i am super pissed right now.
one of my favorite classes in school is creative writing. this is because i love writing. i could write all day everyday for weeks and weeks and i dont think i could ever get bored of it. i love putting my thoughts on a piece of paper. i love turning the ideas in my head into stories. its one of my favorite things to do. now naturally, i am very against artificial intelligence generated writing. i think that it's plain, lacks story, and frankly, confusing. if you have seen those ai generated reddit story times on tiktok or youtube, you know what i mean by confusing. one minute the main character is a girl in highschool, the next she's a full grown adult ceo with kids. those storytimes lack a plot, and often just end up rambling. another thing i dont like about ai writing is the way i got flagged for it on my creative writing final.
a little bit of background first. in our creative writing class, we had been writing short stories for an entire semester. we wrote a narrative, a memoir and created a poetry portfolio. our last piece, our final piece, was a choice piece. the options were between a children's story book, a short story and another collection of poems. naturally, i picked the short story piece. this is because I was currently working on a novel (still am) and i thought that i could build character in the short story. in the end though, up picking a story idea that i had come up with based on a movie i saw.
my story follows an old couple, Martha and Carl, who were on were driving back from their son's funeral. that sounds like a dark start right? it gets worse. carl crashes his car, and blacks out. when he wakes up, he finds martha standing over him and telling him to hold the icepack that was in his hand to his head. carl felt confused because he had no idea what happened or where he got his ice pack from, but he listened anyways. martha directs him to follow her as she knows that there is a gas station up ahead where they can find help. carl feels uneasy due to how calm and collected she is, but follows her anyways. they reach the gas station and carl starts to speak to the cashier about him and his wife getting into a crash. the cashier asks, "is your wife with you?" and carl responds with yea, shes right outside. then the cashier is like there's no one with you, then carl looks outside and realizes that his wife isnt there. he panics, thinking back to the moment he saw his wife standing above him, how she never held his hand, how calm she acted. he runs back to the car and sees his wife, sitting in the passenger seat, deceased.
that was kind of a brief summary of my story. i was writing and editing it for two whole weeks to make sure it sounded perfect. and it did. while reading it, it even sent chills down my spine. i was very proud of my piece. i even sent it to my parents, and i could not stop talking about how amazing it was. i submitted it without a care in the world. that was my first mistake.
after writing essays and stories for school for about 4 years, youd think i would know to ALWAYS run my work through an ai checker, even though i know i didnt use ai in any way. but the way those ai checkers work is they go off of writing style. although ai has a distinct writing style, like the overuse of em-dashes, it can also flag you if your writing sounds sophisticated, or advanced. or if you just spent two weeks working on a piece to make sure it had absolutely perfect grammar. i had mostly perfect grammar. i would hope so, since i made 5 different people read over it and suggest edits. i treated that thing like a college essay. i was invested.
but a few days after submitting it i got my grade back. 0/50. and next to my grade it said, "AI detected, see me for questions." i was so confused. i hadn't used ai at ALL to write this story. why was it being detected as such? now, i wont lie, i have used ai in the past. but never to write/do my work for me. mostly just to check my homework answers or play around with image generators. so i went to my teacher, showed her my chatgpt history, my computer history, and even my doc history, and she graded my piece like normal.
even though i got full points back for my piece, this isnt about that. this is about how stupid it is to work your ass of on an assignment and right after you think its perfect, you get punished for doing something you didnt do. my teacher uses an ai machine to detect traces of ai. do you know how frustrating that is?
i shouldn't have to live in a world where i am punished for my work being "too good"
-greenbean
