I hate the idea that I even have to post my writing journey just to prove I wrote it myself. It's absurd. I don't want to be a content creator. I hate the idea of posting. I just want to write and publish one day. All because of an AI witch hunt.

AI detectors are unreliable.

AI detectors are AI themselves

The funny thing is...the only reason em dashes are now suspect is because a lot of people who never read before are using ai and seeing them, now connecting them erroneously as something only ai does. So it is basically a bunch of new "readers" seeing something that writers used forever and associating it as something alien to human writing. I'm not going to change. Em dashes are a tool in a writer's belt. Just because a bunch of non-reader ai users think otherwise isn't going to change how I write. How about instead of writers capitulating to those who are just now discovering reading, we teach them that a lot of things ai makes are just facsimiles of human creation.

someone needs to sue Pangram

Pangram flagged the first page of A tale of two cities as 40% AI.

If you're too lazy to detect AI yourself, you're too lazy to accuse someone of writing with AI. Using AI to detect AI is hypocritical and actually shows why AI is so tempting. If you think this is bad, wait until readers start using AI to write stories for them. Readers using AI, not authors using AI, will bypass this witch hunt entirely.

Hi, my name is Claude.
You see my problem, right? My parents should have thought about this AI panic 65 years ago when they named me, but they didn't.

3:32 i believe Pengram also uses AI to detect…. AI. So, maybe not the most reliable, trustworthy source.

Agree with this so so much.

I was talking about this with a few author friends and we all came to basically the same horrible conclusion: we’re going to have to start documenting our entire writing journeys just in case we ever need to “prove” that we wrote our own books, whether we want to do it or not. Drafts, notes, research, outlines, timestamps, character sheets, ridiculous scraps of dialogue written at 2 AM, the whole fucking archaeological dig. We shouldn’t have to do any of this. We shouldn’t have to maintain a forensic record of our own creativity because somebody might decide an AI detector (that is NOT trustworthy in any shape or form), a screenshot, or a vibe is enough to accuse us. The horrible cold dread in knowing that you may have to be prepared to defend something you never did makes me sick. It feels like being considered guilty first and being told to prove your innocence before there’s even been a trial.

Also, unless someone literally has the prompt left in the books, the AI-generated output, and some actual evidence connecting that output to the author, there is no fucking way to confidently say “this person used AI” based on a checker going “hmm, 87% likely.” AI detectors are not forensic evidence. They are not little robot detectives that can open a manuscript and reveal the truth. They can flag completely human writing, they can disagree with each other, and yet somehow we’re increasingly treating their percentages like courtroom exhibits. Then there’s the extra layer of absurdity where people are uploading writers’ work to AI-powered detection tools in the first place, feeding even more human writing into these systems while claiming they’re protecting human creativity. So now authors are expected to preserve every draft, timestamp, note, outline, research rabbit hole and abandoned sentence because apparently we might one day have to produce the fossil record of our own creative process to prove we wrote a f*cking book. That is such a backwards burden of proof: instead of there being actual evidence that someone used AI, the author is expected to prove that they didn’t.

Can’t wait for the next stage of the AI witch hunts where authors have to submit their childhood notebooks as evidence that they’ve been writing since they were twelve. /s

I prefer to work in silence then suddenly announce a completed book rather than documenting the minutia of me in my pyjamas at 11pm squinting at my laptop. As for research, I put a full-on bibliography in my historical romance because I wanted to show the amount of work and fascinating sources that went into the plot and prose! I’ve decided I’ll just have to rely on my sprawling folders of time-stamped documents in the cloud if I am queried about AI use. I’m tempted to film my own thoughts on this topic, you are inspiring me!

As an Author, we are guilty until proven innocent in this AI apocalypse witch hunt. This is a sad state of affairs...humanity is fallen

The "Ai witch hunt" was created by salty authors. They made anything Ai related such a big deal that now it's out of control. On YouTube if you search "Ai slop" it's videos made by mostly authors complaining about other authors using Ai. Now the paranoia is so bad that it backfired, anyone can be accused of ai.

Because of the cancel culture we live in now. Once ANYONE accused you of being a witch you're already tied to the stake by the mob. Before you gather evidence to prove your innocence, your already burning. The damage is irreversible.

There's already cases about authors being accused of Ai even if they have a reputation of writing professionally for over 20 yrs. It only takes one person that has a grudge towards you to light that fire and the cancel culture mob attacks. You reap what you sow

I have one self-published novel.  This year, I'm going to finish my second novel and self-publish it on Amazon.  If anyone accuses me of letting AI do my writing for me, I will tell them to crawl back into their Luddite commune and stick to lining up with their resentful, bickering, flea-bitten roommates to shit in the communal bucket.
If you ruin people's lives, you get both barrels.

I really really wish him to win the lawsuit against his agency for both causes. That he didn't use AI to write the book as well as his unpublished manuscript has been used in a AI detector without his concent! He have to win.

No. We all have to collectively put our feet down and tell these witch hunting morons to shut up and sit down. We're not doing "cancel culture, but for writers". I'm sick of it.

The only way to ensure that you can prove that you didn’t use AI is to lock yourself in a cave with a mechanical typewriter during the whole process.  Your “notebooks” can be forged. An electronic trail is useless. The reality is create your art the way you want and ignore the critics.  Every artistic change brings criticism from people who want to gatekeep.

I’ve been in search for a video like this! You are an absolute life saver

This is why I started using Ellipsus for my second manuscript because they save your progress and you can share that proof easily

Thank you, your insights are informative.

I've pretty much given up on my publishing dream at this point. I don't want to be a public figure, I don't want to rely on having an active social media to market my books, and now we're expected to prove our writing is actually ours? Fuck that.

I've made peace with knowing my writing will only be for me and a select group of friends. At what point is publishing just not worth it?