I’m seeing a few of these stories pop up the last day or two. I don’t wanna approve these and I don’t think they belong on the site. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding how it works but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of the text is written by the computer. To me, this breaks the “the story must be yours” rule.
Thoughts on this? Maybe I’m overreacting but I feel like it’s gonna degenerate things if it becomes more widespread.
Agreed. We shouldn’t approve those. I’ll tell the author.
I played a little bit with AIDungeon - from my very brief experience with it, half the text is written by the author, and half is written by the AI. You as the author have some control over the AI, and can use the tools to ‘steer’ it in the direction you want. It apparently wasn’t intended for writing gay fetish porn, so you as an author end up having to do a lot of ‘steering’ to get what you want. 
I had a lot of fun with the short story I came up with, even though I wouldn’t consider it enough ‘effort’ to actually share here. That said, I’d be disappointed to see GSS block AI-assisted stories that the author clearly put a lot of effort into. To me its low-effort stories in general that’s the problem, and not the AI-assist. Perhaps AI-Assisted stories could get a filter tag?
I’m amazed at how far AI has come, and really looking forward to the day that some of the ideas swimming around in my head (perpetually locked in writers block) could someday see the light of day into a story via AI-assist. (Or neural dump… that would be cool) 
The latest story has the opening section suggesting people express there opinion in this thread, so here’s mine : allow them but have them default to not show in similar fashion to the fairly recent “safe mode” feature. That way people who want to see them have to explicitly set a preference for seeing them which presumably also means they need an account, so anonymous people will never see them in the same way anonymous is always in safe mode. As for “the story must be yours”, isn’t that so people don’t take stories from other human authors without permission? It’ll be another twenty years at the very least before AIs start trying to claim they own a copyright, and even then, it won’t be GPT-2 that’s doing it 
You are correct that the “story must be yours” rule was written primarily with plagiarism in mind. To me, it would be better if it were tweaked to instead say something like: “the story must be written by you”, to cover this new development also.
Personally, I just don’t want the really good stories, where authors have spent hours and hours writing and iterating, to be pushed down and buried by a deluge of AI-written stuff. Right now of course this isn’t a problem, as there aren’t many of these AI stories being submitted, but I wanted to nip this in the bud before it starts.
Don’t get me wrong, if people enjoy reading these types of things, I have nothing against that! And I think they should be given a space to share them. I just don’t think it should be on the front page of the main site. Perhaps a new section on the forum instead?
Speaking as the accidental instigator of this, would you have recognized that the story was written with the help of an AI had I not gone out of my way to specify that it was?
What exactly is the issue here? If it’s purely one of quality, I would say that there are plenty of awkwardly worded and grammatically haphazard stories on GSS. My story is literally what I titled it as; a test print, written up in ten minutes with very little thought to the actual content beyond proving content could be produced and raising awareness of AIDungeon’s potential as a writing tool and role play partner, sexual or otherwise. It is not an example of the the best quality work one is capable of producing with AIDungeon.
If the issue is just that the computer did more work than you’re comfortable with allowing, then you’re setting yourselves up to play Turing Test on every story that comes through GSS without a “Made with AIDungeon” disclaimer on it. And if I hadn’t included the carrots or the “You say” or the disclaimer, and done maybe five minutes rough editing work, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all.
Not to call out random people, but this is my issue. This story followed soon after the first mention of the AI site. Again, not wanting to call out this author, but the ratings on this story were extremely low and it was not well received by readers.
Indeed, it’s exactly as you say, Bryx. You were able to produce - and publish - something in ten minutes and with very little thought. My concern is that if this becomes popular, the site will soon be full of people doing the same thing, and we will be inundated with more stories like the one I just linked.
I’m still very new to the culture here, and don’t understand the quality control imposed on the main site, or even if there is quality control. However, I noticed at the top of this discussion some mention of an approval process? If a story is genuinely so terrible that it does not meet the bar for that approval process and should not be posted to the site, what does it matter whether it was written wholly by a person or not? Or is it just worries about increased volume breaking that quality control?
My complaint is unchanged: If you decide to institute a hard and fast rule against AI-generated content on the site, how will you enforce it when the perpetrators aren’t kind enough to let you know?
If the rule is changed to “the story must be written by you” would that mean that all stories going forward would have to have a single author? No collaborations?
If the intent is just to not allow collaboration of a programmatic variety that seems… odd. When I’m preparing for a chess tournament, I make heavy use of computer analysis. I have a respiratory disability and just finished buying a device to help me breathe better, and its efficacy is predicated on the effectiveness of the software on it. I have a heart rate monitor which comes with an app to allow me to exercise within a specific upper and lower heart rate bound. Software is increasingly everywhere and when used correctly helps to raise potential.
It’s surprising that stories on here might be barred from using Grammarly. That’s not a red herring or a straw man either – it’s artificial intelligence developed by way of machine learning which not only does grammar and spell checking but also makes suggestions for clarity, concision, vocabulary, delivery style, and tone ( Grammarly - Wikipedia ).
You could make the argument that AIDungeon is a crappy piece of software to use for collaboration, and set standards for story quality, and I think that might actually be a good idea, but a hard rule against software doesn’t make sense. AIDungeon uses GPT-2 and OpenAI recently started a beta where selected companies/people can use an Application Programming Interface for GPT-3, which has 100 times the parameterization and massive improvements in the quality of what it can generate. Yannic Kilcher had some conversations with other AI researchers expressing his surprise that even with that huge increase in scope, the model still isn’t converging, and he feels it could scale up a further 1 or even 2 orders of magnitude before it does (and even that’s just a guess, it could go even further). GPT-4 and GPT-5 are highly likely to be yet more qualitative levels better than GPT-3 already is.
I guess the tl;dr of my post is that a blanket ban on this kind of thing seems like telling farmers they need to exclusively hand-till their soil because if they use tractors then it’s not really their farmland or crops anymore.
Or is it just worries about increased volume breaking that quality control?
Yes, partly. Every story that is submitted to the site is read and approved by an admin to ensure that it conforms to the site’s rules (and to be honest, your story should not have been approved, regardless of the AI stuff, because it didn’t reach 1k words, one of the requirements).
My complaint is unchanged: If you decide to institute a hard and fast rule against AI-generated content on the site, how will you enforce it when the perpetrators aren’t kind enough to let you know?
Well, the AI stories are mostly obvious, because they’re largely written in the second person, which is relatively rare in itself. Of course, if a person wants to change the pronouns and not make any mention to the AI stuff, there is no way we could verify (afaik) whether it was written by a person or not.
Initially I made this thread (in the staff forum, mind you. It was not my decision to move this to a public area) so that we might be able to stop this from even becoming a thing. While we can’t police people using it, if no mention is being made of the AI website, then it would, I imagine, significantly decrease the number of people who are aware of its existence, and thus decrease the number of people posting stories generated by it.
I was attempting to discreetly get ahead of a problem before it began. And of course, I will freely admit that it might not even be a problem. Maybe my fears are entirely unfounded, which is totally fine. But I figure it’s generally easier to deal with these things before the genie is out of the bottle. Perhaps it was naive to think that was ever possible.
Of course I am not suggesting that all tools be banned. There is no practical way that could be enforced anyway. But my understanding of the AI site in question is that large quantities of the writing, sometimes more than half, are generated by the computer, and then simply copy-pasted into GSS. I could be wrong, but to my knowledge, Grammarly will not write entire swathes of text on your behalf in the same way.
Maybe you should give it a try, then. It’s free, and takes very little time at all. Decide for yourself whether or not the process of creating something worth posting is effortful enough to merit posting them, after some minor edits for quality and readability of course😘. You’d be surprised how hot it is to have those words show up like someone else is actually saying them to you.
Opinion: Any AI written stories should be noted as such so that people can choose to read them or not.
I can’t speak for AIDungeon at this exact moment, but I did use it a fair bit months ago, before I deleted my account for a variety of reasons, including that anything and everything you write with AIDungeon continues to exist forever, regardless of whether you think you’ve deleted it or not. I don’t like being lied to regarding my data so that was a final straw for me.
However, I do continue to use the same underlying model, GPT-2, just from a different site. I think you’re underestimating just how much the human has to be in the loop. If you let it do more than short snippets it will arbitrarily and frequently 1) change your men to women 2) put female anatomy onto your men 3) have your characters start talking to themselves (eg “Josh said to Josh”) 4) swap roles (suddenly the master is the slave and nothing has happened for that to make any sense) 5) I don’t know if this is still true but when I was still using it AIDungeon was extremely insistent that all male genitalia be black, eg “his big black cock penetrates you”, regardless of anything that’s been established about the characters to that point, so rumours of AI picking up biases from what it trains on are definitely true.
The fun and appeal of AIDungeon, other GPT-2s, and other current models, isn’t that you put in a handful of sentences and out comes something hot. It’s that if you work hard, tell it to regenerate its suggestions a LOT of times, write a bunch of text yourself to point it in the right direction, AND get lucky, you MIGHT get small coherent snippets to work with. I’ve started writing a lot of stuff and just abandoned it because sometimes even when you work hard to guide the AI, it refuses to converge on anything coherent and it’s best to just walk away and start from scratch later after the frustration dies down.
But, when it works, I agree with Bryx that it’s hot to have those precious little snippets, surrounded on both sides by an ample amount of human text to corral it in the direction you want.
So the AI state of the art for text generation right now is like using a clumsy, buggy robot to make an omelet. You end up ruining 20 eggs before it finally cracks a few correctly, and then you have to guide the robot arm to stir or yellow and white goo will be all over your walls, and when you direct it to flip the omelet over you pray that it will land back on the pan instead of the floor. But there’s a weird satisfaction if you can get to the end of the food collaboration with something edible enough to enjoy.
But are you saying that if future versions of the robot are no longer clumsy or buggy that the omelets they helped with shouldn’t be allowed at the GSS house party buffet? If a future version could be given the ingredients of the omelet, and directed what kind of omelet I want, that’s not ok? I give it the main characters, lots of details about each character, what role I want the characters to serve, what sorts of artifacts are involved (nanites, spirals, telepathy, or whatever), the sequence of events start to finish. Let’s say I suck at sex scenes (I do) and describing characters in a hot way (also true) but I’m a fountain of creativity for who the characters are, what they want, what they’re going to do, and what will end up happening (I think I am). Lets say AI, which is already superhuman in a bunch of areas, goes from GPT-2 clumsiness to phenomenal. It writes my story, incorporating a rather substantial amount of detail that I’VE written and directed it to use. How is this different from, say, Penny Arcade, where Jerry is the writer and Mike illustrates? Why would it not be a beautiful collaboration and instead be unworthy?
What if there was a master-thread in this forum where people could post their unedited AIDungeon snippets? This could allow people an outlet to play with the format and share their experiments. Maybe it could also be a place where people could chat about the concept, and exchange ideas.
It would also mean that if someone tried to post a haphazard/confusing/low-effort AI story in the Spiral, they could be redirected to the thread in the forum instead.
I worry that trying to tweak the rules to ban AI stories outright could end up complicating the rules for unrelated situations… At the same time, I also wince at the thought of a flood of poorly-written AI stories on the main page. Maybe there could be a guideline that goes something like… “Unedited AI stories should be shared in the master-thread… But edited, expanded, or “high-effort” AI stories can be shared in the Spiral if they receive approval of the mod team…” I’m not sure if that would be the right solution. But I figured it wouldn’t hurt to join in on the brainstorming.
Thank you all for this interesting discussion.
@Swizz
Sorry, that I’ve dragged this thread out into the open, and even without asking you for permission first. I realize that you wrote this in the private internal staff area. But I wanted people to understand why this has been an issue. I figured that you don’t have a problem with it, if you do, I can only ask for forgiveness.
Which story violates the 1000 words rule? The system shouldn’t even allow a story with less than 1000 words to be “Published”.
@all
I’ve marked the two stories with the tag “ai assisted story”. Everyone can use the tag block filter to block out all of these stories. Having said that, since most people don’t use tag filters, that won’t help with the issue that in general short, simple stories will push out the elaborate ones.
Otoh, I know that people sometimes enjoy the short, simple stories to get an easy thrill (and wank maybe). So I don’t want to ban these stories, they are just one corner stone of the site as well as the great epic stories like yours, @Swizz.
(I might end up adding yet another filter based on the word count - which is not that easy to implement actually, and to be honest, I think that the site is already a bit over-engineered as it is).
A general thing about the quality of stories:
I agree that it would be better to enforce a certain minimum quality for stories. But this is kinda difficult to be honest. Who’s going to be judge for that? The amount of stories submitted is so big, that I’d have to spend a considerable time reading them, and even then I’m just not qualified to make that judgement myself.
Currently, I only read stories from new authors. I only scan submissions from established authors - I trust them enough to be more lenient. I just try to make sure that the tags are appropriate, that no essential tags (for safe-mode) are left out and that the rules are not violated.
If we want to enforce a level of quality, I’d need a bigger staff of admins to approve the stories who are willing to actually evaluate the stories and to make an educated judgement. I’m not against this idea, but I can’t do this by myself.
From what I’ve seen, I honestly don’t think the AI-assisted stories are good enough yet that I’ll spend much time on them. When I read them, I’m really just thinking about if I think the author wrote it or if the computer did. Even if the story is alright I’m mostly just distracted.
When the first came out I commented that I thought it was cool, before trying out the tool myself. It’s nifty, but not really built to write stories as much as be the DM of a role playing game you’re playing by yourself; at least that was my impression after a few tries.
My take: I’d rather they not show in the main feed since so much of whether a story gets read or not has to do with them appearing on that first page; once it crosses to the second page it’s likely not to be discovered. I do however like it as a topic of discussion, so I’d much prefer they live in a forum post like this one for people to show off what they were able to get out of it. As far as actual content it doesn’t have much to offer, but as a toy to play with it’s worth exploring and sharing.
Which story violates the 1000 words rule? The system shouldn’t even allow a story with less than 1000 words to be “Published”.
https://www.gayspiralstories.com/newStory/show/2060873
From what I’ve seen, I honestly don’t think the AI-assisted stories are good enough yet that I’ll spend much time on them. When I read them, I’m really just thinking about if I think the author wrote it or if the computer did. Even if the story is alright I’m mostly just distracted.
Yeah I think this is the question that needs to be answered. Clearly, some people enjoy using the tool and creating stories with it. I’ve got no problem with that. But do other people actually enjoy reading them?
Now, the Naked Ginger’s recent story, which used AI dungeon, seems to be pretty well received. So maybe there’s no issue here if the person takes some time to beef it up…
Indeed. It only got through the check because it’s flagged as a community story - which has a reduced limit.
Adding a separate feed is too much work just for this purpose. We could use a forum thread, but I’'m not adding some specific code only for this.