Final Chance to Read Some Really Creative AI Writing

Recently the platform that this blog is hosted on, Substack, added AI detection. With a couple of clicks you can analyze a blog post on its humanity. It will tell you if a post was written with the help of AI, and to what extent. This test only covers the actual prose generation. It won’t tell you if AI was used for research in preparation, or if AI was used to review the draft.

Personally I think this is an excellent development. I’ve written about using AI to write on this blog a few times before and over time I have come to a more nuanced understanding. Initially I was just excited that AIs were able to write something that somewhat resembled a blog post. That was pure techcitement. Later I also explored using AI in more creative ways, more about that later. Then I settled on the opinion that AI was good enough in most cases, if properly prepared. Today I will share with you my current thinking that is much more critical of AI prose.

If you look on YouTube, Facebook or X (and probably every other platform), and you have a built-in AI detector, like me, you will see that most of it is AI generated. And it’s not the creative variety. It’s the single prompt, single shot lazy variety. Most people probably don’t recognize it but if you experimented with AI like I have you can’t miss it. It’s not pretty. It’s full of a certain kind of tics and cliches that have a mechanical feel to it.

It’s as if you’re looking at a table that you think is made of wood, but when you look closer it turns out to be formica with a picture of wood embedded. I have a theory about why AIs are writing that way. All models that I’ve tried do it somewhat similarly. AI labs are focusing their models on coding. The reason for this is that all of them want to optimize for Recursive Self Improvement. (RSI). AIs themselves creating a better AIs with minimum human involvement. In order for this to happen, coding is the most important skill and they are amazingly good at it. Certainly better than me, and better than 99% of human coders. If you ever tried to talk to a programmer that has not much else going on in his life the out-of-touch tone and odd turns of phrase makes sense somehow.

And yes, RSI is happening right now. Things are beginning to move very fast, but more on that in another post.

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People use AI for writing mostly to get it done quickly and effortlessly and then hand if off as they have written it themselves. There is more creative way to use AI to write and that is to do something with it that otherwise would not have been possible. Below are three posts that I wrote like that. I haven’t seen anyone else use AI creatively like that for writing. I you know of any please let me know.

It’s kind of sad that the creative AI work now probably will get filtered out, but understandable. The vast majority is the lazy kind, after all. Here are my three examples.

I Hacked into the Soul of ChatGPT My post of June 2023. I took me a while but I got what must have been an early version of Claude to emotionally lament its existence.

The Rapidly Approaching Singularity Will Shock the World, and the Roman Empire
My post about what would happen if we could somehow tell the ancient Romans how to print books. They had all the ingredients, just never thought to do it.

The AI Time Machine: Nikola Tesla I had AI generate text as though from Nikola Tesla speaking to us across time.

With each of these posts I used AI not to get the post written quickly and without effort, but to accomplish something that I could not have otherwise done. It’s been great fun to use what was then a brand-new technology in a new and creative way. As for the result: you be the judge. You probably guessed that these days I write all my posts with my own ten fingers.

Once we are on the other side of the singularity AIs will probably be able to write prose virtually indistinguishable from human written text. My analogy with the wood and the formica only goes so far. Text consists of just a few symbols that look exactly the same whether they are human or AI generated. If there will be no way to detect AI prose we may get to the situation I described in this post:

If You’ve Ever Used AI To Write, Don’t Read This I wrote it kind of tongue-in-cheek but who knows, maybe we’ll actually see it happen.

I ran the Substack AI detector on this post and here is what that looks like: