Notes

I am continuing to read The Serpent in the Grove . I have now fed its third group of a thousand words to the Oratrice Mecanique d'Analyse Cardinale, and its verdict is 100% AI-generated, with high confidence.  I finally made it to the infamous sentence, "The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink." The accusation is that the simile is meaningless. Nazir's defense is that the image comes from his childhood, when his mother used to polish the kitchen sink until it reflected the sunrise from a window facing east. Laura Miller rubbished this simile in Slate. She said it was meaningless to "anyone who didn't grow up with such a sink, mother, or window". It is not obvious from the image itself that the sunrise is being reflected directly from a polished sink. But as someone who has a sink by a window (and I think most people do), I have certainly seen it glow in sunlight. I have been suspending judgement about this sentence until I read it in its proper context...

I have more free credits today. So, I fed the next thousand words of The Serpent in the Grove into Pangram — still 100% AI generated, with high confidence. Once you get past the purple prose, it's an engaging story, and I'm enjoying reading it.  A good source of links about the story is Laura Miller's article  on him in Slate. It's a takedown piece, though, and nearly all her passages about him contain a sting in the tail.  I must take issue with one of them. She says, "He can talk about growing up in a 'rural sugarcane village in Trinidad,' and how the ravages of alcoholism that he witnessed there became the seed for his story". The sting in the tail is "(in which alcohol plays, at most, a minor role)."  This is hardly fair. It is alcohol that fuels farmer Vishnu's belief that the village hottie Zoongie wants him enough for him to want to kill his wife Sita to get with her. It is even less fair when it is clear from these thousand words...

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...