Abstract page for arXiv paper 2604.03136: StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncrasies in AI fiction
“We could identify it because it’s shit.” - researchers
Here’s the thing: Read enough AI output and everyone can spot it. And that’s the seam that runs through it. The answer is partly right and it’s important to be honest about it. That’s the load bearing statement. It’s this. But it’s also that. And that’s doing a lot of the work here.
It’s. So. Staccato. And it sounds like tech bro in a Patagonia gilet.
Millions of college students silently scream.
93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution
This isn’t what I’d call “reliable”.
I’m also not impressed with their methodology, which is heavily based on Gemini.
To generate mirrored AI stories, we reverse-engineer writing prompts from each human story by prompting Gemini 2.5 Flash (Gemini Team, 2025a) to infer the underlying premise
That’s too many steps removed from anything you’d encounter in the wild. They’re not even testing against human-prompted output.
And then they use Gemini again to analyze all the stories. Relying on proprietary cloud models for the core of your analysis is like building on sand.
Next up: AI adapts to evade detection by last week’s researchers’ detectors.
only 7% of human work got flagged for ai it is reliable though
Percentages are somewhat misleading here. That’s around 2 in 25, enough to falsely accuse a student or 2 in a fairly standard classroom for example.
I remember somebody mentioning a quote along the lines of “A 95% success rate sounds good, until you become the 1 in 20 that it kills”
In matters of life and death, the alternative choices are always important to consider…
5% chance of dying vs a 99% chance of living a horrible life of immobility and pain?
We all die eventually.
Getting your degree or being kicked out and banned from your college and still requires to pay back the loans. IS life or death.
It literally can determine the quality of life of a person for the next 30-40 years. If not forever. This is NOT something to take lightly.
I lived that perspective roughly from high school through sophomore year in University… after sophomore year I took a different view: “I am good enough, regardless of what arbitrary ratings these sad little men put on my transcripts.”
My reality is: I got a teaching assistantship - the D I received in Calc II didn’t weigh on that decision one iota - in contradiction of the admonishments of several “advisors” I was required to see while selecting course schedules for the coming semesters; then, I got a good job out of school and nobody ever read my transcripts to see that I had a 3.45 GPA undergrad and a 3.75 GPA in grad school. Nobody outside my review committee ever looked at my Masters’ Thesis, and I think one of them never really read the whole thing.
Once I “let go” about grades and ratings and all that bullshit, I got another C in Statistics I from a sad little man whose “son hates him too, like me.” Any amount of stressing about that grade and my performance in the class would not have changed the outcome - we were an Honors class of 3.3 GPAs and up, many 3.9s and up in there, and he gave all but one of us C or lower. Elsewhere - and overall - I believe I performed better academically due to not stressing about it.
The parking gestapo started patrolling a week earlier than their announced end of “free parking for summer” period and wrote me a ticket, I appealed, they denied, I decided to see where this led without me paying. For a $20 fine, they sent me about 100 collection letters (postage far higher than $0.20 on each one) over the following years, and told me that “my transcripts are FROZEN and will not be released to anyone until the fine is paid.” Welp, here we are, 40ish years later, and nobody has denied me employment or promotion or any other thing because they can’t get a copy of my transcripts. One new employer 12 years after graduation asked me for a copy “to have on file” and I gave them an earlier copy I had pulled before the parking ticket, didn’t show degree conferred, they didn’t care - gave me Masters’ degree pay rate anyway. Nobody else, anywhere at any of the dozen employers I have had in the last 40 years, ever asked me for transcripts or other proof of my education.
By the time you’ve had something impact your quality of life for 10 years, that is an impact to your entire quality of life. If the University actually expells you over an AI infraction, my take is that they probably wanted to expell you for other reasons already, and your academic career at that institution would have been an unpleasant uphill battle even without the AI flap.
One other thing I learned during my Teaching Assistantship: a couple of my students were demonstrating absolutely zero understanding of the material being taught and making zero effort to improve their understanding, resisting my offers to help. I gave them a failing grade. My advisor was called to the Dean’s office, when he returned he sat me down for a lesson: “These are paying customers, if they show up to class they get at least a C.” I suspect that is true of almost every private university in the world.
Holy the ignorant self-centered anecdote. Too long, no relevance, do not recommend. I‘d probably give it a failing grade.
I‘d probably give it a failing grade.
And after age 19 or so, I wouldn’t care.
“On the one hand, this is good news. On the other hand…”
Find me an option that works like GDocs keeping a running history of writing and editing, and I’ll consider it.
I have receipts for the integrity of my writing. I dont need some shitty tool to validate it.
You can literally just type what the ai says into Google Docs.
I hate using it to write.
It tracks the edits. If you generate a whole doc in one shot then it’s obviously AI.
If you have a shitty draft, then a slightly less shitty draft, then… … … Then a quality end product, you can see how the human worked.
AI can’t really replicate that.
I only ever wrote first drafts when they were forced upon me in school. There might be some edits, but my first draft is largely what I would submit because I hated to write as a kid and didn’t want to write the same thing 3-5 times by hand before submitting it. A small benefit from being around before computers were so common was learning how to write a paragraph ahead in my mind, it would help me catch anything I was about to forget to include, or to remove a trailing thought before I wrote it out.
I hated writing by hand, too.
I had to write more starting in junior high (middle school). This was back in the late 70s. We had an old, non-electric typewriter at home, so, I took typing in seventh grade. For final edit, I’d cut the sheets up and use white out, and then take the taped up mess to a store with a copy machine. That’s how I got through high school English classes, too.
Later, when I got into graphic design as a profession, I learned this was common practice, and called “paste up”.
That’s not how story writing works. Or any long form written art works for that matter. Try to ask any writer if they ever “write in their head” and publish those as a book as-is
The biggest thing I “wrote in my head” was my capstone for my Bachelor’s, I managed a 93 and that is more than high enough for me. I’m not an author though so I doubt I could do a book.
I love that docs receipt feature and agree with you. Great call.
Forgive me being well-meaningly obnoxious, but make sure to get receipts outside of the Google ecosystem too. As a professional writer/editor myself, I’ve heard horror stories about folks losing access to an account, and therefore the receipts.
I am also skeptical of these kinds of tools.
Never trust any cloud storage that you do not personally have access to cold back ups of.
This is data storage 101!
Some moron is gonna vibe code a script that spoofs this on the surface. Yea it’ll be detectable, but not detected in most cases.
OpenAI literally has Google connectors to work with your documents. This is meaningless.
I wonder how does this stand to writers who have learnt English as a second language
At this point, unless you write prose, i’d certainly use AI to improve formulations. See it as proof readers.
no
… which will be fed into the next generation of LLMs in order to stop sounding quite so much like LLMs.
Already, you can tell 'em “stop using em-dashes and other AI tells” — and they will.
Just look for the em dash. Anytime someone says they have been using it before AI is a liar.
Edit:being downvoted by all the AI users
AI can be prompted not to use such things.
It also mostly gets hands and feet right now, in images. It’s a constantly moving target, and it does get better at some things.
One thing it still can’t get right, though, is a classroom full of chairs and desks. It just can’t figure out that chairs need backs, four legs and desks have different style legs, etc.:
Can confirm — am liar
Get - boys! - we got an AIer - here!
I’m a liar for using basic English grammar rules like em dash and oxford comma? Lol, tell on yourself harder
Lol even more at your edit. I’m as anti-LLM and generative AI as they come, are you just proud of your ignorance when it comes to grammar or something?
I can’t tell if you posted this unironically, but in any case this is just bad AI slop
I can’t even imagine what dickhead is saying there. Is he implying that the mean real people are bullying the sensitive AI babies?
Since Ben Garrison is the one human whose output most closely resembles AI, I imagine this is him having an existential crisis.
You’re saying an actual human called that thing both “pen & ink” and a “typewrite”?
… Also labeled the clearly working lamp as “power outage”
… And doesn’t understand how USB works
I don’t buy it. Even if Ben did real drawing in the past, he clearly isn’t now. Edit: Or as a reply pointed out, the signature could be fake too with Ben not involved.
Is this real? Or is it a fake comic making fun of Ben Garrison? It’s hard to tell. I’d expect better even from him, which is saying a lot.
I dont think this is real. Definitely AI generated, very unlikely to be his actual work.
I agree, reverse image search isn’t coming up with anything for this one, but it works on other comics from his site. Seems to be an imitation.
You’re saying an actual human called that thing both “pen & ink” and a “typewrite”?
It’s Ben Garrison! Dude can’t get an erection unless he labels every single goddamn thing. While being barely coherent. He’s been doing this for ages!
He’s always been a big fan of labels.
Why did I think he had died? Probably getting him mixed up with Scott Adams.
I agree with you, it’s a typical example of a Garrison cartoon. It’s so boringly obvious on a surface level that you can’t help but assume there’s some idiotic alt-right subtext.
what? bro the joke is that ai writers are not real writers, it’s not that deep.
Neither are you apparently
Ironically, I expect AI would probably give a more accurate summary / explanation of the comic than you just did.
I just tried with the lowest end local model I could find. It did in fact do a better job than him…
That’s an oof
Note to self, avoid https://grrrgraphics.com/
