I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words

Do you? Just stop caring. I don't think it makes sense to keep asserting that you're an AI vegan in order to please randos. You'll always get hate creating/building anything online. The people that enjoy your work won't care if it's AI or not or they'll believe you.

The blog is AI-created—the commits all have “Claude” as a co-author. [1] The “BLOG-WRITING-GUIDE.md” used to write this post gives it away. [2]

And the product the blog is advertising (“VellumProof”)—that website is 100% Claude too. [3]

Perhaps this is some social experiment? Don’t really get it.

[1]: https://github.com/dylanreed/dylan.blog/commit/a7327d0968692...

[2]: https://github.com/dylanreed/dylan.blog/blob/main/docs/BLOG-...

[3]: https://vellumproof.com

And if you’re writing seriously you’ll know that your first draft often bears no resemblance whatsoever to your final draft. Different character names, different structure, different style, different tone.

You may well have a whole bunch of things that seem completely different and a whole load of fragments that are written revised, scrapped, unscrapped, re-revised, stitched together, pulled apart and then finally assembled into a working draft.

I’m not sure how soemthing that basically counts your words and (maybe) proves you’re not using AI helps with a typical sprawling novel plan.

This is just fear of rejection, in productivity-clothing.

The only way to publish, or to get published, is to put yourself out there.

You risk rejection and ridicule. But life is not a spectator sport.

It is not that it is bad prose, it is that we read it everywhere.

We got LLM prose fatigue.

Then you can upload that to a private repo after each session.

Otherwise people make a program an agent can use to type and retype whole sections like a person

And yet the author does not seem to be forthright about their use of LLMs to write their "author website", blog posts, Vellum"P"roof website, and presumably Vellum"p"roof (capitalization stylized differently on the website and blog) itself.

> Your prose is never fed to an AI, never used to train a model, and never handed to anyone else.

And yet their is a distinct lack of a TOS/etc. codifying this promise. The site does accept payments via Stripe. This almost seems satirical.

Also: * No dashes before the 'its not vibe coding post' (or very rare), afterwards lots of dashes. * All pixel art images are AI generated.

All AI did was accelerate the generation of slop so that bit is interesting to discuss and ponder. It's simultaneously uninteresting to complain about a given piece of work. Either it stands on its own merits or does not. If something sucks, I don't care if it sucked because the human did a poor job at it or they lazily used AI. The output is the same to me and all that really matters.

I think what really is being exposed here is that so much human generated content before AI use became widespread was slop in of itself. We were just supposed to somehow be fine with it because "effort" might have gone into creating said slop. Nope. Talent matters.

The same goes for all the folks complaining about AI generated concert/event posters around where I live. While I can typically discern an AI generated one vs. a human made one - the fact is they all are within a very close quality range to me. This was already low-value slop work most "designers" simply slapped together copying the same basic template. Perfect use for AI imo, since it simply replaced already low-effort work no one actually cared about until they were told to with something far more efficient. It lets the humans who commissioned such pieces do actual work on concert promotion and such vs. multiple hours/days of back and forth with a graphic designer for roughly the same quality output.

Now that people are paying attention, the high effort artistic pieces in the category stand out immediately. TBD if anyone actually cares and if this shows up in better event attendance.

The final output is what matters. I do not care one lick over how it was achieved, what creative process someone follows, or what tools they use. I don't care that some movie director has an artisanal old-school editing process where they glue physical film together for their cuts. I care about how good the movie is, and if that is their process - awesome! I'm happy for them! If some other director uses a digital means to do the same and cuts down their editing time by 80% I really do not care and I'm happy for them too!

Uh, this isn't true, though? I squash commits all the time locally before I publish them. There can be many reasons for that, but at the end of the day, I'm not obligated to share my messy revision history with the world. In the most extreme case, the first commit on one of my projects spans multiple years of development because it was forked from another project that's now pretty irrelevant to it. On the other hand, I've received pull requests that were a couple dozen lines and were definitely LLM-authored.

As sort of a counterpoint to the author's goals, IMO the community should extend the benefit of the doubt to writers and artists who explicitly say they don't use AI, because it's just really hard to prove that you're not using AI. Trying to force any kind of system will inevitably affect the quality of what you make, and the art community should not want that.

Edit: The above said, I am seeing in my own writing, artifacts from my interactions with AI. I am proof that, in some cases, AI can be contagious.

I'm a self-confessed AI hater and yet I agree with the "just write your thing" people on this one. I've watched this play out on Substack and I think there's a mix of a) people genuinely scared of what I believe to be very rare false positives from automatic detection, b) people who use AI (but claim otherwise) trying to use group (a) as cover to argue against automatic detection, and c) the hoi polloi throwing rotting fruit at anyone who uses an em dash.

You can safely ignore group (c); they aren't going to be your people even with a fully-attested human changelog witnessed by the Pope and encoded on the blockchain. Group (b) are basically grifters and also to be ignored. Group (a)'s concerns are valid but in the large I don't see a lot of "grey area" writing online; I see a lot of obvious slop. (Possibly the well-done AI assistance goes unnoticed by me, in which case - philosophical concerns aside - I can only think of the old XKCD comic about spam bots - mission accomplished? I don't think so, though.)

Back to the OP, I didn't really understand the "meet the enemy" section - did that experiment go anywhere? My results from trying to see if even frontier models can capture voice, style, philosophy from my own technical writing corpus have been terrible to laughable at best.