Wahini Vara

So I think there's this, I don't know, misconception among writers, among readers, that there is a certain kind of way that AI generates language, and it's super different from the way writers do.

And it was seeming to me from some research that I've read and from my own experiences that that was probably not true.

So I wanted to do a kind of strange and dramatic thing, which was to see if people who knew my work really well could distinguish between my work and AI-generated imitations of my work that were created in a specific way that made them similar to my work.

So there's a researcher named Tuhin Chakrabarty whose work I've covered before.

And he had already conducted this experiment.

He and colleagues basically trained AI models on the work of established, accomplished writers.

And what that means is he basically got the AI model to generate language that looked a lot like language from those authors.

And then he had readers who were graduate writing students read those passages generated by AI and also read imitations by fellow graduate writing students and say which one they liked better.

And they tended to like the ones by the AI models more than the ones by actual human beings.

And so I had him do the same thing with my work, but a twist on it.

I had him...

train an AI model on my previous books, my three previous books, on pieces of journalism I've written.

And then I had him get his AI model to generate passages sounding like

something from a forthcoming novel that I haven't published yet or shared with anyone.

And then I put that alongside passages that I had written.

I sent those to people who know my work really well.

I'm talking about like my best friend since I was 13, writer friends who I've known since I was 19, 20 years old.

And I asked if they could tell the difference and none of them could.

It's funny because I can't remember now which ones are mine and which ones are the AI.

Gaia said it seemed to her that we'd been on similar trajectories.