How To Tell If That Post Of Advice Is AI Bullshit

How to Tell If That Post of Advice Is AI Bullshit

Right, I wasn't going to write more on this, but every time I block an obvious AI-driven blog, five more clutter up the tags. So this is my current (April 2024) advice on how to spot AI posts passing themselves off as useful writing advice.

No Personality - Look up a long-running writing blog, you'll notice most people try to make their posts engaging and coming from a personal perspective. We do this because we're writers and, well, we want to convey a sense of ourselves to our readers. A lot of AI posts are straight-forward - no sense of an actual person writing them, no variation in tone or text.

No Examples - No attempts to show how pieces of advice would work in a story, or cite a work where you could see it in action. An AI post might tell you to describe a person by highlighting two or three features, and that's great, but it's hard to figure out how that works without an example.

Short, Unhelpful Definitions - A lot of what I've seen amount to two or three-sentence listicles. 'When you want to write foreshadowing, include a hint of what you want foreshadowed in an earlier chapter.' Cool beans, could've figured that out myself.

SEO/AI Prompt Language Included - I've seen way too many posts start with "this post is about..." or "now we will discuss..." or "in this post we will..." in every single blog. This language is meant to catch a search engine or is ChatGPT reframing the prompt question. It's not a natural way of writing a post for the average tumblr user.

Oddly Clinical Language - Right, I'm calling out that post that tried to give advice on writing gay characters that called us "homosexuals" the entire time. That's a generative machine trying to stay within certain parameters, not an actual person who knows that's not a word you'd use unless you were trying to be insulting or dunking on your own gay ass in the funniest way possible.

Too Perfect - Most generative AI does not make mistakes (this is how many a student gets caught trying to use it to cheat). You can find ways to make it sound more natural and have it make mistakes, but that takes time and effort, and neither of those are really a factor in these posts. They also tend to have really polished graphics and use the same format every time.

Maximized Tags (That Are Pointless) - Anyone who uses more than 10 one-word tags is a cop. Okay, fine, I'm joking, but there's a minimal amount of tags that are actually useful when promoting a post. More tags are not going to get a post noticed by the algorithm, there is no algorithm. Not everyone has to use their tags to make snarky comments, but if your tags look like a spambot, I'm gonna assume you're a spambot.

No Reblogs From The Rest of Writblr - I'm always finding new Writblr folks who have been around for awhile, but every real person I've seen reblogs posts from other people. We've all got other stuff to do, I'm writing this blog to help others and so are they, the whole point of tumblr is to pass along something you think is great.

While you'll probably see some variation in the future - as people get wise to obviously generated text, they'll try to make it look less generated - but overall, there's still going to be tells to when something is fake.

I don't have any real advice for what to do about this (other than block those blogs, which is what I do). Like most AI bullshit, I suspect most of these blogs are just another grift, attempting to build large follower counts to leverage or sell something to in the future. They may progress past these tattletale features, but I'm still going to block them when I see them. I don't see any value in writing advice compiled from the work of better writers who put the effort in when I can just go find those writers myself.

Friendly reminder that Fred and George literally tried to murder another student for trying to take House points from them

Like I know we apparently don't give a damn about NPCs in Harry Potter, but it's insane to me how no one acknowledges how fucking vile the Weasley twins were

(unrelated but it's also very funny how self-righteous Fred and George acted over Percy being a "git" and how they were convinced of their own moral superiority because they were on the good side, when I'm convinced Percy would never have done something so horrible)

Same goes for Harry and Ron mind you. The level of apathy and cruelty they demonstrate is CRAZY like they legit do not give a fuck. And yeah, I wasn't much better than them as a teenager when it came to people I didn't like, but surely that is something that should be addressed by the narrative?? By anyone? Hermione gets like 0,5 brownie point for suggesting that maybe they should tell someone (YES??) but considering she does jackshit about it that doesn't exactly endear her to me

Despite how many times Slytherin is said to be the evil house while Rowling glorifies the Gryffindor House (and she absolutely does, there are many examples in the books), the murder attempts between the two houses have been pretty one-sided (Fred&George to Montague and Sirius to Snape, not to mention the Weasley twins and Sirius were both 100% unapologetic). Well, Crabbe did try to kill the trio in HP7 , though 1) it was in the context of the war, they weren't exactly students anymore, and 2) the event is treated with the appropriate amount of horror for the situation

I think it's really fucked up that no one seems to find it a problem or even remember it but hey that's just me!

All of this. All of the stupid headcanons and apologism are even worse when people insist he is better or secretly a good person or just misunderstood and have no actual evidence of it because the man was dead before he ever got on screen. The extras are so limited and out of date that they aren't a good view of what he was really like late in life, and what little they do show us does not tell us good things about his personality even then.

Yeah, he was a slave and that's terrible. But other people have also lived terrible things and not become a POS. That was his active choice. Trauma happens. His response to trauma is what tells us what kind of person he is. No one forced him to take it out on other people.

Also, people pretending that other people would make the same choices in the same situation? Um, no. No they wouldn't. Because they are different people and their response to the same trauma would be different because of that. Sit tf down with all that, please.

I hate Shen Jiu. Mainly bc of his "fans". They infantalize him and turn him into this uwu tsundere misunderstood poor baby, like I'm laughing my ass of imagining Shen Jiu reaction to his delusional "fans". This dude is someone who abuse a child and didn't show an ounce of regret about it. Even after being put through inhumane torture he still doesn't show any regret, if anything the only thing he regret is not killing the abused child the first chance he got. Shen Jiu will definitely hate his "fans" more than he will ever hate Binghe LOL, at least Binghe respect his agency as a person to hold him accountable for the shitty things he did unlike his "fans" 😂

The disproportionate hate on YQY is doing more to kill any scant sympathy I had for SJ than anything else

tbh i dunno why so many sj apologists are anti-yqy. because like????? he is your mascot. he was the originator. the head honcho of excusing sj's levels of unmitigated villainy. look into my eyes and tell me that qi ge wouldn't blush and kick his feet if he saw xiao jiu commit murder. actually we don't NEED to imagine bc jiumei did just that and yue qi just grabbed his hand and ran, no thoughts head empty. arson? child abuse?? yue qi doesn't care. whatever makes xiao jiu happy <3

I think the thing that I've taken away from this panel is that it's okay if you don't like your work because there are people who will love it.

And I didn't take that away because there was any implication that Hugh or Mads disliked the work they did on Hannibal but because they so obviously loved it but even they couldn't remember all the details of the things they loved. Hugh wouldn't stop talking about S1EP2 Amuse-Bouche but he could not for the life of him remember Eldon Stammets' name, and Mads and Hugh had to be reminded of Donald Sutcliffe's name.

And those details of the panel stood out to me because it's like wow I may forget about something I've written or recorded or drawn, but someone somewhere out there, even if it's just one person, probably loved what I made even more than I did and they might've committed parts of my work to memory that I've completely forgotten about or thought were insignificant.

I guess the panel just reminded me how thankful I am for fandom spaces and the fannibal community and just generally people who are kind and uplifting and share what they love with each other.

This is so fitting, I don't even like Nightcore and it's still going on repeat. Lily was such a bad friend.

Lily Evans is just a little girl

I was re-listening to this song (I love the nightcore version) and it made me think! This is perfect for the Snape and Lily friendship break up!!! Or it would be if Snape realized how bad a friend 'saint' Lily was.