Require tagging of AI text

[Wonk]

It's easy to tell when AI art has been used, and to avoid it on this forum as you desire.

Can there please be a rule made that AI text for mods (bios etc.) or diaries has to be declared in the opening post? Especially diaries.

It's starting to take over and people who actually sit and write are going to be crowded out quickly, like what is occuring with the Daz3D / AI renders currently.

[The Superman 3 of People]

These tags should be mandatory. It's one thing (a bad thing, to be clear) if you're going to ask a computer to make a picture for you, but it's something else entirely to misrepresent algorithm-generated glurge as your own work.

I personally would favor an outright ban on all AI-extruded "product" from these forums, but the fact that it's packed into the TEW IX executable demonstrates GDS ownership's feelings on the value of human-derived creative work.

Edited August 28 by The Superman 3 of People

[GreatreDRagon]

How can any of us tell for sure if someone has used AI for write ups? Won't this type of attitude lead to a lot of accusations and arguments that lead nowhere?

Edited August 29 by GreatreDRagon

[Wonk]

6 hours ago, GreatreDRagon said:

How can any of us tell for sure if someone has used AI for write ups? Won't this type of attitude lead to a lot of accusations and arguments that lead nowhere?

Good question. It's becoming very easy to tell though. AI loves to use "buzzes with anticipation" or complete overstatement of skill in matching pairs of words "dizzying athleticism" and suchlike to describe a wrestler putting on a 17 rated performance.

There are also lots of checkers you can pass text through and it gives an indication - though not all of these are fully reliable.

[Shianne_EB]

1 hour ago, Wonk said:

Good question. It's becoming very easy to tell though. AI loves to use "buzzes with anticipation" or complete overstatement of skill in matching pairs of words "dizzying athleticism" and suchlike to describe a wrestler putting on a 17 rated performance.

There are also lots of checkers you can pass text through and it gives an indication - though not all of these are fully reliable.

AI also, when writing, tends to just re-use a lot of the same structure and words in general, so if it seems overcomplicated and wordy in a rambly kinda way just to describe something very simple - it's probably AI. 

[christmas_ape]

10 hours ago, GreatreDRagon said:

How can any of us tell for sure if someone has used AI for write ups? Won't this type of attitude lead to a lot of accusations and arguments that lead nowhere?

I do think that's a concern. 

Personally I can understand people feeling a little cheated if a disclaimer is not used but also I agree that there is a certain AI style that can be noticeable. So I'm not particularly worried about @Wonk concern of written diaries being flooded out by AI ones just because I have faith that the diaries that will get the most traction will be clearly human made. 

Also I think the boards are best when they are busy and have lots of active diaries and I would take a busy board (with some using AI) than a quiet one. So in my mind if someone wants to have a diary, but either doesn't enjoy or doesn't feel like they are a particularly strong writer I think they should go ahead and feel free to use whatever tools they wish. I also think it's not like AI can actually write a good diary in itself, it can help with certain things of course, but so much goes into what makes a diary work that I just don't feel like you can just give it a prompt and have it produce something good.

That said, I do think it will become more of an issue as AI improves. In my mind I'm thinking, well no AI could write like my favourite diary writers, it's just not creative and witty enough. But who knows in 5 years how authentic it will be so I'm definitely not fixed on my position... I'm not even completely certain on how I feel about it now. 

It's an interesting topic though, I'll buzz with anticipation awaiting how it goes! 😆

Edited August 29 by christmas_ape

[The Superman 3 of People]

10 hours ago, GreatreDRagon said:

How can any of us tell for sure if someone has used AI for write ups? Won't this type of attitude lead to a lot of accusations and arguments that lead nowhere?

Wouldn't accurate tagging (and a proper, moderator-driven response to a lack of proper tagging) reduce the number of accusations about AI output?

[SanX]

Wait a min, people are writing full-blown Ai generated diaries now? I can understand getting some help here and there with grammar or structure because it's useful if you are not a native English speaker. It's fascinating to me because unlike AO3 or Royal Road, there is no monetary gain here, it's a plain and simple hobby with barely hundred or so readers and that is if you are one of the HoF'ers.

Agree with Supes of 3 and ape, an honor system is fine, because anything more will just lead to name-calling and other nastiness.

Edited August 29 by SanX

[dstephe4]

The best AI detector on the market right now is definitely CopyLeaks. And it's free.

 

https://copyleaks.com/ai-content-detector

 

I think the consensus here is that any diaries using AI should be tagged, rather than an outright ban. I would agree with this position.

I have 2 diaries. My Russian one which I spend ridiculous amounts of time writing myself, because I enjoy it. And one which is a fully AI-generated experiment, which is poking fun at the garbage AI craps out. 

You can tell when an image is AI generated 98% of the time because anything living looks mutated, text in the image is garbled, and because AI is the digital equivalent of the Cookie Monster on crack.

The images are not a threat. The AI generated writing could be though, I guess.

AI could be good for helping with ideas or for less confident writers. It could be useful for forum members for whom English is not their native language. 

But anyone using AI to generate their writing should have to tag their thread with an AI tag, or receive a forum warning for not doing so.

 

Edit: Here's some screenshot of the CopyLeaks AI text detector in action, to show that it works.

Here's it running on the diary I write myself:

 

Here's it running on my AI generated diary:

Edited August 29 by dstephe4

[The Superman 3 of People]

1 hour ago, christmas_ape said:

Also I think the boards are best when they are busy and have lots of active diaries and I would take a busy board (with some using AI) than a quiet one.

What's the value in a message board where people share their creations when low effort copy-paste garbage is crowding out the work of people actually engaging with a creative process? What I've seen is a talent exodus and good creators switching over to AI in response to a userbase that's uncritical of anything that meets the 150x150 .jpg requirement of a TEW graphics asset. If I was a DAZ 3D renderer and knew that a 15-second Midjourney prompt would get me as much recognition as something it took me three hours to make myself then I'd probably walk away from creating, too.

Edited August 29 by The Superman 3 of People

[Wonk]

31 minutes ago, The Superman 3 of People said:

What's the value in a message board where people share their creations when low effort copy-paste garbage is crowding out the work of people actually engaging with a creative process? What I've seen is a talent exodus and good creators switching over to AI in response to a userbase that's uncritical of anything that meets the 150x150 .jpg requirement of a TEW graphics asset. If I was a DAZ 3D renderer and knew that a 15-second Midjourney prompt would get me as much recognition as something it took me three hours to make myself then I'd probably walk away from creating, too.

I'll put my cards on the table.

I've been down the middle / ambivalent about the AI art. I like to render things but am aware that not everyone has the time / patience / computer hardware / income to create Daz3D renders which fit in with previous iterations. I generally though it okay that, through AI, people could create their own graphics which fit the style coming with the game. Despite that view, I have, sadly, just moved all my render materials to an external hard drive and have no plans to open it up again, so myself at least won't be creating any further. Equally, I don't want this to become a thread about the AI art - but wanted to just agree with you that the prophecy of creators moving away is absolutely a thing.

With writing - unless you have a learning delay or issue (in which case for the love of god please use anything you want to because you deserve to contribute) - you can just open notepad and write. You can use AI-lite tools like grammar checkers, spell checkers, reading clarity helpers which are build into Word itself, for example, without resorting to having it write for you. Hell, you could even dictate the show.

At the moment I'll just one star obviously AI diaries and move on - but I'd much rather have them flagged and be able to avoid them in the first place, hence the request for this rule. If the site needs more mods because of it, so be it - now is a great time to take advantage of the higher levels of traffic and enthusiasm for diaries and the last thing we want is for creators to be pushed away by generated text. 

[dstephe4]

I think there's clearly a passionate set of emotions about AI. Enough anyway to necessitate an official rule being created and enforced through all the diary pages of this forum.

[The Superman 3 of People]

9 minutes ago, Wonk said:

I've been down the middle / ambivalent about the AI art. I like to render things but am aware that not everyone has the time / patience / computer hardware / income to create Daz3D renders which fit in with previous iterations. I generally though it okay that, through AI, people could create their own graphics which fit the style coming with the game. Despite that view, I have, sadly, just moved all my render materials to an external hard drive and have no plans to open it up again, so myself at least won't be creating any further. Equally, I don't want this to become a thread about the AI art - but wanted to just agree with you that the prophecy of creators moving away is absolutely a thing.

I should have been a little clearer in what I was saying. The artist exodus in the face of tools like Midjourney, in my eyes, is a canary in the coal mine for what will happen to diaries unless action is taken to head off AI-generated text being used as a substitute for creative work.

[Teasenitryn]

Eh as a creative writer I do not feel threatened by AI because I know that it can't do what I do. I have actually tried to put through the kind of things I would do on chat gpt and have tried to refine prompts, no way that I could see it not being more work to fix and make look right than just writing in the first place. As AI advances...eh, maybe that will change and maybe it is something that will need to be monitored closely in areas that it affects livelihoods. Posting diaries or character designs on a site like this does not fall anywhere close to that though.

I guess overall even if AI does make it easy for people to put out diaries, so what? If people want to share how they have played their game but are not confident in writing promos or match roundups and it lets them do it, they're not making money off of it, if I brought my diary that I did in a discord group here they would not be taking money off of me and it isn't really the writing that makes a successful diary more than it is the planning behind the scenes and the interaction with the people who visit your thread.

I get that there is a view on AI and there will always be a side that hates it and a side where whether it is written word or art it allows them to make something that they could not do otherwise but on a site where we are all sharing our works for the enjoyment of others I see no value in forcing people to tag their work or for the accusations and moderator presence that such a rule would bring into being.

[Devilb0y]

I don't post on the forums outside of my diary very much, but figured I'd add something here. Hopefully this isn't just beating a dead AI horse at this point.

So, full disclosure: as a baseline I don't really like AI for creative use. It builds models from the actual work of real people, without credit and then allows other people to easily and rapidly produce bastardizations of that work. If the average person can't really discern between proper art and AI art (and we've seen often enough that they can't), then the time and cost savings of AI art will rapidly threaten the existence of actual art. So that's my baseline.

In terms of writing, though, I think AI-written stuff is pretty obvious, though perhaps I'm in the minority on that. So I think we need to think hard about what problem we are trying to solve here.

• If we're worried that diary writers who take the time to write their own work will be crowded out, personally I don't see that happening. The best diaries tend to shine through via longevity and quality, and I expect that the writing style of an AI diary will rapidly become very repetitive, turning people off from reading it. Some people might just come to diaries for booking ideas or to see what stars someone makes, and in that case it doesn't really matter if the diary is AI-written or not because those readers don't really care about the writing quality in the first place. Not to mention that if someone is using AI to whole-cloth write their diary then they probably don't really care that much about their diary in the first place; I'd be very surprised if they didn't fizzle out when interest wains and running the same prompts through ChatGPT over and over again to get the same three paragraphs gets boring.
• If we're trying to prevent a broader proliferation of AI content on the boards then that's a worthwhile discussion, albeit one that people seem to have had a lot already on this forum. My stance will always be that AI work should be separated from real work so that you don't have to rely on the average person to discern between them (because they fail to do so too often). But this brings with it a significant administrative overhead. Who is going and tagging all of this AI work so it can be categorised accordingly? Is it the mods? Are we expecting people to honestly tag their own work as AI when they know that it will make it so that their diary is viewed as lesser in comparison to others? And does this create an atmosphere of people "reporting on their neighbours"  - to use a hyperbolic comparison - that they think may be using AI in their diaries? I don't know if I like the message this sends. Certainly I can say that if someone accused me of it I would be upset that A) they think I would take a short-cut like that and B) that my writing is so bad that it's indistinguishable from AI!
• If we want the people who are writing diaries to abandon the tools that allow them to "cheat" on the creative writing process in an honest attempt to get more people engaged with improving their writing skills then I think that's a noble goal, but I honestly don't know if the people doing AI diaries actually care about improving their writing. That's not intended as a dig. As I said before, some people just want the bare-bones booking decisions and mechanical progress of a game from their diaries. Were I one of those people I probably just wouldn't do angle and match write-ups rather than using AI, but I'm not going to tell other people how to write their diaries.

 

I've waffled on enough. If there's one takeaway from this for me it's that a lot of people really hate the AI content on the boards and I think we need to be hyper-aware of it. But where renders and art in general require intervention to make up for the lack of ability in the average person to identify what is AI-generated and what is not, I think writing speaks for itself. I wouldn't wish for the mods to have to take on additional work to fix a problem that I suspect may fix itself in time.

 

[SirMichaelJordan]

Fwiw, prompting is an art in itself and companies are starting to pay a lot of money for said positions. Whether it’s AI or just a simple computer program, the rules will always be “garbage input in, garbage input out.”  I don’t think AI content in general is going to take away from anything that is genuinely good unless just as much effort was put into prompting. It’s 2024, the tools we use are changing. People just need to adapt…I don’t think moral ethics can be forced.

 

all in all, I think people who are making genuinely good content with AI should be taken seriously, it’s not easy.

Edited August 30 by SirMichaelJordan

[Big Roguey]

We've spoken about it since this was raised and given a few days for everyone to (hopefully) say their peace about the topic at hand and the decision is that this isn't something that can really be enforced thoroughly by a proper rule written into the forum rules. We do still encourage people to make sure of the existing tools on the board if you don't want to see a particular poster's content and that no one here is required to read every single thread on the board - this extends to the moderating team too because if we were to do that, we'd not have much free time left!

To take off the mod hat for a bit, I do agree that more tagging should be done but it's not just for the AI. The tagging system on here isn't the greatest imo but it still does a good enough job and is a good way of letting people know what your diary/mod is about from the forum page alone. It would be my preference to see a board that makes use of the tagging system but that's just my own personal take.

Ultimately we won't strictly enforce a rule of "tag as AI or there will be X, Y or Z done" because that will only serve to drive people away from the board. With that, I'm closing this thread down because there isn't any real room for a back and forth here - as with any post of this nature that I/anyone on the mod team make, I'm happy to have further discussions either through messages on here or on Discord if anyone has any further points, issues or concerns they'd like to raise.