The AI Paranoia

The unexpected byproduct of AI craze, marring the reading experience.

The new subscriber

A notification pops up:

New free subscriber to Majeris Reads & Writes!

I’m just a tiny insignificant blip in the Substackverse, meaning every single one of those is an noteworthy event in Majerisland. I’ll always click on the link that comes with it, wondering whodat?

The premise

A quick backtrack: I came to Substack for two reasons:

1. Posting stuff as a noob author anywhere else seemed a lot like farting in a bathtub—with only yourself to hear it—utterly pointless.

2. I was desperately hungry for fresh, raw, uncut, hard sci-fi, preferably Cyberpunk.

The former went beyond my wildest expectations. Instant live community. It deserves a separate shout out, but the latter is the focus of this rant.

Yet for some reason, Substack lumped me with the horror crowd right from the get go. I secretly blame Andy Futuro for that. His horror/cyberpunk fusion had me clicking/commenting from day one and likely provided an initial anchor point for the algos. And that is fine. I found the whole new literary genre world for me, and met a bunch of awesomest people, even started dabbling in fright myself.

That didn’t mean I stopped looking. Every time I click through a name, I scan the author’s feed for anything that would jump out at me. Read posts. Like if I like it. Subscribe if I love it.

That’s where the shit starts hitting the fan for me.

The shit that hits the fan

First impression: A new profile. 5 subscribers. Pitch line is creative, but not by-the-book. Cool so far.

There’s something akin to “Start here” post. Excellent. No need to rummage through a mess of posts and notes. It holds an excerpt that offers an intriguing promise of a Cyberpunkey world. Awesome!

The initial few paragraphs of the first chapter do not disappoint. It’s a fucking hardcore Cyberpunk. Did I hit a jackpot?

The themes of my favorite subgenre are weaved into the world and the plot, enmeshed into masterful, almost Gibsonesque wording, that seems perfect. Maybe a little bit too perfect?

That’s where it starts to go downhill for me.

As I keep reading, enjoyment begins to be marred by doubts:

This shit is too good for a noname with 5 subscribers. Can it be AI generated?

My finger lingers on the “Like” icon, when I’m done with the first chapter.

What if I’m about to encourage an AI slop?

I mean, I’ve read AI-generated crap before. You can tell there’s something synthetic about it, even if you can’t pinpoint specific points of failure.

OK, this does not feel like something that was licked clean by a machine. It must be genuine.

Then, this:

But, what if it is but I can’t tell it because I’m superficial and easy to distract?

I copy and paste the whole text into ChatGPT telling it to evaluate if it’s genuine: Less than 10% chance of it being machine-written.

Good, good. But do I trust this verdict, coming from an AI itself?

I start nitpicking at everything.

I google the author. The name turns out to be too generic to produce any definitive result.

Maybe I can match one of the Google results with a profile pic? Hm, the photo seems to be a notch too perfect, too.

I copy the pic into Affinity Photo, blow it up, scrutinizing the pixels.

There! A hole on the shirt is too wide for its button. And there’s even no hole for the collar button. The AI alarms start to go off in my brain.

ChatGPT, check this image if it seems AI-generated.

“I can’t be 100% certain, but based on visual cues, this image looks more likely to be AI-generated than a real photograph.

[ Detailed rundown of reasonably sounding clues of why it seems so ]”

Well, fuck.

The impasse

So here I am, sitting on my ass, having wasted five times more time vetting the story I enjoyed than I spent on actually reading it. Feeling conflicted, rather than happy for having found precisely what I had set out to look for.

I don’t hate people for using AI to write and clogging up the publishing pipes for others—it would be too presumptuous of me to assume that I’d have a slightly better chance of breaking through as an author if the scene was not being flooded by slop.

I hate people for using AI to write because they ruined a process of discovery for me.

And for that, a big fat juicy FUCK YOU!