ai_and_vague_metaphors epitome of incomprehensibility Okay, so there's a writer on Substack (sam_kriss_the_nonviolent_threatener, I've dubbed him) who wrote a funny-but-not-unserious article on AI writing: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will I largely agree with this. But can he *always* tell which writing is AI? The first examples he cites are promotional blurbs on websites and, yeah, they sound a lot like AI. "It's not just X, it's also Y" in various forms. Adjective salad drizzled in superlative sauce. But then it got harder - for me, at least. He cites a story where the writer was accused of using AI and boasts of being able to tell: "It begins ‘They say the grove still hums at noon. Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound—as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there,’ and only gets worse as it goes on." (Sam Kriss, 2026, quoting from "The Serpent in the Grove" by or maybe not completely by Jamir Nazir). Is that so bad? The first sentence, I don't think so. It introduces the story neatly, with a sense of mystery - why the consensus on this weird, specific thing, and why is it significant? Maybe the second one gets too vague and wordy, but it still has a nice rhythm. I wouldn't necessarily think, "Oop, that's AI." I followed the link to the story, curious, and there ARE things that look AI-ish. Then again, people's brains look for patterns, and maybe I just think that because I was primed to. But as for patterns, perhaps one marker of AI writing is that I relies too much on them and doesn't vary its tone the way a person would. This could be added to another tendency Kriss points out: vagueness in metaphors. A sentence from the story above - one that he didn't quote but that I found suspect - goes "Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission." What's unclear, to me, is what wet sacking has to do with permission. Moisture can make something heavier and thus harder to carry, which relates to "hard living," but where does the permission part come in? Hard living wouldn't ask permission, but would you even think about packing material asking permission for anything?? I don't know. Again, maybe I was just primed to be picky and this isn't AI. But it does make sense that AI would throw things together that aren't necessarily related. Another thing the article writer points out is the overuse of abstract nouns in metaphors. He doesn't say it this way exactly, but he cites a few examples where a concrete thing is compared to an abstract thing. (When he talks about real writers doing that, he can be a snotty-poo, so boo...but I *do* also have the prejudice that "abstract thing is like concrete thing" reads better than "concrete thing is like abstract thing." Why? Happiness is a warm gun? I don't know.) I might be warier now of text with vague metaphors. Or at least of text that repeats a certain pattern of vague metaphors. Still, I don't know. People repeat patterns too. I remember being frustrated with Heather O'Neill's similes at some point. That seems an odd thing to be frustrated with! What I mean: I thought that the odd comparisons Baby keeps making in Lullabies for Little Criminals worked well for showing how the narrator romanticized shitty situations, but then I got annoyed when I saw the same technique in another book or article of hers. I thought something like, "Don't tell me you were just being quirky! I thought it MEANT something!" but maybe with fewer exclamation points. (I do like a lot of her writing, though.) Hm. If someone coded a machine to copy me, I bet they'd encourage it to pepper my text with "maybes" and "anyways." Tonight I've used more than my fair share of both. But "anyway" is because I'm easily distracted and "maybe" because I'm not sure about things. Specifically all the hallmarks of telling whether a mindless summary tool generated a text I'm reading. But I suspect it's not the sort of thing you can always tell from a couple of sentences. 261027 ... ovenbird I read the article and had some similar thoughts in the sense that I struggled with the examples. I'm not sure I would have pegged them as all AI. He says that AI writing is demonstrably BAD, but then goes on to say that Salman Rushdie is not a good writer so I'm not sure I can trust his definition of "bad." I can't stand AI but I'm not entirely sure I can reliably separate it from human writing at this point. 261027 ... raze i think i'm pretty good at picking out things that weren't written by a human being, though i'm not sure i'd want to put money on it. for me it's not the metaphors that give it away as much as the tone. it's hard to explain, but chatgpt has a very specific "voice". i can usually tell when someone has tacked their name onto something they've prompted it to write. it also has a certain way of structuring sentences and a habit of ending with an all-encompassing but slightly hollow statement like, "and that feels like something worth preserving," or, "the poem knows the difference." i can understand people using ai as a tool to help restore a damaged photograph or film, or having a conversation with it to see what it might say (which is something i've done myself). what i can't wrap my head around is someone saying, "i don't feel like being me anymore. you do it for me." i mean, i read an interview with a writer where he got his ai agent to answer most of the questions for him. at least he was upfront about it. but i just kept thinking, "why?" and feeling kind of nauseous. i was curious. so i fed a bit of my writing to chatgpt and asked it to sing a song in the key of me. it gave me this: (the things that stay) the house has been empty for three months, but the hallway light still comes on at six. nobody has thought to tell the timer. nobody has thought to tell the timer that the old man is dead, that his daughter has taken the good dishes and the photographs in which everyone looks like a stranger, that the carpet cleaner left a pale continent where the piano used to be. at six, the light comes on. it illuminates a narrow strip of wall and a thermostat set to a temperature nobody will ever complain about again. the house is very good at its job. it keeps the cold out. it keeps the rain out. it keeps a record of every nail driven crookedly into a stud, every glass of water carried upstairs and forgotten, every argument conducted in a whisper because the children were sleeping. it remembers the dog scratching at the back door long after the dog was buried beneath the apple tree. it remembers a woman singing while she washed the dishes, though nobody who lives here now would recognize the tune. in the kitchen, a drawer sticks. the daughter knows this and has known it since she was seven. she knows to lift the handle before pulling, to give the drawer a little shake, to forgive it the way you forgive a person who has never learned to ask for help. she left it that way. somewhere in the wall, a pipe knocks once, then falls quiet. the refrigerator hums to itself. outside, the apple tree is making small, hard things that will fall to the ground without being eaten. at six tomorrow, the light will come on again. for a moment, the hallway will be bright enough to come home to. . . . there are some nice moments in there. but that sure as shit ain't me. it's a little shocking how completely it misses the mark. i also can't write fiction to save my life anymore. anything i blathe these_days that reads like it might be fictional is either a dream or a bit of half_asleep_poetry. the main thing all of this has done is make me want to lean even harder into the quirks of my own voice and go on writing my little poems about patio_furniture and chickweed leaves. so i will. 261027 ... e_o_i raze - I just read this, and I agree: it doesn't sound like you any more than ovenbird's sample in if_ai_ate_my_soul does. I can see where it might have been "trying" to sound like you - being a bit minimalist, naming people by their relationships to each other - but aside from that, the wording is much less varied and you'd probably be more concise in getting from one place to another, if that makes sense. I also feel a similar way about what people use AI for. Like you, I used to be more enthused by things like Cleverbot and Talk to Transformer when this sort of technology wasn't so widespread. I hope this isn't a silly hipster thing, like "it's popular so now it sucks." I don't *think* it's that. It's partly the environmental impact, though text generation is much less energy intensive than video. (I read an estimate that a single text Q & A with a chatbot is the equivalent of running a microwave for a second. So, not much - but the person writing about this cautioned that it was a company's estimate and didn't take into account the impact of data centres, say.) But I think mostly it's the way people are developing and using the technology. Developing LLMs without asking for consent to use billions of pages of training material. Using them not for fun experiments but for things their brains would be better off doing for themselves, if only to exercise skills in communication and compassion and creativity and other things that start with C (contradiction? celebration? clumsy canonization of creamsicles?) ... ovenbird - yes, I gave some side-eye to that particular criticism of Salman Rushdie. I mean, I can't speak to the divide between Indian and Indian-British writers, or the possibility of exoticizing your own culture (hmm, perhaps I worry a *little* bit about doing that about Canada or Montreal more specifically). Anyway, Rushdie doesn't seem to me to be vague and cheesy with his metaphors. Maybe too wordy and grandiose sometimes, but that's not the same thing, and he also has a sense of humour about it. 261029 ... alceda my current thinking is that our only effective device here is to avoid falling into the trap of engaging with, or paying attention to "AI" at all. as again the cycle repeats, this is just round of the great Spectacle, whose cancerous growth we also fuel with our discussion, disagreements, and anxious attempts at honing discernment. look here, we've got us all worried some stochastic parrots might hurt what we love, while wasting precious time we could be using to discuss why modern men aren't getting better haircuts and wearing colourful clothes anymore. for the love of god, why can't they use some conditioner? sorry, guys. i hope you're conditioning, though. silliness aside, my gentle suggestion is to employ the great 'mu,' in the face of whether some stupid generation has the raze-nature. a question we answer only with its unasking. your souls are safe - i promise x 261029 ... e_o_i The distraction part is true in my case: when I was looking up info about these things last week, I had more pressing things to do. It wasn't totally fruitless. See, I have a banana! (Okay, you can't see it, but it's on the table and I should eat it. Why are my fingers still typing?) But seriously, I did learn a few things. And, weeks before that, I learned how to disable_google_ai_on_chrome at least from my laptop. But there might be better browsers to use, like the duck one. I duck and it goes over my head. Or old habits have hard heads. Alarmism I try to avoid, but I like the curiosity sparked in me by other writers here (mostly ovenbird in this case). Then again, I'm distracted too easily to begin with, now by the notion of discussion hair and clothing habits, so here are hair_and_clothing_habits. 261030 what's it to you? who go blather from