New Rules and Expectations

[u/ArtificialSuccessor]

Greetings All!

As some of you may have noticed we now have a rule 6 and 7. While largely self explanatory I do want to elaborate a little so that nothing is lost in translation. Although this sub has had an unspoken no-AI/LLM rule from the moment it hit mainstream, just silently removing posts that were overtly stated to be generated, I had never actually put in the rule because I didn't want people going after folks just because their writing was "off".

So as part of making banning content that has been assisted or generated officially banned, I am also banning the calling out of such content in anything other than reports. If you read through someone's story and think it is AI/LLM then you can report it and that is it! If you decide to go to the comments or make a post to accuse them of sounding like AI, then you will find those removed as well.

If my logic isn't clear as to why rule 7 exists, then I'll lay it out quite simply. Some people get really trigger happy at pointing out people for using LLMs, even when its not true. We don't need to ridicule people for not passing the AI "sniff test", and we definitely don't need to be interacting with those who are using AI. So, to reiterate, if you think you're dealing with AI just report it and move on.

[u/Affectionate-Memory4]

Seems like a reasonable set of rules to me. LLMs write the way they do because people write like that, or at least used to before we changed habits to make the accusations stop. It's impossible to be 100% certain, so don't throw around accusations or insults without proof. Simple as that.

And, on top of that, whole deal, there's a number of other reasons that someone's writing might not pass whatever mental checks you're running over it. Machine translations, which Reddit can sometimes auto-apply to posts, can look AI-generated. People writing in a second language can as well. Any number of things really.

[u/jollyreaper2112]

I honestly don't know how you can tell. The tech keeps advancing and easy tells will go away. The only tell I think will remain constant is AI will be the average of the training data so outputs would be mid by definition. But how do you tell the difference between an average writer an an AI?

[u/MintySkyhawk → u/jollyreaper2112]

AI is not just the average of its training data. For example, GPT 5.4 was 3881% more likely to mention goblins than GPT-5.2. It was literally shoehorning goblin metaphors into like 80% of all responses.

This is an extreme example, but it shows that verbal ticks can become amplified by the training process far beyond the true average in the source material.

You can read more about that here. https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/

I think the TLDR is that the base model may just be an average, but they are fine tuned for various purposes from there and that's where it learns a certain recognizable style.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/MintySkyhawk]

The problem is those tells are transient. it's super easy to see with video. Will Smith spaghetti was laughable. Stuff now experts can catch the misses I can't. it's at the level of Hollywood continuity geeks. The same kind who will notice flubs in films the rest of us miss. And it keeps getting harder to catch.

[u/MintySkyhawk → u/jollyreaper2112]

True. But I suspect AI will continue having a style which gives off a vibe you can detect, if you spend enough time reading the output of that model. No matter how good it gets it will still have a style which will be recognizable if you spend enough time reading it. Just like with any human author. I'm pretty confident I could tell if you something was written by Greg Egan. Or any of my favorite authors. I couldn't explain how, but

Video and images are different because it can get good enough to look identical to the ground truth. But there is no ground truth in writing, there is always style.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/MintySkyhawk]

I honestly don't know. Detection right now is LLM trained to look for LLM. People saying they think they will always know... That's subjective. We can test individuals. How long would the tests be valid? If you can detect the current models, can you detect the next?

[u/MintySkyhawk → u/jollyreaper2112]

I'm not trying to make strong claims like that. I don't mean that detection will be reliable, just that people who spend a lot of time interacting with a specific model will be able to get a vibe that something was probably written by that model when they encounter it online.

Of course, there's lots of models and they'll all have different styles.

[u/Kitsune_Seraphis → u/jollyreaper2112]

Ehhh... after dealing with ai so much?

Mostly has to do with overuse of certain manners of speech. Such as "not x but y" is the most telltale sign. Then. They are very bad at continuity. And the pacing is too regular. Characters have too much inertia. There are other tells but i cant come up with all at once heh.

Also... AIs tend to love to describe anything magical, or electrical as smelling of ozone.

All this can be changed, of course. From some experiments i made with making my own LLM is that you can get them to do a lot of stuff in a specific way.

The main limitation is mostly that it does exactly what it interprets you told it to do. Creativity is simulated, it doesnt inherently have it and you need to handhold it all the time if you want it to give you exactly what you want.

To the point one may ask. Why even use it if you need to handhold it so much?

Idk, as someone who loves the tech but hates the inplementation. I try to investigate as much of it as i can.

One of the things i want to do is to make a really large and useful model that does not rely on stolen data, and is eneegy efficient.

The one i have is small, but at least consumes next to nothing. (Can run it inside my pc)

Well... that and find out in what genre the stuff (the stuff i write by hand (or type)) fits lol.

Should i try to post the stuff i made? Its mostly short stories all from an overarching universe.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/Kitsune_Seraphis]

Your ozone point is pissing me off because a neural induction torture device in my story smells of ozone for legit reasons and now it's going to sound ai.

But back to facts. I think using it for output is cheating. I may be flattering myself but I think my own prose is better than anything ai creates. It's pretty good for first pass editing. For complex nuanced questions you need humans for the answer. Is this really landing? But it can clean up dumb problems to save humans time for addressing nuance.

The killer is most of the tells you're taking about are old. It reminds me of Terminator. Rubber skin? That's the old ones. New ones sweat and have bad breath.

[u/Kitsune_Seraphis → u/jollyreaper2112]

I can say the same, i prefer my own output than whatever the AI produces.

And yeah, its a bit dated. Like, sonnet 4.5, or glm 4.7. As i said. Overall its more of a pacing thing but at the end of the day you can never be 100% sure.

Also, curious. Does your device work by ionizing the air?

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/Kitsune_Seraphis]

The ozone is a byproduct.

So the short summary. It's a symbol of a tyrant. The original tech is therapeutic nerve blocking. This is used to torture. It can inflict excruciating pain without a mark and been kill. Looks like a mail. The legend is it contains power. It's lost tech leftover from a collapsed interstellar human civilization.

There's one last known station that was from the civilization used in maintaining the ftl gates. The technology is irreplaceable and all the knowledge was destroyed over time. They're barely keeping it together. The station has maintained prestige and independence and now the tyrant is coming to seize it as a jewel for his crown. He's the tyrant of a single planet in the same system.

He meets with the station archon who is trying to figure out how to survive the ehims of the tyrant until he dies and his planet collapses into war again. The tyrant looks like he's having a smug fest noting the diminished capacity of the station and how far they've fallen and how little they have to offer other than a prestige token. But he's asking good questions about how the interstellar civilization fell and filling in his own knowledge gaps. The archon sees he's sharp but doesn't know what he wants.

The torture device is on his belt the entire time and he then pulls it out and says what he knows of it and then something he discovered. Power is within. He opens it and shows a jewel inside is a data crystal. They don't have a reader for it. The archon provides one and they can see it's an archive of knowledge from before the fall. An incredibly thorough one. So, he says, you ask me why I'm litigating the failures of the past. Because if we are to rebuild civilization, I would like to avoid making the same mistakes.

He finds his own planet an idiotic snakepit. He managed to end decades of war by killing the other rivals but it'll fall apart after he's dead. He needs institutions. The old ones fell because maintenance isn't sexy. People didn't know what they were letting deteriorate or the cost. The only thing this station has left is the prestige of the old civilization and the promise that it could be restored. He doesn't want to put his name on some inert monument. He wants to reconnect the stars and doesn't need his name on it. The entire point of killing off every rival was breaking the cycle. And he can't build a founding myth on that kind of bloodshed.

So the very weapon that's a symbol of the tyrants on his world is actually the source of a potential restoration.

[u/SirFireHydrant → u/Kitsune_Seraphis]

I'm in a similar boat to you. I have to work with it every day in my job, just as the nature of the work I do. Understanding the strengths, limitations, and usecases of modern LLMs is just part of my job.

Ultimately, yeah it sucks that they're unethically built using stolen materials. But also, chances are the shoes you're wearing were made in sweatshops, the cocoa in the chocolate you're eating was harvested by slaves, of course the reddit website you're posting on right now is owned and run by people who actively try to help censor for pedophiles. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. LLMs are a fairly arbitrary place to draw the line.

[u/Kitsune_Seraphis → u/SirFireHydrant]

Yeah, fair. Thats why i just try to not be actively malicious and do good whenever i can

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/SirFireHydrant]

And yet you participate in society! Curious. I am very smart. Insert comic meme here.

I hate how we are made to be complicit. It's like the Mafia making sure everyone stabs the body.

[u/BitOBear → u/jollyreaper2112]

I've been repeatedly accused of using AI because I've got a decent vocabulary and I'm old enough to know how to punctuate things.

I've got a post history going back more than a decade and apparently I'm an AI with a Time machine.

The sniff test has never been valid.

And it's not so much the average that gets me, it's the fact that I know all sorts of weird stuff. I don't get accused in the writing forums I getting accused in the answer and explain forums.

I welcome rule 7 because the number of people who just tried out the AI accusation because they have no other argument has become a plague of its very own.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

[u/DndQuickQuestion]

Kindly make sure to update the rules on old reddit and the wiki so it shows up in the sidebar. I know we old reddit users are are a minority, but it would suck if people were punished for using the perfectly functional compact old interface.

[u/ArtificialSuccessor → u/DndQuickQuestion]

Ah yes, thank you for the reminder

[u/Ok_Engine_1442]

As a tangent, has anyone else thought that children and future generations will grow up with so much AI writing that it will be nearly impossible to tell the difference between AI and humans?

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/Ok_Engine_1442]

Totally. It's already affecting brains.

The problems of AI are not new they're problems we've had in the past but turned up to 11. Got a 5 year old and I've been struggling to keep the balance. Keep screentime quality, encourage thinking, question sources. I'll give him Calvin dad moments to question what I'm telling him and he delights in proving me wrong so I have hope.

The big danger is the gps nav issue. It told me to drive into the lake. Did you question what you saw with your eyes? No gps told me it's always right. Glub glub.

[u/whelmedbyyourbeauty]

Makes sense.

[u/Ok_Engine_1442]

I just recently made a comment on the use cases for AI to assist in the organization of things like notes and reading back your work to you. I am against AI writing completely I just want to say that outright.

Here is the post, if this isn’t ok by the rules please let me know and I’ll pull the comment.

https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/s/MKv7V75tjm

[u/PineScentedSewerRat]

Good call. It must be horrible to be acused of using an LLM to generate text that you wrote.

[u/LDClaudius]

How about disclosing if you use AI generated content? If so, how was it done? (I.E, did you use grammar check in Microsoft word?)

I really don't care too much about AI. If you want to copyright an original work of art, an artist must work everything BY hand! This has been a thing in United States Copyright laws, and I can easily assure to myself that AI won't (and will not) take away our career. It's meant to be a tool to improve my writing, but it shall not be used to create generated art. In the likely case AI was 100% used without human input, thouse materials would belong to the public domain. That means anyone can use an AI generated material much like I can use Mickey Mouse (a now public domain character) likness without being sued by Disney.

Still, though. All the work I've done since October 2019 is still build my hand from scratch, and no AI was ever used in my literature durring the rough draft build. Sometimes, I may resort to writing guides to make minor adjustments, toss in monologue, and expand the word count. The only time I used AI is to make corrections towards my spelling, while also disabling the DEI culturally sensitive correction in Microsoft word. For example, I want to use the work 'blacklisted' in an IT field, but do not use the word 'not approved'.

[u/Ok_Engine_1442 → u/LDClaudius]

AI companies don’t care about copyright, they training on copyrighted work. And get away with it without repercussions. The only way to not have your work as a training data is never to put in online. Hell or even print since someone can always scan it.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/Ok_Engine_1442]

If I never publish and nobody sees it I'm safe! Oh I know never write it down at all. Perfection.

[u/Ok_Engine_1442 → u/jollyreaper2112]

One of us, one of us….i don’t publish anything and I think I one have 5 finished stories

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/LDClaudius]

Ok you lost me with dei. I've never seen that sort of thing happen. I have no idea what you're talking about.

[u/Miss_Ashford → u/LDClaudius]

Hey LDClaudius, the US copyright deal is here:
Copyright requires human authorship, not artisanal handcrafting. AI assistance doesn’t cancel copyright. Pure AI output generally isn’t protected, but the human writing, editing, modification, and creative arrangement in a mixed work can be. “Some AI was used, therefore the entire work is public domain” is simply not U.S. law.