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AI Megathread
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The Wicker Man
In The Wicker Man (1973) Edward Woodward stars as a xenophobic Christian policeman who, during the course of an investigation, visits an island populated by people of a different religion than his own. There he behaves very rudely, with unpleasant results. The best part of this film is the fact that Christopher Lee is so young as to be nigh unrecognizable until he is seen swanning about in a gown and a long wig, which makes him look just like himself in the role of Saruman from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. The Wicker Man is regarded as a horror classic, but is more properly classified as a musical comedy.
I wrote the above in 2015. Recently a couple of people insist that it’s AI generated. They cannot/will not say why, except “…there is a very strange anomaly that runs through the paragraph, like it reads very strangely…” Perhaps someone can explain.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
Yeah, I think I kind of see it. In trying to be coy about the narrative in your attempt to courteously avoid spoilers, it resembles what some AI do in presenting a surface-level response to a prompt, a fun fact, and summarizing what you’ve just said in the final sentence.
It’s not like that’s a criticism of the review - it’s just (unfortunately) similar to the sort of thing that ChatGPT burps up, because … that’s the point, right? It recognizes what to look for in something classified as a movie review and pattern matches for it.
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@Solstice Thanks. That was my guess – I did a bunch of these at the time, the point was to do not-really-fake-but-waggish movie-reviews of films I happened to have seen for free. It’s meant to read like a movie review but wrong.
I’ve never really goofed around with ChatGPT and wondered if there might be some tells beyond that. (And I’m sort of alarmed at the idea that ChatGPT might know that Christopher Lee wore a gown and a long-hair wig in movies thirty years apart, or that people keep bursting into song in The Wicker Man.)
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@Gashlycrumb said in AI Megathread:
And I’m sort of alarmed at the idea that ChatGPT might know that Christopher Lee wore a gown and a long-hair wig in movies thirty years apart, or that people keep bursting into song in The Wicker Man.
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” anything. It’s a souped-up autocorrect that guesses text based on text it’s already seen. So yes, it might make connections between two separate articles about two separate movies both mentioning Lee in a gown; it might regurgitate something that somebody else wrote about songs in Wicker Man.
Unfortunately, the “AI Detector” apps/algorithms/hunches don’t work any more reliably than ChatGPT itself - which is to say you can never be sure when it’s just hallucinating crap out of whole cloth.
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@Faraday Well, yeah, I didn’t mean ‘know’ literally. But Lee in gown in two movies plus thirty year gap between those movies giving a person a younger vs older Lee in similar costume brain-spark seems like a pretty non-linear thing for it to come up with. Then again, some other human has probably also commented on it.
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@Faraday said in AI Megathread:
Unfortunately, the “AI Detector” apps/algorithms/hunches don’t work any more reliably than ChatGPT itself - which is to say you can never be sure when it’s just hallucinating crap out of whole cloth.
Which has me alarmed when the adoption of such services, or the inclusion of them in already extant anti-plagiarism services, is swiftly progressing through educational academia.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
Yeah. I think I am soon to be asked to use such a service, and I am tempted to see what it takes to make it mistake my original writing for AI.
I should probably mention that there are confounding variables in people thinking this is AI-generated, since I did lob it into a social-media group that’s been overrun by MAGA twerps, just to see the predictable reaction. (They won’t actually engage with the question of whether or not Woodward’s character would have ended up in the wicker man if he hadn’t been so very willing to believe that rejecting Christianity, dancing naked, encouraging extramarital sex, and teaching little girls words like ‘phallus’ makes a person likely to practice child sacrifice. But they’re super offended at the word ‘xenophobic.’ And at the point of The Wicker Man.)
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@Pavel said in AI Megathread:
Which has me alarmed when the adoption of such services, or the inclusion of them in already extant anti-plagiarism services, is swiftly progressing through educational academia.
Especially when these services tend to unfairly target neurodivergent students, ESL students, and anyone else who writes differently than whatever these stupid tools deem “normal”.
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@Faraday Agreed. Doubly so when we’re all writing in a dry, formal, academic style trying to meet those word counts.
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As adoption of AI has changed, my former views of ‘hey, this is a fun toy’ has changed into resentment. Mostly, eliminating drudgery and as a super-charged oft-lying google is all I’ve been using it for.
Ironic, as my assigned initiative at work for 2025 is to become the in-house AI specialist. Just what I always wanted, being the person whose product is a hammer in search of a nail, while also being responsible when the hammer decides it’s a fork about 20% of the time.
Tch.
