Becoming AI — What's a Writer To Do?

I never used to check my writing with an AI detector before joining Medium. And even when I first published on the platform, I didn’t check.

But then I read a few stories from writers who indicated their writing, or some of it, had been flagged as AI by an AI detector checker. I thought that I had better check my stories just to see.

For the most part, they pass with a big zero.

But occasionally, I receive a return that tells me that anywhere from 3% to 10% is most likely AI. My usual reaction is, “Really?” Often, it is only one line, one sentence, or at most a paragraph. Occasionally, it may consist of just a few words.

I ask myself why would the detector think that an occasional line in a story of several hundred words, or even a few thousand, is most likely AI-written? What is it about the words that makes the detector algorithm think that it has been written by AI? And typically it will say, 100% certain.

For example, the line below.

Of the two, I prefer the astronomical summer because it lasts longer!

It was part of a story I wrote about the two end dates of summer in the UK, meteorological and astronomical. I wrote it for the reason given; the end date of the astronomical summer is later than the other date.

It was a simple enough sentence. Anyone could have written it. But the detector thought that AI wrote that line. It didn’t make sense to me. Was it because I had used a fancy word like ‘astronomical’? Or maybe it was the exclamation mark at the end? Perhaps AI did not think that a human would write that way, to emphasise being happy?

The detector that I use gives three levels of certainty: low, medium and high. In this case, it indicated that the certainty was high.

I knew that it was totally wrong, but I began to wonder if I was beginning to write like AI!

It also flagged up the following.

And then time passed.

Well, in the story, time did pass, so that’s why I wrote those words. How can those four words in isolation be deemed to be “most likely written by AI”?

I end up writing again to get to zero. If that fails, I sometimes just delete the line. That can be frustrating. Increasingly, I am just tempted to ignore it. I don’t care what the AI detector thinks.

In fact, I think the software must be having a laugh at my expense.

It could be that the AI algorithm is becoming more human. After all, it’s almost behaving like a human, tormenting me that it has found something, when usually the line it flags is so insignificant.

Perhaps it is getting bored?

But soon, I will use my secret weapon.

The em dash.

AI writing seems to like the em dash. The truth is, I rarely use it, although I have been using it more recently — like now.

AI can divide opinion when it comes to writing. I like it for research and as an assistant. I don’t want it to write the story for me, but I do know that it can help well with grammar, style, and tone. I know my writing will never be Hemingway, and I prefer keeping things simple. 

That’s why I have the quote “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac, for the blog.

By the way, I have never read Kerouac, but the quote is a good one.

 

Postscript: I ran this through an AI detector. It decided the following line was a 3% Chance, written by AI.

But occasionally, I receive a return that tells me that anywhere from 3% to 10% is most likely AI.

Funny, very funny.

 

Image by Amrulqays Maarof from Pixabay