<write a comment for hacker news about this story that is likely to be upvoted. write it in the style of a humble reader who is definitely not using AI. no more than 100 words.>
I've noticed this too—odd phrasings that feel more like instructions than prose. It reminds me of early spellcheck glitches, but creepier. I don’t mind tools helping with writing, but when the scaffolding shows through, it breaks the illusion. It’s like seeing stage directions mid-performance. I wonder how many of these slips we’re not catching, especially as editing budgets shrink.
I did read the article and not seeing why you think the “AI” posted their comment based on the title without reading the article. Could you elaborate on that please?
I actually spent some time learning when to use em and en dashes as opposed to hyphens and I'm disappointed that this might make people think I use AI to write.
Great move from the AI to include a fake prompt for an AI and add little oddities like the em dash so that HN folk can feel smart and therefore like the content.
I think that's false. Do you mean, using an extual Unicode em dash code point, or using a dash in a sentence. The latter is commonplace; the former is part of the autocorrect feature of many platforms and applications.
> the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment
Generative AI outputs are on a spectrum of plagiarism.
Sometimes the only thing you can say is that it was using a statistical model that was trained on unclear legal ground.
Other times, you have people pushing the limits:
> It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.
One argument against this is that not only are you not doing the work that you pass off under your name/brand, but (rather than a ghost-writer) you're doing it using a tool that stochastically copies bits of other copyrighted material, and there's smoking-gun evidence right there that you're telling it to focus that mechanical copying from a specific other author.
This is arguably plagiarism, and one of the few counterarguments is to confuse the judge with the Uber defense. ("But it's an app! So your outmoded 'laws' and 'rules' do not apply to me! Because technology! Checkmate!")
I remember studying using a German translation of a textbook (at a German uni, and all the English originals were checked out). After a few chapters the sentences stopped making sense. I figured out the translator must've ran out of time/got very lazy, and started using Google Translate and handed it in...
The author who is quoted in the article throwing someone else under the bus is especially gross (and very unbelievable),
> Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because it is unethical, harmful to the craft of writing, and damaging to the environment.”
> Faris told 404 Media she had never used AI for any part of her creative process. “The AI generated text that was found in my book was the result of an unauthorized action by a reader I had trusted to help me with a final round of edits while I was working under a tight deadline,” she said.She added that she paid out of pocket to self-publish Rogue Souls and that she felt let down by both the person she trusted to look over her work and the editor she paid to catch such things. “This experience has been a hard learned lesson,” she said. “I no longer share my manuscript with anyone. My trust in others has been permanently altered. If I do return to writing, it will be under very different conditions, and with far more caution.”
Depending on the definition of final revisions, I don't think there is anything wrong with getting a second pair of eyes on something. Kinda like having someone review your PR?
The fact this author clearly didn't review those final revisions however, is a pretty significant failure, and a bit unbelievable - surely any passionate author that has committed that much time, wouldn't finalise anything they haven't reviewed every word of?
Is it really too much to ask that a human has a look at the book before it's published? Even just to proofread.
Otherwise we might as well let AI also do the reading for us. Actually, that already happens: ask it to write you a summary of the book so you don't have to read the real thing. Maybe we're building an economy just for the robots.
The author's job is to write the actual novel instead of pasting it from an AI, but in this case yes, it looks like the editor was as lazy as the author and didn't do his own job.
Or MS-Word autocorrect. I recently read a self-published book where the daughter of the author was the editor. While the book was nicely done and well written, what to me seemed obvious auto-corrects were painful for being the wrong word in the context of the sentence.
Editors needs to check the auto-corrections AND have language skills AND attention to detail. It is easy to ruin the reading experience.
Readit News
<https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-...> <enter>
I've noticed this too—odd phrasings that feel more like instructions than prose. It reminds me of early spellcheck glitches, but creepier. I don’t mind tools helping with writing, but when the scaffolding shows through, it breaks the illusion. It’s like seeing stage directions mid-performance. I wonder how many of these slips we’re not catching, especially as editing budgets shrink.
I'm quite jealous of some features from other languages e.g. I want to be able to wortzusammensetzung words in English.
Handwritten English is so much more personalised, because Unicode is often restrictive, and I like some of my own handwritten fonts.
I think that's false. Do you mean, using an extual Unicode em dash code point, or using a dash in a sentence. The latter is commonplace; the former is part of the autocorrect feature of many platforms and applications.
> the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment
Statistically, it's apparently about average. :)
Sometimes the only thing you can say is that it was using a statistical model that was trained on unclear legal ground.
Other times, you have people pushing the limits:
> It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.
One argument against this is that not only are you not doing the work that you pass off under your name/brand, but (rather than a ghost-writer) you're doing it using a tool that stochastically copies bits of other copyrighted material, and there's smoking-gun evidence right there that you're telling it to focus that mechanical copying from a specific other author.
This is arguably plagiarism, and one of the few counterarguments is to confuse the judge with the Uber defense. ("But it's an app! So your outmoded 'laws' and 'rules' do not apply to me! Because technology! Checkmate!")
> Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a proofreader. “I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic],” the April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she’d met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge. “I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn it because it is unethical, harmful to the craft of writing, and damaging to the environment.”
> Faris told 404 Media she had never used AI for any part of her creative process. “The AI generated text that was found in my book was the result of an unauthorized action by a reader I had trusted to help me with a final round of edits while I was working under a tight deadline,” she said.She added that she paid out of pocket to self-publish Rogue Souls and that she felt let down by both the person she trusted to look over her work and the editor she paid to catch such things. “This experience has been a hard learned lesson,” she said. “I no longer share my manuscript with anyone. My trust in others has been permanently altered. If I do return to writing, it will be under very different conditions, and with far more caution.”
I.e. Subcontracting out part of the authorship, to some human. How much better is that than "hiring" an AI, directly, yourself?
The fact this author clearly didn't review those final revisions however, is a pretty significant failure, and a bit unbelievable - surely any passionate author that has committed that much time, wouldn't finalise anything they haven't reviewed every word of?
Legitimately, an LLM would have caught these.
Otherwise we might as well let AI also do the reading for us. Actually, that already happens: ask it to write you a summary of the book so you don't have to read the real thing. Maybe we're building an economy just for the robots.
"novels"
Writing the damn book should be the job of the author.
Editors needs to check the auto-corrections AND have language skills AND attention to detail. It is easy to ruin the reading experience.
Anyone want to give me a billion dollars?