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Begrudging congratulations to @self_made_human for producing a book review entry that's good enough to make it as a finalist of Scott's Book Review Contest, yet AI-sloppy enough to make the comments section focus almost exclusively on the (un)acceptability of undisclosed use of AI.
This reminds me of a video I stumbled on the other day. It's a 12-minute "documentary-style" video essay telling the story of a rescue dog that gets dropped off at a shelter without any documentation. It's a cute, healthy dog that should be eminently adoptable except for his utter refusal to engage with anyone. Five months in, the dog's time at the shelter is up, and he is scheduled for transfer to doggy prison (or whatever, the point is that it's the end of trying to get him adopted). But a woman brings in her small, shy six-year-old deaf girl, and amazingly the dog responds to the child alone, and knows all the hand-sign commands. Turns out the dog was raised by a deaf old man, who then had a stroke. That's the gist, though the video packs a whole lot more dramatic beats, twists, and turns.
It's a real tear-jerker... if it describes a true story. Unless it's made up. Which, come to think of it (I say to myself as I review my reaction to the video), it probably is. Because how can there possibly be a dog smart enough to learn sign commands, yet so dumb that it couldn't possibly figure out any other forms of human-dog communication. Yeah, I smell bullshit.
But OK, maybe it's like a video short fiction, it's not supposed to be real, no more than any other kind of fiction. Then I can judge the video on this fictional-short-film kind of merit, and not worry about thinking critically on the veracity of facts. Damn it, they really should have specified that this is fiction. Then I can enjoy it as such. It has good plot beats. The actors are cute and relatable. Especially the dog.
Unless it's AI-generated. Posted March 2026. Possible. Fuck.
When I read something that, presumably, is the human author's thoughts, only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust as when I read something purportedly factual that turns out to be fictional, even if not actively meant to deceive. This is definitely true if the entire output is LLM-produced, and remains partially true if LLM is used for editing that inserts LLM-created phrases. Like this zinger from the review:
I hope this forum preserves the norm of humans writing for humans by humans, even as I know that the overall tide is flowing the other way.
What is the biggest AI tell?
In the dog video? I only watched the first minute or so, but one of the very first video clips has characteristic "AI image generation can't do text" artifacts on both the security-camera timestamp and an in-universe poster. The girl's hands morph bizarrely whenever she's doing sign language. And despite all the clips ostensibly showing the same girl/visit, the name and layout of the animal shelter constantly change.
In the book review, the most immediate tell of AI is that current models really really like to write "The [noun] is the [noun]" phrases/metaphors, and awkwardly use verbs as nouns like this:
(Emphasis mine.) This isn't 100% dispositive, but it helps that the metaphor doesn't actually make sense here. The hospital didn't write this book and hand it to Adam Kay as a routine record of their decision!
This pair of sentences is also very AI-clichéd:
I agree. Nobody writes like this. You might think there are people who do, I guess it apes a kind of noir pastiche., Raymond Chandler way of writing sentences, but even they sound different. The way I like to think about it is that if it reads like ‘personal essay’ a well tutored scion of an affluent Singaporean family uses to get into a second-tier Ivy, it’s probably AI.
Of course, you can get LLMs to write very differently, but most people don’t care to and I suspect the labs themselves don’t modify the system prompts to say “don’t sound like AI” for fear of media backlash.
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