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It makes absolutely no sense to accept stuff written by an AI Not calling you out specifically here, but this line seems to me to reflect a trend that I see fa

It makes absolutely no sense to accept stuff written by an AI Not calling you out specifically here, but this line seems to me to reflect a trend that I see far too often. That being something like a variation of the "fallacy of the excluded middle" where people seem to posit that a work is either A. written by a human OR B. written by AI, with no recognition of possibility C. written by a human assisted by AI. I don't know what it is about this issue that makes people adopt these overly binary positions and ignore the middle ground. But whatever the reason, I think it's harmful to quality discourse on the topic to ignore that middle position.

poulpy123 2y ago
I don't think getting inspiration with a LLM or using AI to proofread your text is concerned here. But the point of this event is to provide a creative outlet for people. If you accept submissions written in part or totality by AI what is the point to host it ?
andrewl-hn 2y ago
Oh, I have a good example: While not AI, tools like Grammarly can offer suggestions for synonyms, removing unnecessary words, re-phasing, etc. so they go beyond spell and grammar checking, and people have been using these tools for NaNoWriMo for a long time. The middle ground definitely exists, and at seems like defining a line between what would be acceptable and non-acceptable use is really difficult and potentially futile.
blargey 2y ago
The lack of discussion of a middle ground is a product of how genAI is right now. 1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. 2) the ideal middle path results in a work where there are no “tells” that genAI was involved, because the “tells” are just blatant flaws anyone with the skill and taste to follow a “middle path” of AI usage would have fixed in post anyway. So the genAI question won’t come up at all unless your goal was to make A Point instead of a work.
- mindcrime 2y ago
  1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. That's probably a fair point. And I might have missed that because I don't really use any "Gen AI tools" that are purpose specific, besides Github Copilot and that's for code, not prose. And in that context, Copilot (at least the way I use it, which is rarely using the "chat" feature) is generally generating small snippets for me, not large, complex structures. And in my mind, I imagine using something like Gemini or ChatGPT in a similar way. I guess I assume if I were using one of those tools to help me write prose, I'd be using it break "writer's block" with a prompt like > given everything that has happened so far, what might the character Suzy do here? or just asking it to clean up grammar for me > Can you rewrite this chunk so it sounds neater and maybe is slightly reminiscent of Dean Koontz or something like that. A GenAI tool that allows you to input a single prompt and get a complete novel or something like that would be of no interest to me whatsoever and probably wouldn't even come across my radar (or wouldn't register any attention if it did).
  - nopelynopington 2y ago
    I attempted to use ChatGPT and other tools as a middle ground for my writing, but even asking it to format a few paragraphs and add missing dialog tags often ends with the story being altered entirely. Using AI as a reader to give feedback is maybe safer, but even then it's going to make your writing more generic. LLMs work by giving the most likely next word, and the illusion here for a writer is that the LLM is a helpful partner that is thinking about the story you've written, but really all it's doing is pushing it to be more mainstream and closer to existing works. It also has a tendency to want to resolve and wrap up a narrative, and can lead to bad suggestions that seem reasonable but push you towards a character dead end

poulpy123 2y ago

I don't think getting inspiration with a LLM or using AI to proofread your text is concerned here. But the point of this event is to provide a creative outlet for people. If you accept submissions written in part or totality by AI what is the point to host it ?

andrewl-hn 2y ago

Oh, I have a good example: While not AI, tools like Grammarly can offer suggestions for synonyms, removing unnecessary words, re-phasing, etc. so they go beyond spell and grammar checking, and people have been using these tools for NaNoWriMo for a long time. The middle ground definitely exists, and at seems like defining a line between what would be acceptable and non-acceptable use is really difficult and potentially futile.

blargey 2y ago

The lack of discussion of a middle ground is a product of how genAI is right now. 1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. 2) the ideal middle path results in a work where there are no “tells” that genAI was involved, because the “tells” are just blatant flaws anyone with the skill and taste to follow a “middle path” of AI usage would have fixed in post anyway. So the genAI question won’t come up at all unless your goal was to make A Point instead of a work.

mindcrime 2y ago
1) most genAI tools are explicitly catered towards “prompt goes in, complete work comes out” usage. That's probably a fair point. And I might have missed that because I don't really use any "Gen AI tools" that are purpose specific, besides Github Copilot and that's for code, not prose. And in that context, Copilot (at least the way I use it, which is rarely using the "chat" feature) is generally generating small snippets for me, not large, complex structures. And in my mind, I imagine using something like Gemini or ChatGPT in a similar way. I guess I assume if I were using one of those tools to help me write prose, I'd be using it break "writer's block" with a prompt like > given everything that has happened so far, what might the character Suzy do here? or just asking it to clean up grammar for me > Can you rewrite this chunk so it sounds neater and maybe is slightly reminiscent of Dean Koontz or something like that. A GenAI tool that allows you to input a single prompt and get a complete novel or something like that would be of no interest to me whatsoever and probably wouldn't even come across my radar (or wouldn't register any attention if it did).
- nopelynopington 2y ago
  I attempted to use ChatGPT and other tools as a middle ground for my writing, but even asking it to format a few paragraphs and add missing dialog tags often ends with the story being altered entirely. Using AI as a reader to give feedback is maybe safer, but even then it's going to make your writing more generic. LLMs work by giving the most likely next word, and the illusion here for a writer is that the LLM is a helpful partner that is thinking about the story you've written, but really all it's doing is pushing it to be more mainstream and closer to existing works. It also has a tendency to want to resolve and wrap up a narrative, and can lead to bad suggestions that seem reasonable but push you towards a character dead end