Some Practical Safeguards Against Accidently Reading AI
Don't Be A Schmuck
“Trompe l'œil with Writing Materials” by Evert Collier
As I’m sure many of you know, I am trying desperately to make a living as a writer. This is a pretty high stakes venture for me, since the alternative is and has been sex work. I do not say this to bemoan sex work. I simply do not wish to fully rely on it for income. I much prefer writing. In fact, I love writing. I published my first short stories (in children’s lit magazines) as a pre-teen, and writing has not left my life since. I hate AI then for some very practical reasons. “Writers” who “write” with AI take attention and money away from real writers. Since my current income is over ten thousand dollars under the local poverty line, it is difficult not to view each dollar AI “writing” is given as money that could potentially have helped myself and other struggling writers survive. Of course, this is not necessarily true. It is possible that the person who has decided to pay the AI “writer” would not have paid a different writer, and instead saved the money, or spent it on something else. It is possible they are paying the AI “writer” money out of an attachment to the individual person, and they would not have formed a similar attachment to another, real, author. However, if we presume that many people have a vague idea within some loose mental budget of how much they’re willing to spend per month on subscriptions to media, or maybe even subscriptions to authors, then the AI “writer” is really taking up space in that budget (and thus money) that a real author could be receiving.
On another level, AI writing is simply insulting. I am a very proud person and I deserve to be proud of my writing. It has a unique style that, while it does not work for everyone, has clearly amassed a fairly large audience (both on substack and Instagram). I have spent over twenty years of my life studying how to write, picking apart the grammar of books, speeches, poems, and plays. This has not been a passive study, but an active one. I can rant for a good twenty minutes about my favourite opening lines of novels and why they work.[1] When you really care about something, and have spent a lot of time trying to perfect it, someone mass producing a bad and cheap imitation will always insult you.[2] It is easy to tell AI from a good writer. However, it is difficult to tell AI from a bad writer who is trying to become a good writer, and who might even have some good ideas. No one has ever accused me of using AI. My style, while not to the taste of everyone, is unique. I have a clear authorial voice and a weird one that that. However, it seems a shame not to encourage young or inexperienced writers who are struggling to become better. There are also many terrible writers who have very good and important ideas. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is one of the least readable books I know of, and yet it is invaluable to the history of queer and trans theory.
I don’t want to write yet another article about how AI is bad and how AI is a problem. Hell, I didn’t even intend to be writing this article at all. I have an article I wrote a few days ago scheduled to drop on Monday. So I’m trying to keep this short and sweet. Besides, better writers than me have written article, after article, after article, after article, after article, after article, after article, after article, after article about the problem with AI in journalism and literature. Frankly, I can’t do better than Sam Kriss. What I can do is to tell you that you should care if you’re reading AI. You should care if the person who “wrote” what you’re reading put actual effort in. Do you really want to be reading something that it is taking more effort for you to read than it took them to write? Someone has to think pretty fucking little of their audience, of you, to do that to you, don’t they? Are you going to let yourself be talked down to like that? Are you going to listen to opinions and arguments about your community, your survival, that aren’t even anyone’s actual opinions, anyone’s actual argument? You owe yourself more than that. The community is owed more than that. So, I am going to propose a short little list of what you can do.
1) Don’t read anything with an AI generated picture. Right now, it is easier to tell when a thumbnail is AI than when writing is. So this is a good rule of thumb.
2) Second, if you suspect something is AI, run it through Pangram. Pangram is currently the best AI detection software around. It is more likely to give you a false negative than a false positive. It would rather let very good AI use slide through than say something is AI that is not. So when it says something is AI you can be dead on balls accurately sure that it is. If for whatever reason Pangram becomes less reliable, or does not fit the specifics of the situation, move directly to point 4.
3) Before you give money to an author, any author, run a bit of their writing through Pangram. Pangram allows you to have a free trail and allows you to check one piece of writing for free per day. So, you don’t necessarily need disposable income to check if something is AI. But also, if you are someone who frequently gives writers money, you should consider investing in Pangram. Afterall, don’t you want to make sure that the money you’re giving isn’t being stolen from you, that the product you’re paying for is real?
4) If an author is accused frequently of using AI or has been caught using AI in the past, I think it is entirely reasonable to demand proof that they are actually writing their work. You’re probably wondering what proof this could possibly be…and bad actors are likely to offer proof that they know they can fake or get around. So here’s what I think should be the universal level of proof: I think that if you have been accused of AI you should be forced to write your next few pieces on video. There should be one camera pointed at you showing you writing with your screen visible. There should be a second camera (this time a webcam) that is both streaming your face and sharing your screen with the audience. Ideally this would be done on a live-stream with the video posted for all afterwards. The video should last from start to finish of writing the article/story. The writer should not be allowed access to their phone while they write the article/story. Anything less than this is insufficient.
5) We should start expecting non-fiction pieces, especially argumentative article, to cite with the same rigor that academic articles do. If there is a quote it should have a citation including a link or a page number. If there is a paraphrasing of someone else’s argument, there should be a link or a page number. If there is a page number, the author should prove that they own the book or have it on loan. Why would we accept less than this?
[1] Kathrin Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms begins with the line “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” It is an incredible opening line both for its immediate capacity to convey setting, but also because of the amount of questions it encourages the reader to ask, questions the reader wants to read on to have answered for them. What year? What village? What river? Which mountains? Who is “we”? When is the reader speaking from? Why are they nostalgic for this year? Another great example is The Great Gatsby, “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” The sentence is flawless iambic pentameter (the most pleasant-sounding poetic meter to the English ear, except for the addition of “ever since”. Arguably, the addition of “ever since” is supposed to subconsciously add a level of unease, to contribute a feeling that something isn’t quite right.
[2] Indeed, I think that this is part of why some terfs hate trans women. They few womanhood as something they have struggled to build for themselves, to achieve, and they believe that trans women are bad imitations of it. This, of course, ignores that trans women work far far harder than cis women to achieve womanhood.