Damon Beres

@damonberes

Senior editor at The Atlantic, focused on tech // Writing EASY MODE, a book exploring technology, humanity, and the importance of friction, for Scribner SIGNAL: Damon.63 📨 dberes at the atlantic dot com ✴️ damonberes.com

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Damon Beres@damonberes· 14d

The analysis is pretty damning.

In a new study, researchers randomly selected more than 14,000 Kindle ebooks and ran them through Pangram, an AI-detection tool. One in five came back as more than 25 percent AI-written; Daggermouth returned 60 percent, according to an underlying data set that the authors shared with me. Those numbers, they acknowledge, tell us only so much. The researchers grouped together text that Pangram had flagged as either “AI-generated” or “moderately AI-assisted” (the latter of which can mean that AI was used to edit or polish human writing, or vice versa). And although Pangram has a low rate of false positives, it is not perfect.

So the study’s authors, led by Tuhin Chakrabarty, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University, devised another check. They scanned each book’s text for “rare expressions”—strings of at least five words in a specific order—that also appear in other suspected AI books but almost never in human-written ones. Daggermouth had many of them. For instance, the following sentence appears near the end of a multipage sex scene in Chapter 27: “They collapsed together, a tangle of sweat-slicked limbs and racing hearts.” That same sentence, word for word, also shows up in another self-published ebook by a different author. Or consider this line from Chapter 38 of Daggermouth: “Her pulse thundered in her ears, drowning out the murmurs of the crowd.” It’s also in an ebook by another author who has published more than 400 different titles on Amazon in the past three years.

Chakrabarty, who researches AI writing, told me that Daggermouth has “too many telltale signs” of AI for him to buy that explanation. He cited Chapter 18, “Thank You,” as an example: His research team broke it into 12 chunks for Pangram to evaluate, and the tool classified all parts as AI-generated. (In my own spot checks, the tool classified the first few paragraphs as human-written and the rest of the chapter as 100 percent AI.) I ran this by Mohit Iyyer, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland who wasn’t involved with the study. An expert on AI-language detection, Iyyer told me that even accounting for Pangram’s fallibility, it’s “almost statistically impossible” for an entirely human-written book to register as 60 percent AI. He added that the study’s broader methodology, which connects AI writing to ebook sales, is sound.

Whether or not you believe that Wolfe deserves the benefit of the doubt, the same questions about how Daggermouth was written apply to a growing number of other hits on Amazon. Chakrabarty’s study found that books written with “substantial” AI assistance made up 20 percent of Amazon’s ebook catalog, 12 percent of sales, and 10 percent of best sellers in their genre.

Damon Beres@damonberes· 15d

seems like a bit much

Damon Beres@damonberes· 17d

People criticize AI but you can’t convince me this isn’t an amazing use of natural resources

Damon Beres@damonberes· 17d

A thing like that

Damon Beres@damonberes· 22d

Dang www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Like Hard Choices, Communion is full of what might loosely be described as anecdotes. Take the one about Vance’s future wife, Usha, recommending Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking while they were students at Yale Law School. Usha said she found it “cathartic,” prompting Vance to look up this unknown word in the Oxford English Dictionary. As one does? Until I stumbled onto this passage, I would have guessed that the middle of the Venn diagram of “people who use the paywalled OED rather than Dictionary.com” and “people who don’t know what cathartic means” is empty, like the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m not saying that Vance’s story is impossible. I’m just saying that if it did happen as described, it would be like somebody discovering this Beethoven character in his well-thumbed set of the multivolume New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Damon Beres@damonberes· 23d

Look who’s here

Damon Beres@damonberes· 26d

Damon Beres@damonberes· 28d

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jul 7

It arguably gets weirder

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jul 7

Posting #face to celebrate the release of @ibogost.com’s excellent new book THE SMALL STUFF, which I was fortunate enough to read an earlier version of. It’s a lithe book, yet pleasantly sticky, filled with little stories and details that will endure in your spirit. I recommend! smallstuffbook.com

I am bolding the book THE SMALL STUFF by Ian Bogost

a photograph i took in my bathtub of the small stuff

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jul 6

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jul 2

I really do struggle with the incongruity between Anthropic's messaging about safety, the idea that Fable 5 was dangerous in some way, and this cutesy presentation advertising the model's return in Claude.

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jun 30

The White House's construction started in 1792 and finished in 1800

Trump Truth Social post showing a picture of a golden eagle decoration on the White House, with the caption: "A Golden Gift to the White House for its 250th Birthday Year!"

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jun 17

Huh: Google now populating … 4chan very close to the top of search queries. Clicking through produces about what you would expect:

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jun 11

Meet the new neighbors.

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jun 2

Algorithmic content-creation systems making nonsense to be pushed through an algorithmic content-distribution system, all of it optimized for engagement, all of it pushing the friction of production and consumption to zero … …

Damon Beres@damonberes· Jun 2

This also reminds me a lot of the system that leads Chinese vendors to trademark nonsense words for branding on Amazon, through which they sell whatever happens to be the best market opportunity at the time; last week I saw one that had shifted from Bluetooth speakers to wooden phonics toys