A Chat About AI

Okay, we gotta have a chat about AI and the "witch hunts" (I hate that term, considering I'm a witch).

I'm as anti-gen AI as they come. I abhor what it represents, and the theft of people's work without compensation for what they've done. I want to avoid it at all costs as well. I visually examine all my stock photos to try and see any AI markers. I count the fingers. Check the shadows. All that. In text, I look for repeated phrases that are unusual and try to determine if this is just someone with a good vocabulary by seeing if things flow properly, or if they're stilted. I decide if something is overused, or used every paragraph.

But still, those things are not always indicative of AI. Sometimes, people do these things on purpose. Now, is an artist likely to put six fingers on a hand? Not likely, but maybe the character has six fingers, we have no way to tell for sure at the end of the day. I do know that a lot of times uncredited art may have a higher likelihood of being AI, and I know that there are other ways people swear you can tell the difference between AI and original work.

But things are getting ridiculous out here.

AI Tools

People who make digital art are having their works run through AI checkers, which are tagging them as AI because they're 100% digital and they used painter or photoshop to create them. People who use AI tools are being targeted as if AI tools (background removers, partial image selection, etc) are generating the entire image. Hint: Canva, Photoshop, and other programs like Paintshop Pro are all equipped with various AI tools. For writers, AI tools includes things like AutoCrit, ProWriting Aid, and Grammarly. Yes, these offer AI help to authors, and may make suggestions on sentence structure, but they are in no way writing the content for the author. And they can help identify many points that an author can work on such as overused words, repeated phrases, repetitive sentence starts, and more.

Punctuation Means AI?

Also, this stuff going on about how em dashes and everything are indicators of AI. Like, AI was trained on the classics and other ones that were stolen from writers. Guess what? Those people used em dashes. Yes, AI will often OVERUSE em dashes, but a LOT of writers (including myself) use them as well, along with gasp semi colons, colons, en dashes, hyphens, and sometimes, interrobangs! I also use a variety of words due to having a large vocabulary from a LOT of early reading (so much so people have chastised me for using "big words" in regular conversations). My works often gets tagged as AI because of this. Also, I'm autistic, and AI tags a LOT of autistic writers as AI. I saw someone recently that said the color palette of an image "would never be used" by a real artist. Um, artists use all kinds of color palettes? How do you determine which ones are used and not uses by every artist in existence? Several of my autistic friends have commented on how their works have been tagged as probably AI because of the way they write. Write with no passive voice? Must be AI. Write with too much passive voice? Must be AI.

Vellum Debacle

Then there's the whole Vellum debacle. Giving one star reviews because someone FORMATTED their book with a program that has the same name as an AI (and came first) is ridiculous, and a simple google search reveals that Vellum is a formatting software. If it isn't the top result it is very close to the top. Vellum has NO AI at all, and doesn't do anything except make the book pretty, just like Atticus. The fact that people take it upon themselves to try and destroy an author's career without even taking five minutes to google something is horrible. These people have put blood, sweat, and tears into their work, went as far as buy the best software out there for their system to make the book look beautiful, and people are throwing them under the AI bus. The Vellum company has even responded to this ridiculous trend by altering the wording in the front of their books so that people will stop mistaking "Created with Vellum" for being created by Vellum AI. THE COMPANY has done this. The fact that they have to take this step is absolutely ridiculous and should not be a thing they have to do, but kudos to the vellum people for doing it anyway.

AI Checkers

And let's talk AI checkers, while we're at it. They're unreliable. All of them. Both for pictures and writing. Why? Because they're AI themselves. You're basically deciding that one AI bot is going to know another AI bot created the content. MANY artists' works and MANY writers' works get tagged as probably AI. I've already outlined above some of the reasons these checkers tag people, but let's have a comprehensive list of JUST the things I've seen as proof of AI, shall we:

Art:

Wrong Color Palette
Too realistic
Too cartoon
Too 3D
Not 3D enough
Too Flat
Too few colors
Too many colors
Weird shadows (often true)
Multiple fingers or limbs (often true)
Extra ghosts of other things (mostly true)

Writing:

Too many Em Dashes
Use of Colons
Use of Semi-colons
Use of too many "big" words
Not enough sentence variety
Too much sentence variety
No passive voice
Too much passive voice
Awkward dialogue (no matter the character's voice)
Transitions that don't make sense (Mostly true)
No contractions
Plots that are hard to follow (sometimes true)

So, you can see that there's a variety of these things that AI checkers could be looking for, and while I have no data on what AI checkers actually do look for, this list is what SOME people believe the AI checkers use to decide if a written piece or an art piece is AI or not.

Not only that, you're feeding the AI more information and giving them access to the content of that artist or writer by placing their stuff in an AI checker. Not really great.

AI as a Tool

Again, I abhor generative AI. Assistive AI is a tool, however, and it can help people with their creative endeavors. It can aid those with disabilities, and it can help people who need it. Generative AI is theft, pure and simple, and cannot create anything new. It smooshes together all the data it has, and regurgitates it in some parody of art or writing. There are no new ides in Gen AI.

Using AI to remove a background, or select a part of an image you want to remove is not the same as giving a three sentence prompt to an engine to produce an entire picture. Rewording one sentence that is awkward in your story that you can't come up with a good way to reword it is not depending on AI to create an entire story. Using the Tools at are disposal is what AI is supposed to be fore. It is a tool, and should be used as such. Using it to create is simply disingenuous and farcical.

And give people some grace, for goddess' sake. Some people don't know the signs of AI very well, and sometimes people miss something in the thing they're posting. We don't need to crucify people just because they unknowingly MIGHT have posted AI stuff. And if they shared something to make a point about AI? Leave them alone.

Please.

Think before you comment or post on things.

Gen AI = Bad
Assistive AI = Not Bad
Witch Hunts = Bad
Being reasonable about things = Not Bad

Your words could completely destroy an author or an artist based on allegations that may not be true. Your words have power. Be careful how you use them. You simply cannot know when someone has used AI unless you have seen them create the thing with it, or the creator tells you they've used AI. AI took from creators, and what it generates can sometimes look very similar to what an author today may write. There are ways to prove your theory that someone used AI, but all of them are unreliable. AI checkers are not the end all and be all of what is AI, and we need to keep that in mind.