AI detection

There is a new trend out there. Very quickly AI has written thousands of books, and people have figured out how to use it to flood the market. Amazon tries to get authors to admit whether they have used AI. Quite a few have. They use it sometimes to fix the grammar and proofread. Sometimes they use it to do the research and organize it. Sometimes they have it write the whole thing. Why not?

There's an industry built up around "AI detection." This software will read your novel and decide whether 70% of it was written by AI, or it was 70% likely to be written by AI. Naturally this software is flawed, so writers who have written original work are dismayed to find that some programs are accusing them of having AI's help. Others have scoffed at the software, having noticed that it's somewhat random so the numbers, widely varied as they are, are meaningless. What it means essentially is that if you work hard on making your grammar standard, acceptable, and common, and have your work proofread carefully, you are more likely to be accused of AI-generated work than if you were to leave it chock full of typos.

So in my estimation it's only a matter of time before writers start leaving in typos on purpose as a kind of signature, or at the very least as a statement that a person wrote this sentence, or paragraph, or book, or whatever. How else can you tell AI from human-produced? We human authors are programmed to eliminate typos, standardize our grammar, etc. But if we need to distinguish our writing from AI writing, shouldn't we leave some typos in there? I would think so.

Here are some interesting facts. 1) if it's standard grammar, how can the software determine whether it's yours or AI-generated? It can't. It's that simple. 2) You have a style, which can be defined as the tendency to use certain constructions at certain frequencies, all else being equal, that is, assuming it's all grammatical, all prooofread and spelled properly; you still have a kind of signature in that you use em-dashes, for example, or semi-colons, at your own frequency. Ah but all this does is give AI something to work on. AI can create language at the same frequency, with your style, and still say what it wants to. So although someone can tell your writing from other writing, or AI writing, if AI is given proper instructions they can't tell your writing from AI-generated writing with your style. Both are proofread. Both have your signature and your style.

Here are some solutions: leave in a typo, or, create a typo, or create a signature typo, or, put in some bland statement about how you wrote it yourself. I'm leaning against that last one although it was my original solution.

Rather, I think we should embark on a journey of emracing and celebrating typos (although I suppose AI could generate those too, especially if they're the same in every book, every paragraph or every sentence). Let's loosen up this language and get away from the strangling tendency to FIX EVERY ERROR.