Via nocryptographer I talked with someone who works in book publishing, and they mentioned they get a lot of AI slop these days. I asked how they know what's human-written, and they said that there's one thing that will reveal AI slop without error, and that's the author not knowing their own creation. A real author can talk about their story for hours. They love to elaborate every character, every twist, every detail. Because those existed in their head long before they ever made it to the paper. They were loved before they were written. Al slop wasn't. It was just vomited into existence. Someone who generates their story with Al will never bond with their story the way real writers do. That's why they may not know what to say when they're asked why did the character do this, or even remember the scene in the first place. It's something they read, not something they wrote. And to a writer, those are not the same. There's a unique bond between the creator and the creation. If your writing doesn't come of you, you'll always lack that. I keep hearing soon we won't be able to tell. And perhaps, in a superficial sense, that's true. But there is a difference. It's not em dashes or repeated words. It's whether the story was made by someone who loves it and cares about it. If the writer's eyes light up when asked why did the character do that? and they start their very own Ted Talk about that specific scene... then it's real.