3.6 KiB
AI written or human slop? - Mr. Beast's Book
Watch on YouTube.
Description
Links are kept outside of my YouTube descriptions after YouTube threatened me over linking to the New York Times:
- The video that inspired this: I PROVED MrBeast's Book is AI Slop by Catastrophist
- Dan Olson's bluesky thread
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Script
So by now, you all know I have checked out Mr. Beast's book from a local library, and I will livestreaming my reactions to it along with critique. I accidentally overwhelmed myself with getting things set up for that, so it's going to happen a little later than I intended, but before I get to that, I want to play a little game with you. The question is whether or not you can tell the difference between AI-generated text that has not been touched by a human and text from the book.
There have been a lot of accusations and assumptions of Mr. Beast's book being AI written. I believe the most likely correct answer is that a ghost writer used AI while writing the book, and to what extent that caused issues is hard to say. I think there is likely an obvious difference between purely AI-generated text and the text of the book. I also think Mr. Beast did actually write some of the book, because Dan Olson is a really reliable guy, and has stated he is confident Mr. Beast wrote his own lines.
Anyhow, back to this video. There are three side-by-side examples given of text from Mr. Beast's book and AI-generated versions of the same scenes. Catastrophist's argument is that these are indistinguishable from each other. My argument is that if you are experienced with reading bad fiction, good fiction, and AI slop, you can easily spot the difference, even though there are elements of the book's text that seem AI-generated.
Like I said, we're going to play a little game. Please be ready to pause and resume the video. I am very serious that I want you to honestly answer which of these texts you think is AI-generated. I want to know if my experience actually makes me better at detecting AI text or not, and for that, I need a comparison to others. I'm going to show each side-by-side for 10 seconds each, and I want you to not only say which one you think is AI-generated in the comments, but WHY you think that. What details in the text stand out to you? How certain do they make you feel? Likewise, it's important to highlight any details that seem more human, and how confident those lines make you feel.
After I show those screenshots, I'm going to explain my process for determining which text is purely AI-generated using a bunch of color-coded highlights. Now, as I said, I am not making a claim as to whether or not AI was used or how much it was used. I have a guess, I've watched a few people talk about the book, and I've looked at these three examples, but I have not started reading it yet. That's gonna be live.
(This section was done live, with no scripting.)
As far as I know, Mr. Beast regularly uses AI, and I think people who use AI a lot start to write like an AI. I'm saying this not to excuse the poor writing or to say it was human-written, but to say that the difference is murky and more difficult to tell apart once someone starts using AI.
I don't have anything else to say here, go look at Dan Olson's thread on the book.