Notes

I asked Grok to give me some examples of false positives generated by Pangram. Sillily, it gave me Shy Girl , even though Mia Ballard has already said that a friend may have "edited" it with AI. But in some ways, it's even more fascinating that another example it gave me was The Serpent in the Grove . This story was the winning entry for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It's available to read for free on Granta.com , so I ran the first thousand words of it through Pangram. They came back as 100% AI-generated, with high confidence. Then I actually chose to read them, and I'm almost sorry I did. This is very purple prose — choked with metaphors, including ones that seem nonsensical: "Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it." "She had the kind of walking that made benches become men." "The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink." (Not in the first thousand words but honorably mentioned by Marlon James on...

That's really what Pangram and other AI detectors are: the Oratrice Mecanique d'Analyse Cardinale. The mechanical weighing-scale-like device from Genshin Impact  that delivers both verdicts and sentences. Once its judgement has been made, even the Chief Justice must honor the results of the Oratrice. Shy Girl 's fate was sealed the moment the Oratrice said that it was 78% AI-generated. Even Hachette had to honor that result.  I don't feel sorry for Mia Ballard for stealing artwork for the cover. In fact, I don't know why she didn't just use AI to generate the artwork herself! But I do feel sorry for her that she's lost her book deal due to the probable high AI content of her work. I mean, the whole reason Hachette picked up her book in the first place was that it was already successful on KDP. She should've just been upfront about its AI content so they could have left her alone. But I also notice that all this started when Pangram was used to decide tha...

One thing I was thinking about in relation to the Shy Girl controversy  was Corey Doctorow. Many (but not all) of his works are freely available. Most of them have been released under Creative Commons licences that let you download, share, and often remix them. And yet he still makes a living predominantly as a writer, because you can support him financially by buying his books from his publisher. The free downloads actually help drive paid sales, build audience, and get his work into libraries and schools.  So, what does a publisher P have to fear from Person Ps 1 taking book B and sharing it on qBitTorrent? With the proper business model, it could actually drive sales of the printed books. Unfortunately, one big difference with Corey Doctorow is that he clearly owns the copyright on all his books anyway. Ps 1  is sharing B because it cannot be copyrighted. That means that it really doesn't matter whether Person Ps 2  prompt-engineered it with minimal effort. There...

I've been following the controversy surrounding the horror novel Shy Girl  in horrified awe. I don't have any problem in principle with writing with AI. I care about how good  the material actually is and not whether it was written in the old-fashioned way or prompted. I think that there is a lot of anti-AI prejudice out there that will not even consider anything that was created with AI. To take a random example from Goodreads, " There's no value for me to art that a human didn't create. " In other words, no form of prompt engineering or editing outputted AI counts as creation. The term "AI slop" was coined because of work that was (1) created with AI and (2) of inferior quality. As such, humans are every bit as capable of producing slop as AI is. And a low-effort AI prompt is almost guaranteed to produce slop. Nevertheless, some people use the word "slop" to tag anything that was created with AI, which is where I draw the line. Just as on...

I think the Java version verification plugin has pretty laughable compatibility issues. I was prompted to update my Java runtime tonight. It meant that I was prompted to test that I have the current version of Java installed. The Java installer is meant to determine this with a plugin on a web page. I would launch a browser to open on that web page by pressing the prompted button in the installer. What followed was a comedy of errors. For some unknown reason, the Java installer launched Firefox, despite the fact that it is not my default browser. Firefox made sure to tell me this and prompted me to choose to make it my default browser. Instead, I prompted its dialog box to piss off. There was also a notice on the bottom of the Firefox application to prompt me to tidy up its display a bit. This was because it noted that I had not used Firefox in a long time. I did clean up the display, if only to get rid of the banner at the bottom of the browser. Meanwhile, in the middle of the brow...

Saw a very stimulating episode of Black Mirror today, “White Bear”. A woman with amnesia is chased by hunters throughout the episode. At the end, it’s revealed that she is really a murderess, and the hunting games are punishment for her crime. A big part of what makes her punishment immoral is that she is unaware of who she is. Merely telling her who she is at the end of the episode is not enough. Because she has no memory of who she is, she cannot confirm or deny anything they are telling her. So they could be telling her a complete fabrication for all that she knows. What it comes down to is that we punish people because they have a “guilty mind”. The law recognises this in the form of the legal principle of mens rea. But they have erased this woman’s memory of who she is and what she did. They seem clearly, in so doing, to have erased her intention of harm as well, so how can they not have erased her guilty mind along with it? To be culpable for a crime you must have a guilt...