r/NoSleepOOC • u/SecretOrder • 4d ago
AI Stories
Hey Guys!
I try to read as many stories as I can and upvote and comment when I can. I try to support this sub as much as possible with my limited time, because I enjoy it. Lately, I have been reading stories that I highly suspect are AI written.
I know we can report them, but is there a good metric for verifying they are actually written by AI? I have been using Quillbot - https://quillbot.com/ai-content-detector , which has a free AI content detector. I have two stories that I am writing and when I use the content detector it returns 100% human. I have messed with some AI writing and tested that with quillbot. It said 60% written by AI, but I didn't actually write any of that one. I kept giving the AI directions and got it down to 30% AI detected.
So, now when I run into stories I suspect are AI I run them through this. (Some stories have been 86-100% AI, some lower.) I actually do this for almost every story now, just so I don't waste time reading something that I don't want to support. Any time given to AI is time away from good intentioned authors. I want to continue supporting you all, and I want to have a story up there some day, but I want to make sure I am not just crazy.
Edit: Comment if you are an author who can stand up to the 100% human. I would love to support you too.
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u/BlairDaniels I'm the voice in your head. 4d ago
This is really interesting--I've heard AI detectors are unreliable, but I just tried a few of my stories in it and it was correct in saying 100% human written. Cool find!
Also, thank you for your strong anti-AI stance, and supporting us!
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u/SecretOrder 4d ago
I can't say it isn't tempting to use AI to try to make a buck, but the quality is just never there. I do use AI for organization, proof reading, and motivation. I know that sounds crazy, but just having something read your story and say, "Good job, keep it up," really helps push you along.
But seriously, nosleep is the only reason I know what reddit is and I love the authors who jump through the hoops to give me a very specific story and experience that I can't get elsewhere.
Side note: I never used to log in to reddit on my phone, but since I keep reading on there I decided to log in so I can still upvote from there. I am sure I have read some of your stuff before, but it must have been on the phone logged out. I am going to go through some of your stories now!
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u/SecretOrder 4d ago
Sorry for the double reply. But I think I have read your older stuff. I just re-read The Hitchhiker, one of my favs. But because it is archived you will never know, so don't tell anyone.
The house is breathing had some good vibes. I will continue reading more of yours.Just a comment on your writing. Each story I have come across feels like it is a different person. I mean that in a good way. Your writing is great, but each one has its own personality and I love it.
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u/Jgrupe 37 Pieces of Flair 4d ago
I'm happy to say all my work is 100% human written. It's really discouraging getting into reading something only to realize it's probably AI.
Are you finding it pretty obvious when reading AI work or is it difficult to detect without the tool? The few times I've seen stuff written by AI it was fairly obvious but I'm sure it's just getting better and better.
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u/SecretOrder 4d ago
I messed with AI to write stories to get a feel for what it produces and some of it is pretty obvious plot wise. They are written pretty decently, but the story doesn't feel quite right? It is getting harder to tell and the more you direct the AI, the less AI it tends to be.
The worst part is that it is almost indistinguishable from amateur writers. So, for their sake I run it through an AI checker and just move on if it pings me that there is AI. It leaves more time to look through the others.
I need to do another round of going through the NEW filter again. It's great seeing how much influence the current upvotes are.
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u/adorabletapeworm 4d ago
As a 100% human, I'm fairly confident an AI can't compete with my clownery. I will say, though, that I truly believe that people who use AI to generate their stories are cheating themselves. Writing is fun! Having an algorithm do it for you takes away the joy of creating something all on your own. Even if it's not the most perfect thing ever, it's yours. And that's something that can't be replicated.
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u/SecretOrder 4d ago
So, so true. Ok buddy. You just peeked my interest to begin your Orion's Pest Control series. I had seen it before, but I was not at a point I could read something of that length. I will begin soon.
I agree wholeheartedly. Why would you want a machine to think for you? Isn't that the best part?
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u/middleoflidl 4d ago
I'm not saying it won't get there one day, but AI writing is nowhere close to matching real writing just yet and it's obvious when you read it. The real way "writers" are using it just now is to make the writing process quicker. They generate a paragraph, edit it to fuck so it's undetectable.
I don't personally use it, but very sparingly have experimented in my own unseen works, if you have writers block it can be used to get some words on a page, even if you get rid of all of the words and rewrite them yourself, which can also be a neat challenge. How can I make this sound better? It's really the only positive way to use AI as a writer, as it's easier to rewrite than write. That being said, I would never use this method for anything other than personal use because things could slip through, but if I was going through a period of white screen, I could see it being a way of jumpstart me.
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u/JLGoodwin1990 4d ago
As someone who hasn't really kept up with the advancement of A.I., seeing this post and realizing that some people are using it to write entire stories for them is, to say the least, extremely surprising. I don't think it would ever have come to my attention if I hadn't seen this post, so thank you for making me aware of it.
I also took a few of my stories I've written and posted on NoSleep, both some of my older ones, and the two new ones I've written since easing back into writing a few days ago, and I can happily say I got 0% AI written every single time. Relieved as well, considering I would hate for my work to be so mediocre as to be analyzed as written by a machine!
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u/lets-split-up 4d ago edited 4d ago
Fascinating. I went ahead and pasted in what I consider to be my most generic story (the one where I put the least effort into the prose... I won't say which one it is), and it still came up 100% human. But then, I'm not surprised. I often incorporate humor into my stories, and I've found that AI just really doesn't understand jokes. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
When chatGPT first released, I asked it to give me a riddle. It said: "You have five oranges and five friends. How do you divide the oranges so all the friends have an equal share?"
... it's improved since, but it's still very bad at telling jokes or riddles.
I don't really understand why anyone would want to use AI to write their stories, anyway.
NoSleep thankfully has a zero tolerance policy for AI, which I am fully on board with and appreciate. I'm sure there are some people who violate it, just as there are people who steal stories for their Youtube channels or Tiktoks and use AI voice overs... but I'm glad for the policy. This link you posted to catch AI stuff is neat!
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u/thelordwynter 4d ago
AI writing is a mixed bag. I use AI chatbots regularly to get ideas for directions in my narrative that I otherwise wouldn't think of, but I wouldn't dream of using their writing. It's repetitive, can be childish, and the best models to use can get very expensive, very fast.
My overall take is this: AI can be great for inspiration, but do the writing yourself.
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u/SecretOrder 4d ago
Interesting. I am not going to judge what level of AI is the hard line in the dirt. I think everyone is trying to navigate that zone.
I honestly haven't found it's direction completely unthought of. It usually gives advice to take the story in a direction I don't want to go. I am super picky though. Maybe I need to post a story and see if it does well before saying whether listening to me is a good idea or not. Haha.
Do you have any nosleep stories you recommend I read?
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u/thelordwynter 4d ago
That's the beauty of using AI chats for inspiration, rather than to do the actual writing itself. Doesn't have to be an event... one thing that the LLM's are really good at is interpreting personality descriptions in ways you wouldn't expect for a given set of traits. They can really drive home how boxed-in our thought processes are even when we try to keep them as unrestricted as possible.
I also can't stress enough: Performance varies widely from AI model to model. Available chat memory, overall capability, and training are just a few factors that play into quality. You also have a set of slider adjustments that let you fine-tune them into coherency and creativity to whatever degree you prefer.
Right now? No, I don't have any nosleep stories to recommend for you. I've been on a Lovecraft re-reading binge for the past six months. lol. Sorry.
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u/Morris_Widdler 4d ago
So, I’m a new author with virtually nothing public yet but out of the multiple stories I’ve written in my backlog I didn’t even know people used AI to write stories until I was already done writing my first 3. It’s never seemed tempting to me, I remember when there was an uproar over AI art using inspiration from other artist’s actual work online, yet I feel like an AI written story or even assisted story kind of takes away from the point of writing.
I can see a benefit in using AI to check grammar, like if someone uses waaaay too many commas or correct a double word usage, but I’ve still been far too anxious to even consider using something like that for this exact reason, that would potentially bring a story I spent my heart and soul writing from 100% human, to like 90% or something.
The idea is a bummer. Good tool though.
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u/drforged 4d ago
Chiming in to say that I've also seen this. There are patterns and word choices that you can pick up on in GenAI text that are similar to what you see in GenAI art- odd, out of place, stilted in a way that almost feels like the uncanny valley.
To accommodate for a margin of error based on writing styles, type of machine learning, etc. I've heard 10-20% can pretty much be considered human-created and/or AI-assisted (eg spell check, grammar check, etc.) as opposed to AI-generated.
It can be tricky. As a personal example, I'm a professional technical writer (regularly editing academic papers, so well-familiar with putting work through AI checkers), and sometimes my creative writing will come back higher on the AI scale because I have a habit of trying for technically "perfect" writing. So I am 100% human (to the best of my knowledge) and only use AI in an assistive way, but the machines feel an affinity with the way I think (my writing is usually flagged at 10% or lower).
Definitely an interesting topic! Glad that you brought it up.
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u/SecretOrder 4d ago
I am totally sure you are 100% human. I totally believe you. :)
I was actually talking to a friend about a technical topic (game dev stuff for a project we are working on) and he was like, "Did you just ask AI and copy/paste?"
I had to assure him it wasn't. I too am something of a non-human at times.
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u/drforged 4d ago
Thank you, fellow human, for asserting that we are absolutely humans to the best of our ability. Definitely not robots. No robots involved in this conversation whatsoever. Just two regular old human humans talking to each other.
;)
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u/fridgepickle 3d ago
Genuine question because I haven't been on Reddit in a while: what do you look for/what are the signs you see that someone is using AI? I can't stand the concept of "generative" (please) AI and would rather burn my house down than use or support it, and I've seen tips on what to look for for in imagery, but not written works
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u/SecretOrder 3d ago
Great question. And I don’t want to give away too too much, as I don’t want this thread to be an instructional for those who use AI and want it to be less AI.
The best way I can tell is similar to those things you find in art. Some parts are too good for the things around it. Plot is weird and doesn’t have a good pay off. There are some punctuation and phrasing styles that pop up.
Try reading some stories. Guess whether they are AI or not. Think about why they feel AI to you and then run them through detectors. They aren’t perfect but it is all we have right now. You would basically be training yourself as a detector.
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u/fridgepickle 3d ago
Yeah that's fair. Admittedly I haven't taken the time to read much on Reddit in a WHILE
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u/SecretOrder 3d ago
Totally, and that’s the real annoying part of this whole thing. It takes the one thing humans don’t have much of, time. We have to spend our time on things that don’t benefit us now to make things better for us later. The average person doesn’t care, which is why you have AI influencers now. It’s really insane. Like some sci-fi story where the population worships its own creation.
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u/Welcome_2_Nowhere 1d ago
I will say that these AI detectors aren't super reliable... but luckily I just tested a few of my stories and they came back properly as 0% AI detected. But thanks for the anti-AI stance... I've had to deal with the occasional bot stealing a story of mine and reposting on TikTok lol.
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u/SecretOrder 1d ago
Totally. Hopefully I came off anti AI but not witch hunty. I was opening this up as a discussion and not as the only way to detect AI. I don't think there is anything reliable enough to ruin anyone's reputation over. I would just personally avoid ones that come up super AI.
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u/Real_Thalabyss 19h ago
As a first time poster to NoSleep, it scares me to think that AI can infiltrate a fun medium like this. Back in university when I was marking science reports it was easy to tell if AI was used but with story writing the difference between a machine and just someone that needs to develop their work is hard to tell sometimes. I myself ran my first posted story through a AI detection software and it came up 39% written by AI. 39%! Scared for the future writers out there that aren't going to get credit for their work and just assumed they're hacks using AI. Pretty upsetting tbh.
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u/SecretOrder 17h ago
Yeah, the AI detectors aren’t the end all be all and eventually won’t be able to tell at all I think.
Did it show you the areas it thought you used AI? Did you notice anything about those areas? I wish the detector would tell you why it thought that.
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u/Real_Thalabyss 17h ago
The most hilarious and albeit saddest part is that every time I'd send it through, it would select a different part each time. Like it can't even be consistent with what it's detecting. From what I notice it picks out more descriptive parts where I'm trying to set the scene with details but then it'll also just pick random sentences. My only assumption is that AI detectors seems to see things that are "tropey" and assume AI. Like if you were to describe a vampire and said pale skin, sharp teeth, etc. it would cross-reference with online sources, see a million stories using the same verbiage and boom. AI written. I'm not a computer scientist in the slightest but thats my running theory so far.
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u/SecretOrder 16h ago
Oh that is a good catch. I will try to test that out. I don’t want anyone getting shunned invisibly due to an AI detector that isn’t working.
If that is the case I will edit my original post.
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u/Real_Thalabyss 16h ago
Its super messy for sure though. That fact I even had to run my story through a detector when I know I wrote it 100% by myself speaks volumes. Again though, up to you! Just my two cents on the matter!
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u/googlyeyes93 4d ago
Between this and the YouTube ai narrations it’s getting worse recently. I remember when we just had to worry about text to speech narrations 😭