Consolidated AI Thread: A Discussion For Everything AI

[Trista_JW]

I am extremely glad that CoG/HG is taking a hard stance against AI-generated bullshit and I will be reporting things (not just here, but in other game communities where some of their games are using AI resources as well) that way the proper people are made aware.

@Havenstone

With that said, I don’t have an answer for how to catch AI-gen HG material in future. As we’ve talked about on different threads, some of the things people confidently declare as signs of GPT authorship (overuse of “embarked” or “amidst,” or excessively vague/purple prose more generally) will throw a lot of false positives. As @Lan noted, if you have enough of an author’s writing handy to spot a huge contrast between things they’ve clearly written themselves and the prose of most of the game text, it can be a giveaway. That’ll catch ESL writers a lot more often than native speakers, though–for the latter, the quality gap will often be more questionable, and pressing into it will be more witch hunt-y. And if nearly the whole game was written using AI, beta testers won’t always have much grounds for comparison.

There is far more to it than just the blatant overuse of “amidst” and “embarked.” The prose generated by AI isn’t just purple; it’s pointless, repetitive, meandering, disjointed in numerous places and hits a brick wall (or let’s say full stop) before jarringly switching subjects. Descriptions of things make little sense, as they sound pretty enough, as they go far beyond thesaurus humping, use metaphors that don’t make sense in any language (I am multi-lingual, I speak English, Japanese and German fluently, for what little that might be worth) and never really get to the point of explaining why the minute details of starlight gleaming off the mercenary woman’s poorly-described weapon matters, as that detail is forgotten as quickly as it’s generated. Issues that it generates as “plot points” are resolved strangely quickly and there are no repercussions.

Those are just a handful of indications that there’s an extremely high likelihood that the writing is AI-generated. Then, while stilted dialogue can and does happen even when an extremely skilled author is writing it, AI-generated dialogue makes the characters sound like they’re spitting surprisingly stilted nonsense (and occasionally verbal prose as well.)

Honestly, it’s extremely easy to differentiate between something an ESL author, or someone who’s been having a hard time writing for whatever reason, has come up with-- and AI-generated garbage. People like to disagree with me for… well, reasons, basically, but once you’ve read more than one AI-generated story, you’ll notice things that will stand out, regardless of what bot they use to spew their trash with.

It’s not really going on a witch hunt or alienating a group of people, when ESL writers’ works are usually pretty damn decent-- and are far better than what AI generates and throws in the metaphoric hog trough. It might take reading a few lengthy generated stories, but after two or three, it’s very evident.