this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
485 points (99.4% liked)

Fuck AI

7613 readers
781 users here now

"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"

A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.

“AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonists’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,” the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. “Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.”

Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect. The typical method of detection involves looking for stylistic markers such as an abundance of em-dashes, the overuse of the word “delve,” or an obsession with goblins, but this project tried something different. “The idea for this project came because we are hoping to eventually move past plain text detection, into some sort of space where we can separate human ideas from AI-generated ideas,” Jenna Russell, a University of Maryland researcher and one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. Russell is also an intern at the AI-detection company Pangram.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] november@piefed.blahaj.zone 13 points 6 hours ago

No kidding. Anyone else visit the SCP wiki? It's so blindingly obvious which new skips are LLM-generated, but the "authors" always play dumb like "Huh??? What makes you say that????" when their skips are like "SCP-12345 is multiversal, ethereal, and ruminant. We are not containing it—it is containing us."

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 8 points 14 hours ago

I'd expect AI fiction to be equivalent to the 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters. Eventually they'll push out a good one but mostly it'll be just crap.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 3 points 20 hours ago

Well yea, they are basically pocketFM ads on YouTube. Just awful.

[–] FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was recently talking to an independent bookshop owner, looking at some of the submissions for self-published books. It was depressing as fuck. An absolute slop fest. The 'illustrated' childrens books were by far the worst offenders.

[–] Dpek@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Now im wondering what brand of slop its put out for the illustrations

[–] FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago

There was a short book about a teddy bear. The art style started off as cute but obvious slop pencil lines with color shading. By the end of the book it had fully morphed into nightmarish photorealism. Absolutely demented.

[–] MartianRecon@lemmus.org 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

LMMs are just mediocrity machines.

You input one great book, and 25 dogshit fanfictions, you're not going to output a great book.

It's like teaching someone how to cook Chateaubriand, but also 19 recipes for hot dogs, and then expecting them to make braised lamb or some shit.

[–] Noja@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You are wrong, even a LLM fed with 26 great books couldn't write a good one.

[–] binux@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago

”If you give a robot one good chemistry textbook and 25 bad chemistry worksheets, it isn’t going to get a chemistry PhD”

”You are wrong, even a robot given 26 good chemistry textbooks couldn’t get a chemistry PhD”

”Uhhh yeah but that doesn’t contradict the point I’m making”

????????

[–] MartianRecon@lemmus.org 8 points 1 day ago

Oh, I fully fucking agree.

I'm just putting this in 'crayon eater' terms for them to try and understand.

I mean yeah they mostly learned from fanfic authors.

[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I remember the stuff they added to Duolingo after the leadership went "AI first".

Duolingo has these story exercises. Old stories were all kind of fun and distinctive, and the characters are fun and memorable. Then they got the bright idea to AI generate more stories.

"Oh, don't worry, the new content will all be reviewed by humans", they said.

Were they?

The new stories were... I don't even remember any more. Best I can describe them is "there's stuff and it happens and the characters are just kinda there". It went in one ear, out of the other. I fucking can't. I don't think I was learning stuff from that.

And these were tiny stories, like couple of hundred words tops. Anyone uses LLMs to write novels is out of their rocker.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

there's stuff and it happens and the characters are just kinda there

You're welcome to ignore this, but I feel I have to point out, not to you, but the universe in general (and just coincidentally as a reply to your comment), how well this describes almost everything about the most recent two episodes of a beloved TV series featuring a blue box that travels in time and space (which I like the usual amount). I'm going to go cry now. 🟦

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] trem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 46 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description.

Which are all ways of creating more text without saying anything. Repetition is another classic.

I feel like that's a problem with all low-effort, AI-generated texts (which is the vast majority of them): You give it a prompt with maybe ten pieces of information and expect it to generate a text that's a hundred times as long, while also not straying too far from the prompt.

Of course, it's going to take every opportunity to not say anything that would advance the plot. Because advancing the plot means either using up the little input you gave it, or to invent new information which might contradict the prompt...

[–] ghodawalaaman@programming.dev 1 points 16 hours ago

that is a very good explanation of why LLMs generate words which contains no meaning

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 54 points 1 day ago (4 children)

50 shades of grey was also stupid and bad and it very much was not written by AI.

[–] Dpek@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago

50 shades of gray was very gray tho

[–] Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

50 shades of grey and fanfics like my immortal are fun to read because a person was weird enough to write them. Llm slop is just spam.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 49 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I learned recently that it was actually Twilight fanfiction to start, and the author had to tweak the world to make the vampires rich guys.

Which I guess explains it a bit more.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] nullspace@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

AI stories give me whiplash with how borderline personality disorder the characters seem after any significant length.

[–] dumnezero@piefed.social 7 points 1 day ago

peak mediocrity

[–] BloodMuffin@lemmy.ca 38 points 1 day ago (5 children)

the overuse of the word "delve" is hilarious

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›