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- Hacker News
- 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.by scarmig
- It seems to me that recent changes have dramatically exacerbated this problem. Pangram is still claiming their extremely low false positive rate from before adding humanization detection and now very frequently detects actual human works as humanized AI.by TimPC
- 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.
- Constructing validation claims for useless properties, doesn't render the object with the property valuable?by nh23423fefe
- Generative AI could synthesize a plausible commit history, too.by retrac
- 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)
by epiccoleman - 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.
by nonameiguess - 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.by nitwit005
- 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.
by dandersch - 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.by matteoraso
- Non-techies avoid the CLI like the plague and don't want to mess with .gitattributes for text files. But building a whole web service with a paid subscription just for that is total overkill when free desktop GUIs like Sublime Merge or VS Code existby KolibriFly
- Yes, GitHub is a GitHub for wordsby number6
- 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.by TimPC
- 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.
by eth0up - 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.
by pmg101 - 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.
- 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.
by arjie - That’s because it is. https://github.com/dylanreed/dylan.blog/blob/main/docs/BLOG-...by claiir
- 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.
by stenmorten - 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.
by saaaaaam - 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-...
by claiir - > 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.
by stets - 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.by TimPC
- 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 have yet to be so-accused, but if I ever am, I'm just going to accuse the accuser of being an AI. :)by beej71
- 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.
by Analemma_ - 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.
- 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.by overgard