Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.
“AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonists’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,” the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. “Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.”
Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect. The typical method of detection involves looking for stylistic markers such as an abundance of em-dashes, the overuse of the word “delve,” or an obsession with goblins, but this project tried something different. “The idea for this project came because we are hoping to eventually move past plain text detection, into some sort of space where we can separate human ideas from AI-generated ideas,” Jenna Russell, a University of Maryland researcher and one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. Russell is also an intern at the AI-detection company Pangram.
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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The more we criticise AI, the more it will take notes and improve. And before we know it, we won't be able to tell if a fictional story is man-made or AI-made.
Edit: I hadn't realise that this is FuckAI initially. I don't love AI, I hate what it would do to arts and even the concept of jobs and livelihood, but as much as those who hate AI either don't realise or don't want to admit, the potential is there and the wilful ignorance and denial is really just the unspoken feeling of uncanny valley surfacing. AI is here to stay and will improve upon, unfortunately. I just wish it had been open source instead.
Also, the overwhelming majority of people already can't tell if a music is AI or not. So AI imitating art is already underway as we speak: https://news.sky.com/story/a-third-of-daily-music-uploads-are-ai-generated-and-97-of-people-cant-tell-the-difference-says-report-13469818
The more we criticise muppets, the more they will take notes and improve. And before we know it, we won't be able to tell if a movie is human acted or muppet acted.
You're being sarcastic, but you aren't wrong.
"It will take notes"? AI is just autocorrect on steroids.
AI is still on training. It is either naive or wilful ignorance to think they are not being improved upon.
I've read several articles by people in the field who claim that no, the quirks AI has now, cannot be improved on much. Not with the LLM technology that is used now, it would be necessary to start over with a better method.
The only sensible comment here.
Yeah there are limitations with the current AI models, but it doesn't mean there won't be breakthrough at some stage. The renewable energy technologies also had limits ten years ago but those limits had been broken through to make it increasingly more efficient than before.
Well, but that's not what I wrote.
I'm saying in general that detractors of AI think it won't ever improve and hit its limit, but so were lots of technology before such as renewable energy technology.
Probably, but it's not going to happen with LLMs. That's quite a bit different from renewable energy where it was a question of refining existing technology.
I mean the technology for AI is there right now.
Yes, that's my point. It's not. The potential of what LLMs can do has pretty much peaked last year. One reason is that they have absorbed pretty much all available data and cannot be trained on content that has been created by an LLM itself. The consensus seems to be that there is no way to work around this. Companies have even resorted to add coded triggers into the models to make them seem more useful.
Perhaps but i doubt that there won't be a breakthrough. Like I said, even renewable energy took decades to become more efficient so the same would be with AI.
Look, that comparison makes no sense. It also took AI technology decades to be where it is now. It's not like it still has toothing problems. Remember Cleverbot? That was released in 2008 based on at least 20 years of development. And now, almost another two decades later experts are saying we reached the peak.
Renewable energy has been around for at least 50 years. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels in the White House when he was the president. What limited renewable energy for a long time is the battery storage capacity technology not being efficient enough and the material costs. Only in the past ten to fifteen years when those associated technologies improved that renewable energy became more commercially viable (thanks to China subsiding the research and developments which spurred other countries). It's the same thing that will happen with AI/LLM. Since you mentioned about the chatbots of the 2000s, wouldn't you say that the current LLMs are dramatically better than the bots of yesteryears?
Now you aren't talking about renweable energy, but only photovoltaics specifically. And what you wrote about them is very debatable. But you spell out an important difference between those and AI development right here:
That's ture. For that reason development has always been focused on that point. There is no equivalent to that in AI development. We don't even know what would be necessary to develop to improve on current LLMs at this point. At the moment the reasearch is mainly focused on how to monetize AI and even that fails.
I mean... that is what I wrote didn't I? Decades of development that peaked last year?
It's naive to think that you can take something and feed it shit. Then, when it regurgitates out shit to you, it'll give you caviar when you only continuously feed it shit.
Even if the technology hasn't plateaued, you're still just going to get better and better autocorrect.
This article is discussing a research paper that looked into AI's hilarious tendency to "delve," among other things, and one of the many conclusions they came to is exactly what we all already suspected: it sucks at fiction. That is the furthest thing from being willfully ignorant.
I'm saying that it is not like it won't improve. I edited my comment to show a news link reporting that the majority of people already can't tell if a music is AI. The same would happen on written literature.
Except that hasn't happened.
You underestimate our ability to discover patterns. It's this trait that has given us language, art, science, etc. That very same ability is why we're able to figure out small little nuances like the above mentioned delving phenomenon. And the fact that the companies behind these models are so dead set on preventing people from writing erotic fiction in favour of bland literature with forced morals only adds to said predictability.
And if there is one thing people hate more than bad literature, it's a boring one.
I see your point. But again, I don't see any reason why AI would not learn to think and behave the same as humans at some point-- if there is no corporate input. I see the current models of AI as still quite literally in infancy.
It's been in its infancy for a long, long time.
"AI," as we know it today, is just marketing speak that refers to LLMs or image generators. That isn't to say there isn't grain of truth to the usage of the word. Machine learning is the underlining method used to "train" these models with whatever information needed to full fill a task. So, yes, it is "learning" per se but not in any way similar to humans. It's just a computer doing what we tell it to do at the end of the day.
And that's fine if it weren't for the fact that the training data is based on our art and that it consumes even more power and water than even blockchain! Unlike blockchain, there is no known way to undo that. Like, I'll at least give credit to devs behind Ethereum. They acknowledged it was power hungry and switched to an efficient algorithm. Still doesn't addresses the laundry list of issues but credit where credit is due. What's the solution for AI?
How did you learn to think?
I'm not being facetious. This is an honest question.
They can't even reliably get image generators to stop generating people with six fingers.
It's a matter of time. Not if but when.
LLMs are a dead end technology. You are in a cult.
It's not that I love LLM, but its potential is there try, as you might deny. I know this is FuckAI, but i find Lemmy in general is experiencing uncanny valley and either don't realise it or don't want to admit it and thereby refusing its potential. That's like saying automobiles in 1800s is a deadend technology and horse and buggy is the only way because the maximum speed of cars was 2 mph.
Love it or hate and try as one might, AI is a Pandora's box opened. I just wish it's open source instead.
Literally tech bros said the same shit about block chain and nfts.
Keep dreaming sweety.
They have nothing to do with AI.
Again, love it or hate, denying AI is like denying cars aren't better than horse and buggy.
What a ridiculous take.
And yes, bringing up tech bros forcing their delusional nonsense on the general population when, time and time again the last decade you people have been catastrophically wrong just further proves that LMMs are fucking dumb and a massive waste of resources.
No one brought up techbros.
Tech bros are the ones shoving ai down everyones throats every day.
Try and keep up.
Techbros or not, the potential of AI is still there.
No there isn't. The use-case for AI is hyper specific, in that it's decent at comparative analysis. Feed it a data set and then have it give you data out of that data set. Even then, ai is lying to people about what is in the data. So no, there's no 'potential' in something that cannot be profitable and is absolutely awful for the environment.
Not so sure about that
Decent chunck is just the greed of hopeing to use it to replace people + the "if it can do it despite its issues then imagine what it will do with people to compensate for the issues" people (so the reduce costs + inprove output people)
Yes, I already said tech bros are pushing it down people's throats. Lol.
Those people literally are the tech bros.
LLMs need an ever increasing amount of energy and compute for diminishing returns, they all operate at a loss to generate mediocre results and can only function as long as they're getting unlimited money from investors to burn.
Not every technology just gets exponentially better forever. Some hit a wall, and then that's it.
Anthropic or OpenAI should hire you as a marketer. You sure hit all their nonsense empty promises.
The technology is fundamentally limited. It will never be „intelligent“ because it is founded on flawed premise - that language leads to intelligence and not vice versa.
I'm sure as hell people said the same about horse and buggy being the only mode of personal transport because cars were slow: empty promises.
Only in Lemmy people have so much complete dismissal. Outside of Lemmy, even detractors of AI recognise the potential albeit admit the current model is overrated. Again, I'm certain the feeling of uncanny valley in Lemmy and most don't recognise it.
To use your car analogy: what you are arguing is the equivalent of saying that a car will eventually become a horse.
Weird strawman that doesn't make sense.
Anyway, Lemmy could try to be dismissive, but time doesn't care about personal biases.
Yes, we know that LLMs can "imitate art", but regardless of how good an LLM gets, it's still going to be an LLM. LLMs aren't AI, no matter how much they improve, because for that you have to have understanding, not just a statistical model.
I do have good news for you, though. There are several open-source LLMs.