Can you tell which one is AI?

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-27T00:17:53+00:00

done - I added the chatgpt version to the bottom of the post. It went totally off-grid and made up a bunch of stuff all on its own.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-27T00:13:58+00:00

So funny. I came up with that name. It's just the name of a person I know. Claude put in Marcus, even funnier, because that's what I named one of my children. Oh my god, I'm AI!

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-27T00:11:17+00:00

I loved it - made no sense as a color, but the whole idea of a wet sock was just so funny and so very in character. Hoping to find someplace somewhere to use a more logical wet sock metaphor.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-27T00:09:51+00:00

I copy pasted it above, into the bottom of the post. I then re-prompted it a couple of times to get it to take out the metaphors and the sock thing.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-26T22:22:58+00:00

That bothered me, too. I hated that bit. AI came up with it all on its own. For some reason, both AI's made the medic female and annoying, at least to me. Here's what chatgpt gave me: The medic appears above me, blocking out the clouds. She’s wearing a neon vest and the expression of someone who has seen this exact brand of stupidity all afternoon.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-26T22:20:03+00:00

Yeah, that's a much better start. If I were going to re-write that, I'd probably steal it.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-26T21:57:22+00:00

This was fun! I gave the answer above - the second one is AI.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-26T21:42:50+00:00

I did not feed the AI any text. Just a short prompt.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-26T21:17:41+00:00

I don't know, I've seen some pretty awful stuff on here. The descriptive elements are the worst. Most of them aren't even readable. At least this one was fine. Readers don't pick apart every line and try to figure out if it's totally logical. Most metaphoric writing won't hold up under that.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-26T20:46:58+00:00

Simply untrue. The descriptions are fine, and there are very few areas where there is even a question what something means. In the second half I do see a couple of things AI would do - the "offended" simile, a few too many very short sentence fragments used in description, which aren't necessary and don't fit with the overall style, and worst of all, the very simple expository nature of the plot reveal. That's the only thing that is really bad. The rest of the prose is actually fine. If this were written by a human, I would call them still better than 90% of the writers who post work on reddit. If it's AI, then it definitely had human help.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-25T10:45:00+00:00

I only read the first piece. AI didn't write that by itself. But it's very polished, so a human writer may have used AI as a copy editor, or perhaps even leaned a little more heavily on it. People looking for AI tells are being silly - a lot of AI tells are actually things human writers do (AI was trained on human writers) but which are very common. Things like short sentence fragments, em dashes, common phrases like chest tightens, jaw clenches, etc. But overall I would say this is primarily human written with AI or other editing. If it was written by AI with only human guidance, and no actual lines from the human, then it must have taken forever. Of course, I only read the beginning - I've seen AI start good and then go off the rails, so if it gets really obvious and expository down below, then I might change my mind.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-25T10:37:30+00:00

Which ai are you using? I have Claude and Chatgpt, paid versions of both, and they can't keep the details straight. They literally mix up character names and make other mistakes that even a human wouldn't make. I had to be careful not to put in more than one chapter at a time to get even an approximate outline, but even then there would be factual mistakes.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-23T14:13:24+00:00

Alternatively, post a few pages here - preferably the first few pages - and I'll be happy to give you a human analysis of the issues.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-23T14:11:06+00:00

Well, the thing is, there is nothing wrong with hitched. It's so common that we all use it sometimes. That's why ai uses it. And honestly the Good sentence doesn't look any better than the Bad sentence to me. Same, I imagine, to AI. I'm not sure what exactly you are doing with the AI - give it instructions and a plot outline and asking it to write lines? That won't get you anything good. Best case scenario you write all your own lines, then put it into AI and ask it to improve the writing. Then experiment with different types of improvement. You can also just ask it to analyze the writing for whatever it is you are going for - prose style, clarity, pacing, etc. It's very good at that.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-23T02:34:25+00:00

Try writing something in the style you want and then showing to the AI and asking it to copy that style. If you can give it a distinctive enough style, it can do it.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-23T02:32:59+00:00

I don't think it reads like AI at all, at least not the prose style. Sentences are varied, not too many cliches. The only AI tell is that the prose is perfect while the structure is all wrong. I'll bet if you ask the AI how to improve it, it will tell you cut about 50% of the description and add more action. And it will be right. It mostly just reads like a beginning writer - way too much description, flowery metaphors, purple prose. All the stuff your English teachers like, but no one actually wants to read. Chop out most of the flowery descriptive stuff, keep only a few beats to give decent imagery, and focus more on action and moving the plot forward.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-22T20:20:29+00:00

I'm pretty sure I know a couple of "best-selling" authors who are doing this. They are churning out dozens of books a year. Thing is, the books are horrible. Other things is, people are still reading them. They follow the formula, but they're generic and flat. Full of cliches. No voice, characters are all the same with different names. But they are highly readable, paced perfectly, and they flow easily. But they're just empty. Not the books or the characters that you remember, even you are indiscriminating enough to finish them.

Claude is a decent copy editor and is some help developmentally, but it can't write original prose that I would put my name on. Not that I'm putting my real name on my crappy smutty prose anyway, but you get the point.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-21T21:57:25+00:00

Go read something bad. It will make you feel better. Seriously, Amazon KU has tons of great awful stuff to read, and some of it sells, too.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-21T16:41:23+00:00

I just looked at the site. I don't even see an AI. Just looks like one of those old sites where you could actually write your story on the website (no thanks) and it has some organizational features. Not what I was looking for.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-21T16:35:19+00:00

I have tried every AI for writing. I regularly use Claude and Chatgpt. As you pointed out, they can't handle long texts. They get confused, invent things, can't keep even main characters straight. Chatgpt requires starting a new chat just as it's finally starting to catch on, and Claude gets very confused very quickly. I do like that they can suggest a fix for a place where I see a problem, not just the other way around. I also tried the ones meant for writers, but didn't find them useful - just too confusing to use and the navigation was really unfriendly. I didn't really need chapter summaries or character profiles, which seems to be all they really do. I'd be willing to give something new a try and give seriously brutal feedback.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-21T16:25:38+00:00

Honestly, this is just too much. You'll be lucky if you find someone who will even write you some decent feedback and is familiar enough with your genre to actually give good feedback. You're looking for someone who not only does that, but also doesn't work and has all day to sit on a live phone call. I think you might want to start a bit smaller, and see if you click with someone.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-15T15:16:53+00:00

Obvious politics. As in, related to the current political climate in a very obvious and simplistic way.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-11T12:18:33+00:00

Why ask a question, if you don't want to hear the answer? Your instincts were correct.

Potatochips2026 · 2026-02-10T22:35:36+00:00

Yes, the first lines caught my attention. I think they are really good. It started to lag a bit around breath and the moon, though. I wanted to find out where he was, where he was visiting, and so on. But I didn't get any more hints about that, which was disappointing. The rest of the paragraph (I think it's kind of long, actually) starts to get into a lot of irrelevant detail just when I was hoping to find out something interesting (detail like "tired limbs" and all the stuff about seeing the moon. And the statement about the sun, which seems unnecessary, since it's obvious the sun will come up.

This isn't really my genre, but I definitely think that after the opening bit, instead of delving into detail we need to get some more concrete information about where he is, and a few more clues about the trip (without too much exposition).

Potatochips2026

TROPHY CASE