Tomás B.'s Shortform

Tomás B.

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Writing fiction on Substack being my hobby, I keep tabs on the rise of AI-written fiction. I came across this amusing example, a fiction story called Flagged as 97% AI, which is about a man unjustly accused of using AI to generate his thesis. It read off to me so I put it through Pangram. It flagged as 100% AI generated.

4cubefox10mo

If you told this people a few years ago, they would have dismissed it as sci-fi satire.

2lilkim202510mo

It didn't stand out to me as especially aesthetic or memorable, sure, but I didn't see any issues that'd make me think it was outright "bad". I'm not a writer, though - what did you dislike about it?

I'm not a writer either, and if I tried to write a story it would probably be worse than this. But, as well as having problems that are hard to define precisely (the lifelessness of the prose) and arguably a matter of taste (the mild-to-moderate AI slop vibe), it is much more on the nose than most good stories. Rather than leaving the reader to put some things together, it's constantly stating exactly what conclusion we should have drawn from the preceding paragraphs.

You'll need to see these in context to confirm how unnecessary they are, but here are some... (read more)