AI Usage = Trash

I am so annoyed that I have to make this post.

While this goes without saying, I’m not famous, I’m not well known, I’m not planning or trying to be either. But what I am, is someone who enjoys creative writing and using my imagination while doing it.

I wanted to share with you this annoyance I found! I saw a reel on Instagram the other day that said that AI usage in books is rising at an alarming rate, but what they did after was even more interesting. They put a section of one of their chapters in an AI detection website and it came back 100% AI. So I did the same and got the same result on 3 out of the 4 websites I used. With the one only saying it was 20% AI, highlighting all the em dashes as a flag, which my editor has been VERY open with me about because she uses them to correct my over usage of commas.

So then I decided that I would drop a section of Dana Lake, which was written between 2021 and 2022, just before the ChatGPT boom happened. The 3 websites that said my new book was 90%+ AI swapped and said that Dana was 90% human (yay) and the one that said my new book was 20% AI now says that Dana was 95% AI. What is happening?

If I’m being honest, I am not the type of guy that really cares what anyone thinks about me on a personal level, but what I really DON’T want happening is someone thinking that I am not actually creating, writing, and putting out something that is completely mine. Any author knows that criticism is tough, but I’d take a criticism on my story being anything other than AI any day!

What I think is really happening, and a few of my friends said the same thing, is that the websites I used are probably AI powered as well. I’d say the likelihood of these sites using other people’s work to detect AI or to help train AI, is very high.

What I will say I use, and have always been honest about it, is Grammarly. Which I am sure has always been AI powered, but on a reduced level like how Microsoft word has been with the autocorrect feature for as long as that program as been around. I use Grammarly because it helps me put commas in where they need to be, to correct the simple mistakes. But not because I want it to write my book for me!

Also, this is something I thought of while pounding on my keyboard, my new book is a bit more dialed in. I stopped using bigger words and long descriptions because that was feedback I got from readers of Dana Lake. I sat for a long time with a dictionary and a thesaurus next to me while writing Dana, my wife can vouch for that because she made fun of me for it, because I wanted that higher vocabulary. I didn’t do that for Beckett’s story, so does having a more simplistic way for writing trigger the AI detection?

Who knows at this point…

People will always have the ability to think what they want, and that is fine. I guess if someone wanted to plug my books into AI, choose to believe that it’s AI, because AI told them it AI (get the joke yet?) then that is on them.

I'm just going to add "people thinking my stories are AI generated" on my "things that keep me up at night" list!