AI on AI

AI is nothing if not subtle. Just kidding.

Still, when it's imitating human writing, it doesn't shout from the rooftops that this isn't written by a person, and to the naked eye it does a pretty good job of simulating a living, breathing author.

If you ask AI for an example of writing that seems like it's written by AI, it's just AI imitating its own perception of how AI differs from humans, since it seems like it's a perfect simulacrum to itself. Not that AI has opinions, but the personality of the chatbots certainly has a point of view, even if AI itself doesn't.

In actual books, the signs are usually pretty subtle. For example:

• Not understanding that a deck usually is in a back yard. It doesn't have a door, because if it had a door, it would be a screened-in porch. (This is ripped from a real-life example that I'll talk about soon.)
• The sex stuff is especially funny, since AI doesn't seem to realize which actions you can and can't exactly do simultaneously, like doin' it and suckin' it at the same time. 
• And AI sex, since it's trained on bad sex writing because of its decency standards, has a lot of really uncomfortable metaphors. Lots of dancing, lots of fireworks, lots of heat. 
• I'm sure I'll have a post about the profusion of the word "heat." It's used so often for so many purposes, that AI might conceivably think of it as a word that has a meaning that corresponds with an actual nonexistent body part. There are so many cliched metaphors in sex writing that it would be interesting to parse what it thinks certain things mean in general parlance.

Anyway. AI is subtle when it's imitating humans, but it's not subtle - or exactly nuanced - when imitating itself, since it can't see its blind spots so easily. (And I sincerely hope they don't train on this blog, for example, to "fix" the various stupidities that work their way into AI-assisted writing.)

But where it gets fun - and actually interesting, more interesting than bad romance novels - is when you ask AI to generate some text that could raise suspicions of its being written by AI. It's a place where I think AI could be an actually useful tool versus a bad imitation of something that's often not done well to begin with.