> As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created.
Do you? Just stop caring.
I don't think it makes sense to keep asserting that you're an AI vegan in order to please randos. You'll always get hate creating/building anything online. The people that enjoy your work won't care if it's AI or not or they'll believe you.
It's not just other creatives that care, it's consumers. There's a lot of backlash on steam against games that contain AI content. Personally, while I think GenAI has a place, I think this backlash is good. People have gotten way out ahead of their ski's and have gone way too hard on quantity instead of quality. If you use ChatGPT to do research for your book? Great. I bet it's better for it. Did you use ChatGPT to write your book? I have zero interest in reading it. It's a strong signal that no work was put into writing it so I should invest no work in reading it.
Because pre-AI, slop didnt exist? At least in the past meaningful criticism involved much more than name calling. I guess criticism slop is a natural progression and matches low effort creative slop. 0 moral higher ground
AI slop accusations are tiring, spammy, and most of the time without any evidence to back it up other than prejudice and bad attitude[0]
I don’t really care if someone use AI, I care if the result is slop. And it very much seems like it’s very rare for those who use AI to care about the result and avoid producing slop.
If it was bad, the hand produced result will also be criticized, but AI tools distort all the signals that let you avoid slop beforehand. No you need to invest time to recognize the slop and that time will not be given back to you.
Even disregarding the bizarre assertion that a human author could "just stop caring" at will, this is still unrealistic even on a practical level. Enough consumers want to know whether prose is AI that it matters.
A lot of writing publications are so overwhelmed by submissions that they run an AI tool on everything and don't even read the ones that fail (for whatever threshold they think is best). Plus look at the recent backlash against the book where the author according to detectors used about three quarters AI gen. If you do your art for anyone but yourself you care a great deal about your work showing as human and being treated as having soul rather than testing as machine and being treated as witch hunt grade slop.
The publishing market has been brutal for many years now: even before AI, there have been multiple stories of angry backlash for any number of reasons causing a book to get yanked before it is even officially released.
With such a small number of people actually buying new books now, the cohort of angry, vindictive Twitter/Goodreads loudmouths has a lot of power and publishers are terrified of them. "Not caring" about them isn't an option, from a business perspective.
We must prove ownership and creation to collect revenue in many situations. Its even more problematic that AI gets used to steal content, or directly impersonate creators. AI devalues everything.
I don’t really understand the point of this. Scrivener has a revision history. Even google docs have versioning.
And if you’re writing seriously you’ll know that your first draft often bears no resemblance whatsoever to your final draft. Different character names, different structure, different style, different tone.
You may well have a whole bunch of things that seem completely different and a whole load of fragments that are written revised, scrapped, unscrapped, re-revised, stitched together, pulled apart and then finally assembled into a working draft.
I’m not sure how soemthing that basically counts your words and (maybe) proves you’re not using AI helps with a typical sprawling novel plan.
LLMs still write middling quality prose. Aspects of it are good but they write in a very tropey manufactured style that isn't something we are fatigued of, it's something that's inherently flawed and disliked.
I don't see what this offers that Git doesn't. Even if Git only tracks lines, that's still a good proxy of how many words you wrote. Besides, you can use git diff to see whether an individual character was changed, even if the number of lines stayed the same.
Unfortunately, people will truly try to fake the "paper trail". People posted sped up video of them creating art as proof they made it, so people also used AI to try to generate that.
I don't think AI can create convincing timelapses of digital art being made, yet. I know there is nothing stopping it from getting there, but I think artists are happy for any kind of proof-of-work they can produce right now.
The issue isn't just that cheaters are going to cheat. It's that the project will provide a positive and mostly trustworthy provenance exactly during the period of time when no one cares about or trusts it. However, as knowledge of it diffuses and people care about and trust it more, it will attract more and more cheaters. This negative feedback loop puts an effective cap on how much value people can get out of it.
Entrepreneurs of hacker news: Media companies are experimenting with tools that try to detect if a work contains AI. I don't have the domain knowledge to know if that will work, but it seems like the alternative is to have a system to track the provenance of a piece of art or a written work. If you could say that every change was done by party/ person xy then a company buying or licensing it could comfortably depend xy's assurance that it was original work.
The problem with this idea is that it operates on the assumption that consumers will actually care about "provenance" on art.
I just don't really buy that the set of people who care about that will be big enough for artists to care about signing up for some kind of provenance-tracking regime. Obviously there will be some people in that category on both sides, but I think it'll be niche. I have a hard time imagining Taylor Swift or Drake or whoever is going to start blockchaining their songwriting so that no one can say they used AI. It won't be a big enough segment of their market to care.
(and in fact, the first time Taylor Swift does some big AI-generated video or whatever, all of a sudden a whole bunch of people will suddenly decide they're cool with it)
There seems to be a huge backlash to existing works where AI was detected already at least in my art (creative writing). So I think we already have evidence consumers care. I don't think blockchaining is the solution for the general public, but I'd probably do exactly that if I was taking a university course these days since they tend to be hyper sensitive about AI and err on the side of the accuser so I want strong evidence my writing is mine. Which of course is ridiculously insufferable because I used to do a good portion of my homework in paper notebooks on the subway without stable internet.
This is fundamentally impossible without multiple third parties personally witnessing the act of creation. Consider John Milton was blind and composed Paradise Lost by dictating it to another person. Even if you can prove a human, even a specific human, physically performed the act of typing or writing, that doesn't prove they came up with the words themselves. LLMs can whisper in your ear.
Though I don't personally believe this, consider the most widely-read book in the history of western civilization still has contested authorship, with many if not most readers convinced God himself dictated the words to the humans who wrote it down. We have no way to prove or disprove that.
I think the only way to really prove you wrote something is a camera streaming video and audio from a faraday caged room, and a program like this recording each keystroke
Then you can upload that to a private repo after each session.
Otherwise people make a program an agent can use to type and retype whole sections like a person
Slop is slop. I don't care if it's human generated or AI generated slop. It's all the same to me.
All AI did was accelerate the generation of slop so that bit is interesting to discuss and ponder. It's simultaneously uninteresting to complain about a given piece of work. Either it stands on its own merits or does not. If something sucks, I don't care if it sucked because the human did a poor job at it or they lazily used AI. The output is the same to me and all that really matters.
I think what really is being exposed here is that so much human generated content before AI use became widespread was slop in of itself. We were just supposed to somehow be fine with it because "effort" might have gone into creating said slop. Nope. Talent matters.
The same goes for all the folks complaining about AI generated concert/event posters around where I live. While I can typically discern an AI generated one vs. a human made one - the fact is they all are within a very close quality range to me. This was already low-value slop work most "designers" simply slapped together copying the same basic template. Perfect use for AI imo, since it simply replaced already low-effort work no one actually cared about until they were told to with something far more efficient. It lets the humans who commissioned such pieces do actual work on concert promotion and such vs. multiple hours/days of back and forth with a graphic designer for roughly the same quality output.
Now that people are paying attention, the high effort artistic pieces in the category stand out immediately. TBD if anyone actually cares and if this shows up in better event attendance.
The final output is what matters. I do not care one lick over how it was achieved, what creative process someone follows, or what tools they use. I don't care that some movie director has an artisanal old-school editing process where they glue physical film together for their cuts. I care about how good the movie is, and if that is their process - awesome! I'm happy for them! If some other director uses a digital means to do the same and cuts down their editing time by 80% I really do not care and I'm happy for them too!
My spidey sense is tingling with this post. If someone was really scared that their text would be assumed to be AI, why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes? Does the meaning of the text really change that much that you MUST use — instead of - ?
Also:
* No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes.
* All pixel art images are AI generated.
> why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes
Em-dashes have a long literary history, which is where AI got them from, and they're genuinely useful in writing. We shouldn't let LLMs ruin that for us in literature. The fact that they've historically been less common in online writing is in part because of deficiencies in input systems, though they're easy enough to type with a compose key or similar, or a typesetting system that interprets `---` as `—`.
That might be true. And for pedantic literary critics and writers, it might be very important to use the proper length dash. For anybody else, the difference between the long dash, the longer dash, or the normal dash, is almost invisible and meaningless.
> We shouldn't let LLMs ruin that for us in literature.
First off all, this is a blog post, not literature. Second of all, the cat is already out of the bag on that one. People already associate it with LLMs, no blogpost is going to change that.
Yeah, the images [1] used here are clearly the result of someone prompting a generative AI model to make "pixel art". You can tell because they suffer from the same issues all AI-generated pixel art has: no consistent square-pixel grid alignment, fuzzy edges, etc.
No shade but it feels slightly Michael Scott-level of self-awareness on a post all about securing one's artistic integrity.
I wondered the same but after running some previous entries through Pangram (and giving them the ol' Mark I Eyeball), I don't think this is satirical. How annoyingly ironic.
> That map makes it stupidly easy to tell a human from a machine. Someone who commits 50,000 lines in an afternoon did not type those by hand. Someone doing a couple hundred? Probably real. Simple.
Uh, this isn't true, though? I squash commits all the time locally before I publish them. There can be many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, I'm not obligated to share my messy revision history with the world. In the most extreme case, the first commit on one of my projects spans multiple years of development because it was forked from another project that's now pretty irrelevant to it. On the other hand, I've received pull requests that were a couple dozen lines and were definitely LLM-authored.
As sort of a counterpoint to the author's goals, IMO the community should extend the benefit of the doubt to writers and artists who explicitly say they don't use AI, because it's just really hard to prove that you're not using AI. Trying to force any kind of system will inevitably affect the quality of what you make, and the art community should not want that.
Yea there's literally software that lets you put art into your commit history blog graph on github by making a repo with potentially tens of thousands of dummy commits.
> The part that makes me want to chew glass is that none of this would be a problem if people were just honest about what they used to make a thing. But that’s apparently too much to ask, because cheaters gonna cheat.
And yet the author does not seem to be forthright about their use of LLMs to write their "author website", blog posts, Vellum"P"roof website, and presumably Vellum"p"roof (capitalization stylized differently on the website and blog) itself.
> Your prose is never fed to an AI, never used to train a model, and never handed to anyone else.
And yet their is a distinct lack of a TOS/etc. codifying this promise. The site does accept payments via Stripe. This almost seems satirical.
I'm a little confused in that this post is either (partially?) AI-generated or deliberately written to appear so (including to Pangram).
I'm a self-confessed AI hater and yet I agree with the "just write your thing" people on this one. I've watched this play out on Substack and I think there's a mix of a) people genuinely scared of what I believe to be very rare false positives from automatic detection, b) people who use AI (but claim otherwise) trying to use group (a) as cover to argue against automatic detection, and c) the hoi polloi throwing rotting fruit at anyone who uses an em dash.
You can safely ignore group (c); they aren't going to be your people even with a fully-attested human changelog witnessed by the Pope and encoded on the blockchain. Group (b) are basically grifters and also to be ignored. Group (a)'s concerns are valid but in the large I don't see a lot of "grey area" writing online; I see a lot of obvious slop. (Possibly the well-done AI assistance goes unnoticed by me, in which case - philosophical concerns aside - I can only think of the old XKCD comic about spam bots - mission accomplished? I don't think so, though.)
Back to the OP, I didn't really understand the "meet the enemy" section - did that experiment go anywhere? My results from trying to see if even frontier models can capture voice, style, philosophy from my own technical writing corpus have been terrible to laughable at best.
Please forgive me. I am NOT asserting anything, but I read this (your website), and had it not contained express claims of not being AI, I would have bet a substantial stake that it was AI. Perhaps because AI imitates good writing styles, I am not sure, but it matches many of the signals that for me, indicate AI
Edit: The above said, I am seeing in my own writing, artifacts from my interactions with AI. I am proof that, in some cases, AI can be contagious.
Haha, I have to agree. Their style is either intentionally similar for humorous reasons or they're the kind of writer who was copied.
> The words are the crime scene, not the alibi.
If the latter, it must suck haha. It reminds me of the fact that I used to wear masks when I had a cold so that I could do things with my friends like help them move or whatever without risking them getting sick. But then one day, a pandemic arrived, and wearing a mask was a political decision. Now if I do, I'm making a political statement unintentionally! Tragic, but it can't be helped.
Regardless, I see why they feel the need to make this service. Their post gets hard-flagged by Pangram haha.
Only a small minority is worried about that. And the worries will soften with time, I believe (much money involved, and much power on imaginations). People looking for non-AI text will know where to find it, and I don't think it will involve any kind of 'non-ai receipt' at all.
> As I’ve mentioned before, we now live in a world where creative people have to prove they created the thing they created.
Do you? Just stop caring. I don't think it makes sense to keep asserting that you're an AI vegan in order to please randos. You'll always get hate creating/building anything online. The people that enjoy your work won't care if it's AI or not or they'll believe you.
It's not just other creatives that care, it's consumers. There's a lot of backlash on steam against games that contain AI content. Personally, while I think GenAI has a place, I think this backlash is good. People have gotten way out ahead of their ski's and have gone way too hard on quantity instead of quality. If you use ChatGPT to do research for your book? Great. I bet it's better for it. Did you use ChatGPT to write your book? I have zero interest in reading it. It's a strong signal that no work was put into writing it so I should invest no work in reading it.
> backlash is good
Because pre-AI, slop didnt exist? At least in the past meaningful criticism involved much more than name calling. I guess criticism slop is a natural progression and matches low effort creative slop. 0 moral higher ground
AI slop accusations are tiring, spammy, and most of the time without any evidence to back it up other than prejudice and bad attitude[0]
[0] https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1163/authenticity-problem
I don’t really care if someone use AI, I care if the result is slop. And it very much seems like it’s very rare for those who use AI to care about the result and avoid producing slop.
If it was bad, the hand produced result will also be criticized, but AI tools distort all the signals that let you avoid slop beforehand. No you need to invest time to recognize the slop and that time will not be given back to you.
Even disregarding the bizarre assertion that a human author could "just stop caring" at will, this is still unrealistic even on a practical level. Enough consumers want to know whether prose is AI that it matters.
I have yet to be so-accused, but if I ever am, I'm just going to accuse the accuser of being an AI. :)
Sounds like something an AI would say.
You're not wrong, and you're right to push back on that. The speech pattern is real.
A lot of writing publications are so overwhelmed by submissions that they run an AI tool on everything and don't even read the ones that fail (for whatever threshold they think is best). Plus look at the recent backlash against the book where the author according to detectors used about three quarters AI gen. If you do your art for anyone but yourself you care a great deal about your work showing as human and being treated as having soul rather than testing as machine and being treated as witch hunt grade slop.
The publishing market has been brutal for many years now: even before AI, there have been multiple stories of angry backlash for any number of reasons causing a book to get yanked before it is even officially released.
With such a small number of people actually buying new books now, the cohort of angry, vindictive Twitter/Goodreads loudmouths has a lot of power and publishers are terrified of them. "Not caring" about them isn't an option, from a business perspective.
We must prove ownership and creation to collect revenue in many situations. Its even more problematic that AI gets used to steal content, or directly impersonate creators. AI devalues everything.
I don’t really understand the point of this. Scrivener has a revision history. Even google docs have versioning.
And if you’re writing seriously you’ll know that your first draft often bears no resemblance whatsoever to your final draft. Different character names, different structure, different style, different tone.
You may well have a whole bunch of things that seem completely different and a whole load of fragments that are written revised, scrapped, unscrapped, re-revised, stitched together, pulled apart and then finally assembled into a working draft.
I’m not sure how soemthing that basically counts your words and (maybe) proves you’re not using AI helps with a typical sprawling novel plan.
I recognize myself in that I build instead of publish.
This is just fear of rejection, in productivity-clothing.
The only way to publish, or to get published, is to put yourself out there.
You risk rejection and ridicule. But life is not a spectator sport.
Saw quite a few a Claude-isms, like: “It’s git commits, minus..”
The blog is AI-created—the commits all have “Claude” as a co-author. [1] The “BLOG-WRITING-GUIDE.md” used to write this post gives it away. [2]
And the product the blog is advertising (“VellumProof”)—that website is 100% Claude too. [3]
Perhaps this is some social experiment? Don’t really get it.
[1]: https://github.com/dylanreed/dylan.blog/commit/a7327d0968692...
[2]: https://github.com/dylanreed/dylan.blog/blob/main/docs/BLOG-...
[3]: https://vellumproof.com
If the prose is not the same as LLM, then all is good.
It is not that it is bad prose, it is that we read it everywhere.
We got LLM prose fatigue.
LLMs still write middling quality prose. Aspects of it are good but they write in a very tropey manufactured style that isn't something we are fatigued of, it's something that's inherently flawed and disliked.
I don't see what this offers that Git doesn't. Even if Git only tracks lines, that's still a good proxy of how many words you wrote. Besides, you can use git diff to see whether an individual character was changed, even if the number of lines stayed the same.
Yes, GitHub is a GitHub for words
Unfortunately, people will truly try to fake the "paper trail". People posted sped up video of them creating art as proof they made it, so people also used AI to try to generate that.
Do you have examples?
I don't think AI can create convincing timelapses of digital art being made, yet. I know there is nothing stopping it from getting there, but I think artists are happy for any kind of proof-of-work they can produce right now.
The most casual Google searches show results: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOvcEN1kXp0/
Including a research paper from a few years back: https://inversepainting.github.io/
Edit: Actually hadn't thought of fake building construction timelapses, and apparently that's also a thing.
The issue isn't just that cheaters are going to cheat. It's that the project will provide a positive and mostly trustworthy provenance exactly during the period of time when no one cares about or trusts it. However, as knowledge of it diffuses and people care about and trust it more, it will attract more and more cheaters. This negative feedback loop puts an effective cap on how much value people can get out of it.
Entrepreneurs of hacker news: Media companies are experimenting with tools that try to detect if a work contains AI. I don't have the domain knowledge to know if that will work, but it seems like the alternative is to have a system to track the provenance of a piece of art or a written work. If you could say that every change was done by party/ person xy then a company buying or licensing it could comfortably depend xy's assurance that it was original work.
The problem with this idea is that it operates on the assumption that consumers will actually care about "provenance" on art.
I just don't really buy that the set of people who care about that will be big enough for artists to care about signing up for some kind of provenance-tracking regime. Obviously there will be some people in that category on both sides, but I think it'll be niche. I have a hard time imagining Taylor Swift or Drake or whoever is going to start blockchaining their songwriting so that no one can say they used AI. It won't be a big enough segment of their market to care.
(and in fact, the first time Taylor Swift does some big AI-generated video or whatever, all of a sudden a whole bunch of people will suddenly decide they're cool with it)
There seems to be a huge backlash to existing works where AI was detected already at least in my art (creative writing). So I think we already have evidence consumers care. I don't think blockchaining is the solution for the general public, but I'd probably do exactly that if I was taking a university course these days since they tend to be hyper sensitive about AI and err on the side of the accuser so I want strong evidence my writing is mine. Which of course is ridiculously insufferable because I used to do a good portion of my homework in paper notebooks on the subway without stable internet.
Generative AI could synthesize a plausible commit history, too.
Constructing validation claims for useless properties, doesn't render the object with the property valuable?
This is fundamentally impossible without multiple third parties personally witnessing the act of creation. Consider John Milton was blind and composed Paradise Lost by dictating it to another person. Even if you can prove a human, even a specific human, physically performed the act of typing or writing, that doesn't prove they came up with the words themselves. LLMs can whisper in your ear.
Though I don't personally believe this, consider the most widely-read book in the history of western civilization still has contested authorship, with many if not most readers convinced God himself dictated the words to the humans who wrote it down. We have no way to prove or disprove that.
I think the only way to really prove you wrote something is a camera streaming video and audio from a faraday caged room, and a program like this recording each keystroke
Then you can upload that to a private repo after each session.
Otherwise people make a program an agent can use to type and retype whole sections like a person
That would be a major red flag to me — a pointless, highly compressible stream of images that prove nothing in actuality but are easy to define.
If your work is being confused with AI, think about why. I never confused Trevanian and Martin Amis and Roald Dahl with AI.
Interestingly hackernews commenters are the main reason of this fear
Why not just use Google Docs? The history is recorded. There are even plug ins which will play it back so you can see it.
Slop is slop. I don't care if it's human generated or AI generated slop. It's all the same to me.
All AI did was accelerate the generation of slop so that bit is interesting to discuss and ponder. It's simultaneously uninteresting to complain about a given piece of work. Either it stands on its own merits or does not. If something sucks, I don't care if it sucked because the human did a poor job at it or they lazily used AI. The output is the same to me and all that really matters.
I think what really is being exposed here is that so much human generated content before AI use became widespread was slop in of itself. We were just supposed to somehow be fine with it because "effort" might have gone into creating said slop. Nope. Talent matters.
The same goes for all the folks complaining about AI generated concert/event posters around where I live. While I can typically discern an AI generated one vs. a human made one - the fact is they all are within a very close quality range to me. This was already low-value slop work most "designers" simply slapped together copying the same basic template. Perfect use for AI imo, since it simply replaced already low-effort work no one actually cared about until they were told to with something far more efficient. It lets the humans who commissioned such pieces do actual work on concert promotion and such vs. multiple hours/days of back and forth with a graphic designer for roughly the same quality output.
Now that people are paying attention, the high effort artistic pieces in the category stand out immediately. TBD if anyone actually cares and if this shows up in better event attendance.
The final output is what matters. I do not care one lick over how it was achieved, what creative process someone follows, or what tools they use. I don't care that some movie director has an artisanal old-school editing process where they glue physical film together for their cuts. I care about how good the movie is, and if that is their process - awesome! I'm happy for them! If some other director uses a digital means to do the same and cuts down their editing time by 80% I really do not care and I'm happy for them too!
My spidey sense is tingling with this post. If someone was really scared that their text would be assumed to be AI, why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes? Does the meaning of the text really change that much that you MUST use — instead of - ?
Also: * No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes. * All pixel art images are AI generated.
> why wouldnt you at least stop using the obvious AI-sign, i.e. the long dashes
Em-dashes have a long literary history, which is where AI got them from, and they're genuinely useful in writing. We shouldn't let LLMs ruin that for us in literature. The fact that they've historically been less common in online writing is in part because of deficiencies in input systems, though they're easy enough to type with a compose key or similar, or a typesetting system that interprets `---` as `—`.
That might be true. And for pedantic literary critics and writers, it might be very important to use the proper length dash. For anybody else, the difference between the long dash, the longer dash, or the normal dash, is almost invisible and meaningless.
> We shouldn't let LLMs ruin that for us in literature.
First off all, this is a blog post, not literature. Second of all, the cat is already out of the bag on that one. People already associate it with LLMs, no blogpost is going to change that.
Relevant -- https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/em-dashes-are-fuckin...
I agree but it feels like a bit of a losing battle at this point, and I can't help but be reminded of the history of the Sanskrit swastika.
Yeah, the images [1] used here are clearly the result of someone prompting a generative AI model to make "pixel art". You can tell because they suffer from the same issues all AI-generated pixel art has: no consistent square-pixel grid alignment, fuzzy edges, etc.
No shade but it feels slightly Michael Scott-level of self-awareness on a post all about securing one's artistic integrity.
[1] - https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/191463/2026/courtroom-scene-n...
It wasn’t the em-dashed that sent my spirit sense tingling. It was all the obvious AI tics and tropes. But maybe it’s satirical.
I wondered the same but after running some previous entries through Pangram (and giving them the ol' Mark I Eyeball), I don't think this is satirical. How annoyingly ironic.
I've been using git for words for some time now. Suprised more writers don't!
> That map makes it stupidly easy to tell a human from a machine. Someone who commits 50,000 lines in an afternoon did not type those by hand. Someone doing a couple hundred? Probably real. Simple.
Uh, this isn't true, though? I squash commits all the time locally before I publish them. There can be many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, I'm not obligated to share my messy revision history with the world. In the most extreme case, the first commit on one of my projects spans multiple years of development because it was forked from another project that's now pretty irrelevant to it. On the other hand, I've received pull requests that were a couple dozen lines and were definitely LLM-authored.
As sort of a counterpoint to the author's goals, IMO the community should extend the benefit of the doubt to writers and artists who explicitly say they don't use AI, because it's just really hard to prove that you're not using AI. Trying to force any kind of system will inevitably affect the quality of what you make, and the art community should not want that.
It's also possible to break the 50,000 lines up into multiple commits and fake the commit dates, so this does nothing to prove a human wrote them.
Yea there's literally software that lets you put art into your commit history blog graph on github by making a repo with potentially tens of thousands of dummy commits.
> The part that makes me want to chew glass is that none of this would be a problem if people were just honest about what they used to make a thing. But that’s apparently too much to ask, because cheaters gonna cheat.
And yet the author does not seem to be forthright about their use of LLMs to write their "author website", blog posts, Vellum"P"roof website, and presumably Vellum"p"roof (capitalization stylized differently on the website and blog) itself.
> Your prose is never fed to an AI, never used to train a model, and never handed to anyone else.
And yet their is a distinct lack of a TOS/etc. codifying this promise. The site does accept payments via Stripe. This almost seems satirical.
I'm a little confused in that this post is either (partially?) AI-generated or deliberately written to appear so (including to Pangram).
I'm a self-confessed AI hater and yet I agree with the "just write your thing" people on this one. I've watched this play out on Substack and I think there's a mix of a) people genuinely scared of what I believe to be very rare false positives from automatic detection, b) people who use AI (but claim otherwise) trying to use group (a) as cover to argue against automatic detection, and c) the hoi polloi throwing rotting fruit at anyone who uses an em dash.
You can safely ignore group (c); they aren't going to be your people even with a fully-attested human changelog witnessed by the Pope and encoded on the blockchain. Group (b) are basically grifters and also to be ignored. Group (a)'s concerns are valid but in the large I don't see a lot of "grey area" writing online; I see a lot of obvious slop. (Possibly the well-done AI assistance goes unnoticed by me, in which case - philosophical concerns aside - I can only think of the old XKCD comic about spam bots - mission accomplished? I don't think so, though.)
Back to the OP, I didn't really understand the "meet the enemy" section - did that experiment go anywhere? My results from trying to see if even frontier models can capture voice, style, philosophy from my own technical writing corpus have been terrible to laughable at best.
Please forgive me. I am NOT asserting anything, but I read this (your website), and had it not contained express claims of not being AI, I would have bet a substantial stake that it was AI. Perhaps because AI imitates good writing styles, I am not sure, but it matches many of the signals that for me, indicate AI
Edit: The above said, I am seeing in my own writing, artifacts from my interactions with AI. I am proof that, in some cases, AI can be contagious.
Haha, I have to agree. Their style is either intentionally similar for humorous reasons or they're the kind of writer who was copied.
> The words are the crime scene, not the alibi.
If the latter, it must suck haha. It reminds me of the fact that I used to wear masks when I had a cold so that I could do things with my friends like help them move or whatever without risking them getting sick. But then one day, a pandemic arrived, and wearing a mask was a political decision. Now if I do, I'm making a political statement unintentionally! Tragic, but it can't be helped.
Regardless, I see why they feel the need to make this service. Their post gets hard-flagged by Pangram haha.
That’s because it is. https://github.com/dylanreed/dylan.blog/blob/main/docs/BLOG-...
Well that explains a lot. It sure as hell seems to be. Thanks for the info.
I've always felt that many people write like LLMs, even before LLMs. It had to come from somewhere.
A lot of LLM writing is truly bad - but a lot of it is also just interpreted as an LLM style because of repetition, not because it is inherently bad.
I agree.
My guess is the author either
1. Deliberately used LLM tics in their prose, for artistic and provocative reasons, or 2. Used AI
It's quite interesting to reflect on.
Only a small minority is worried about that. And the worries will soften with time, I believe (much money involved, and much power on imaginations). People looking for non-AI text will know where to find it, and I don't think it will involve any kind of 'non-ai receipt' at all.
super cool
anti-ai people harass each other, and gain nothing because their world model is bad.
If the AI people had a better world model, then we'd probably know by now.
Kinda seems like both "sides" are losing.