Have you been able to discover a book written by AI?

Whatever you think about AI writing, there are a few drawbacks. According to author Imogen West-Knights, “There are things like negative parallelisms…or the excessive use of metaphors and similes, especially those that make no sense or come in very quick succession. Every noun has an adjective attached, and certain types of repeating syntactic blocks occur.”

Of course, if an author uses AI to write their book, the publishing industry can easily detect it, right? As it turns out, not necessarily. AI models are based on human writings, the good and the bad, so it can be difficult to tell whether something was written by a chatbot or by a person who loves bad metaphors. The problem is even more acute with smaller text fragments, as there is less room for the telltale patterns and flatness of the AI.

To find out how good AI has become at imitating human writing, writer and journalist Vauhini Vara decided to conduct an experiment…