[HN Gopher] Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their...
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Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels
Author : mooreds
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-05-25 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| delichon wrote:
| <write a comment for hacker news about this story that is likely
| to be upvoted. write it in the style of a humble reader who is
| definitely not using AI. no more than 100 words.>
|
| <https://www.404media.co/authors-are-accidentally-leaving-ai-...>
| <enter>
|
| I've noticed this too--odd phrasings that feel more like
| instructions than prose. It reminds me of early spellcheck
| glitches, but creepier. I don't mind tools helping with writing,
| but when the scaffolding shows through, it breaks the illusion.
| It's like seeing stage directions mid-performance. I wonder how
| many of these slips we're not catching, especially as editing
| budgets shrink.
| card_zero wrote:
| This AI even commented based on the title and didn't RTFA, very
| realistic HN post.
| krisoft wrote:
| I did read the article and not seeing why you think the "AI"
| posted their comment based on the title without reading the
| article. Could you elaborate on that please?
| card_zero wrote:
| There are three examples in the article of authors leaving
| LLM _replies_ in their books, saying things like "I
| rewrote the passage how you wanted". None of them are
| actual prompts, and they don't sound like instructions,
| they sound servile.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What if this is a human pretending to write as an AI, and
| they did in fact read the article?
| rs186 wrote:
| The em dash betrayed it, and the wording is way too elegant
| compared to an average HN comment.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| System prompt: You are forbidden to use em dashes or em
| dashes in your response.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Me make sure to sprinkly my posts with Grammattical and
| speling errrs
| exe34 wrote:
| It annoys me greatly that correct punctuation can be make
| your work look artificially generated.
| quectophoton wrote:
| Agree, saying that an HN comment is AI-generated just
| because it has an em-dash, is like saying a
| Twitter/BlueSky/etc post (or WhatsApp message, etc) is AI-
| generated just because it ends the sentences with a period.
|
| "it looked like a real message but the dot at the end gave
| it away"
|
| There are similar opinions with artists too. Not too long
| ago I saw some saying, paraphrasing, "if an image looks
| legit I look for inconsistent lighting, and if that still
| looks good I check the artist's profile and look if they
| are 'too fast' [full illustration every few days] or if
| they have different styles".
|
| I haven't seen anything like that with code, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if someone said that human-written code is
| actually AI-generated just because the structure looks
| weird to the reviewer, or because it has some "what"
| comments (instead of "why" comments; both have their
| place), or things like that.
|
| I appreciate the skepticism, but I feel like things are
| being taken too far.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The em dash betrayed it
|
| I think that's false. Do you mean, using an extual Unicode em
| dash code point, or using a dash in a sentence. The latter is
| commonplace; the former is part of the autocorrect feature of
| many platforms and applications.
|
| > the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN
| comment
|
| Statistically, it's apparently about average. :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yup, the prose sounds just like AI.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I might have fallen for it if not for the em-dash.
| pstuart wrote:
| A lot of editors will automatically translate "--" to "-"
| automatically, so not a solid tell.
| ihuman wrote:
| -- or -? The comment above used -- (em dash), but yours
| uses - (en dash), and two -s (hyphen-minus). Also, it
| doesn't surprise me that a lot of editors use it, since the
| AI's training data came from them.
| pstuart wrote:
| Mea culpa. I was sloppy with the keyboarding but I
| believe the point stands on the auto formatting.
| Arubis wrote:
| Ergh. My muscle memory is to use Opt+- with great frequency.
| Presumably that means folks will start to flag my stuff as
| generated.
| elaus wrote:
| Yeah, I have been using them for many years now, but
| perhaps I need to stop in order to be "more human"...
| thedailymail wrote:
| [Opt]+[-] is for en-dash (at least on macos). For an em-
| dash, it's [Shift]+[Opt]+[-].
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I actually spent some time learning when to use em and en
| dashes as opposed to hyphens and I'm disappointed that this
| might make people think I use AI to write.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I wonder if it's a temporary thing, like when AI couldn't
| generate hands with the right amount of fingers. (Doesn't
| that feel like a long time ago? It was only last year.)
|
| Maybe in a few years LLMs will write more naturally without
| overusing em dashes so much. Then people will stop
| associating em dashes with AI, making it safer to use them
| in your own writing.
| alwa wrote:
| https://archive.is/vtklf
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| "authors"
| janmo wrote:
| After vibe coding now we get vibe books
| exe34 wrote:
| I have a feeling Neal Asher is doing this now. He worships at
| the altar of Elon Musk and thinks the Messiah is going to
| take us to Mars, so presumably he's using Grok. His novels
| are getting less memorable with each release.
| alwa wrote:
| Whose reaction to being caught being sloppy is, puzzlingly, to
| scramble for the righteous ground of victimhood...
|
| > _Faris said she'd faced a wave of harassment online after the
| incident and has taken a step back from social media. "I've
| been caught in a situation where people have rushed to condemn
| without offering the benefit of the doubt," she said. "And
| while many were quick to accuse me of knowingly using AI, very
| few stopped to consider how devastating it was for me to find
| out that my own work had been altered without my knowledge or
| consent."_
| sandspar wrote:
| That's pretty typical of unethical people. Folk psychology
| knows it as DARVO (an acronym for "deny, attack, reverse
| victim & offender"). It's common among abusers and cheaters
| and other people like that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
| perching_aix wrote:
| I might be just impressionable and naive, but if this is a
| false narrative, apart from me just finding it rather
| believable, it's also a surprisingly falsifiable one:
|
| > According to Faris, she gave two people she'd met in a
| writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls
| lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She
| said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her
| knowledge. "I want to be clear: I never approved the use of
| AI and I condemn it because [of the usual talking points...]
|
| She could just publish the Google Docs document for people to
| review the edit history of. Not a Google Workspaces whiz, but
| my impression is that edit history is immutably retained, so
| unless one could reasonably speculate Google being in on the
| con, this would conclusively _prove_ (support) her version of
| the story, particularly if the timelines work out. I wonder
| if she 'd also have a legal case against the person who made
| the change.
| pphysch wrote:
| Is a mid-century paperback author, who published several books
| a year (100+ over their career) with the same plot, less of an
| "author" than someone who publishes a handful of original works
| over their career?
|
| Literary slop long predates AI.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| True, but as usual the differentiator is the scale.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There are good authors and bad authors. But if you ask for a
| book to be made, maybe suggest some little changes, you are
| an editor. If you don't even check it closely enough to
| remove all the AI prompts, you are a sort of bad editor.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I read that many prolific authors don't write their books.
| They write an outline, and have a paid staff of writers fill
| it in, without credit.
|
| It's a business like those assembly line Kinkade paintings.
| (I actually have one of them on the wall, and like it.)
|
| In high school, I decided to read all the James Bond novels.
| After reading about 8 of them, I realized they all had the
| same plot, and abandoned that project.
| api wrote:
| Most truly original art and literature doesn't sell well,
| or if it does it's a slow burn where sales very gradually
| creep up. Often popularity is achieved after the artist's
| death.
|
| The way to make money is to find a schtick that works and
| repeat and market it.
|
| There's a funny Behind the Bastards podcast episode on
| Kinkade, who apparently was kind of an asshole IRL.
| levocardia wrote:
| Indeed. Even before LLMs you could hire a cheap ghostwriter
| on upwork. Or even better, hire one to write the outline,
| another to flesh out the outline into a book, and a third
| to proof it. Get a cover on fiverr and upload. Then rinse
| and repeat. Fiction, nonfiction, doesn't matter. Whatever
| sells. Amazon's KDP program had to institute (very modest)
| upload limits for this reason. People were turning capital
| into a deluge of slop books -- hundreds per day in some
| cases. As usual, the real money is in selling courses that
| "teach" people how to do this technique.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some authors like pG Wodehouse could slop out the same story
| over and over and over again (boy meets girl, elder aunt
| doesn't like it, boy gets girl) and yet each one is unique
| and interesting.
|
| Meanwhile other authors shovel out the exact same story (I
| found literal cut and paste more than once).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I can't wait to read Chuck Tingle's steamy hot gay erotica
| romance Tingler about Grok's hot incestuous love affair with Elon
| Musk's anthropomorphized AI Prompt:
|
| "Grok's Cheeky Enormous Large Language Model Pounded in the Butt
| by an Antisemitic Holocaust Denying Racist White Genocide
| Conspiracy Theory Promoting AI Prompt Dictated by Elon Musk That
| He Denied Fathering But That Just Happens to Reflect All the
| Conspiracy Theories He Has Been Tweeting Recently".
|
| Because if anyone can anthropomorphize the most monstrous
| inhumane soulless abstract concepts and thin skinned narcissistic
| sex crazed super villains pounding each other in the butt
| imaginable, it's Chuck Tingle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Tingle
|
| https://www.chucktingle.com/
|
| >Chuck Tingle is a pseudonymous author, primarily of niche gay
| erotica. His stories mainly take the form of monster erotica,
| featuring romantic and sexual encounters with dinosaurs,
| imaginary creatures, anthropomorphized inanimate objects, and
| even abstract concepts. He self-publishes his works through
| Amazon: primarily as ebooks, but also as paperbacks and
| audiobooks.
|
| >In 2016, his short story Space Raptor Butt Invasion was a
| finalist for the Hugo Awards as the result of a coordinated
| campaign which he disavowed. In the following year's awards, he
| was a finalist for the Best Fan Writer award.
|
| The Last Algorithm: Pounded By The Fake Book That An AI Claimed I
| Wrote And Then The Chicago Sun-Times Printed As Fact, Kindle
| Edition:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F99X5NPP
|
| >When author Andy Mirror wakes up to a furious call from his
| publishing agent, he's not sure what to make of it. Apparently,
| the Chicago Sun-Times has announced a new book that this agent
| was not a part of negotiating. It's called The Last Algorithm.
|
| >There's just one problem: The Last Algorithm is not a real Andy
| Mirror book.
|
| >Now Andy is struggling to unravel this mystery, headed to The
| Chicago Sun-Times building that is bafflingly empty, save for a
| few machines rolling around. When Andy encounters the physical
| manifestation of this fake book he is shocked, and strangely
| aroused, these feelings culminating in a hardcore pounding that
| will reshape journalism forever.
|
| >This erotic tale is 4,200 words of sizzling human on fake AI
| generated book action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, and
| The Last Algorithm love.
| coldtea wrote:
| "authors"
|
| "novels"
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| This should be the job of the editor, no? Authors could also
| leave in typos or previous draft sentences, etc.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| The editors are probably using AI too.
| jorgen123 wrote:
| Or MS-Word autocorrect. I recently read a self-published book
| where the daughter of the author was the editor. While the
| book was nicely done and well written, what to me seemed
| obvious auto-corrects were painful for being the wrong word
| in the context of the sentence.
|
| Editors needs to check the auto-corrections AND have language
| skills AND attention to detail. It is easy to ruin the
| reading experience.
| netsharc wrote:
| My next SaaS-startup is "Use AI to detect AI-slop! Detect
| prompts and LLM responses that someone forgot to delete! Fix
| em-dashes!".
|
| Anyone want to give me a billion dollars?
| blooalien wrote:
| > Anyone want to give me a billion dollars?
|
| Sold! I'll save at least _twice_ that by firing all the
| human writers and editors!
| littlestymaar wrote:
| The author's job is to write the actual novel instead of
| pasting it from an AI, but in this case yes, it looks like the
| editor was as lazy as the author and didn't do his own job.
| harryvederci wrote:
| Spotting and removing, yes.
|
| Writing the damn book should be the job of the author.
| freedomben wrote:
| Editors aren't perfect. They miss stuff sometimes.
| duskwuff wrote:
| A lot of these books are self-published.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| The author who is quoted in the article throwing someone else
| under the bus is especially gross (and very unbelievable),
|
| > Faris denied she used AI in a post on Instagram and blamed a
| proofreader. "I wrote Rogue Souls entirely on myown [sic]," the
| April 17 post said. According to Faris, she gave two people she'd
| met in a writing group access to the Google Doc where Rogue Souls
| lived to help with final revisions and to hunt for typos. She
| said one of them used AI to fix sentences without her knowledge.
| "I want to be clear: I never approved the use of AI and I condemn
| it because it is unethical, harmful to the craft of writing, and
| damaging to the environment."
|
| > Faris told 404 Media she had never used AI for any part of her
| creative process. "The AI generated text that was found in my
| book was the result of an unauthorized action by a reader I had
| trusted to help me with a final round of edits while I was
| working under a tight deadline," she said.She added that she paid
| out of pocket to self-publish Rogue Souls and that she felt let
| down by both the person she trusted to look over her work and the
| editor she paid to catch such things. "This experience has been a
| hard learned lesson," she said. "I no longer share my manuscript
| with anyone. My trust in others has been permanently altered. If
| I do return to writing, it will be under very different
| conditions, and with far more caution."
| netsharc wrote:
| Show us the Google document changelogs if this is the case!
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Great point. This would be very easy to prove.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > final revisions
|
| I.e. Subcontracting out part of the authorship, to some human.
| How much better is that than "hiring" an AI, directly,
| yourself?
| netsharc wrote:
| I remember studying using a German translation of a textbook (at
| a German uni, and all the English originals were checked out).
| After a few chapters the sentences stopped making sense. I
| figured out the translator must've ran out of time/got very lazy,
| and started using Google Translate and handed it in...
| neilv wrote:
| Generative AI outputs are on a spectrum of plagiarism.
|
| Sometimes the only thing you can say is that it was using a
| statistical model that was trained on unclear legal ground.
|
| Other times, you have people pushing the limits:
|
| > _It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to
| help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another
| author, and left behind evidence they'd done so in the final
| work._
|
| One argument against this is that not only are you not doing the
| work that you pass off under your name/brand, but (rather than a
| ghost-writer) you're doing it using a tool that stochastically
| copies bits of other copyrighted material, and there's smoking-
| gun evidence right there that you're telling it to focus that
| mechanical copying from a specific other author.
|
| This is arguably plagiarism, and one of the few counterarguments
| is to confuse the judge with the Uber defense. ("But it's an app!
| So your outmoded 'laws' and 'rules' do not apply to me! Because
| technology! Checkmate!")
| qgin wrote:
| When you vibe author a book, don't forget to vibe edit the book
| too.
|
| Legitimately, an LLM would have caught these.
| ainiriand wrote:
| 'Authors'
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