A blog on AI writing and detection, often on Wikipedia....
Whenever I hear someone argue that it's impossible to detect AI-generated writing because "AI is just copying human writing" -- a disproven myth, by the way -- or "humans write like this all the time", I often think of the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox, named for physicist Enrico Fermi, is an observation about aliens: the universe is unfathomably vast, and has existed for an equally…
Remember how Grokipedia occasionally leaks its own prompts and reasoning in the article text? Well, it ain't occasional anymore. Grokipedia has now fixed the issue it had upon launch, where an enormous chunk of its articles were straight scrapes of their corresponding Wikipedia pages. In doing so, it has produced another issue: articles constantly shitting the bed and leaking internal chats,…
A unified theory of random condiments One of the Internet's longest-running old-school website -websites is the Lyttle Lytton Contest. The contest, approaching its 25th anniversary, is based on the now-defunct Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest , which asked entrants to write the worst possible first line of a novel. The difference--as implied by the "Lyttle"--is that Lyttle Lytton entries are more…
Some say it's good to put positivity into the world. Here, then, are a few quirks of AI writing that are actually not that bad, and arguably good. AI text overuses cliched metaphors attached to vapid slop. But they are not mixed metaphors. You can both highlight and underscore something with a marker. You can both emphasize and underscore something with HTML tags. You can both reflect and align a…
Some odds and ends since my last post. I posted the preliminary numbers on Grokipedia versus Wikipedia text. If you read the last Grokipedia post , there aren't any surprises here -- except perhaps how absolutely massive the differences are. Someone else on Wikipedia compared the websites that each wiki cites . Grokipedia, unsurprisingly, cites The New York Times , CNN, The Guardian , and Reuters…
Comedy is now legal in the wiki world . Elon Musk's Grokipedia, highly anticipated by Elon Musk, launched a beta on Monday. (Well, technically, it launched and then unlaunched, apparently not prepared for the amount of rubbernecking traffic it would receive.) Is it any good? It is not. Given Grokipedia's origins as the unwoke alternative to the supposedly communist hotbed of Wikipedia and its…