But he didn't. And it didn't affect his experience until he found out.

Which strongly suggests there was nothing wrong with the reading experience, and no lack of "authenticity" in the text itself, on its own terms.

It was a chimera.

As far as most readers knew, Carolyn Keene, Franklin W. Dixon, and Victor Appleton were all authentically real people.

Discovering they weren't didn't change the quality of the writing - it only changed the implied relationship with the author.

But that's a parasocial experience, not a feature of the words on the page.

I suppose the implication is that because the book went through the mill the author and publisher somehow didn't really mean them.

Perhaps they were tainted by money instead of being products of pure enlightened generous impulse.

But how can you not mean something like a Tom Swift book?

The series was incredibly successful and had real social influence. Would it have been more successful if Victor Appleton wasn't a made-up person?

Why do we expect authors to be scrupulously physical, when creating imaginary people and imaginary worlds is literally the job description?

The question is more - how hard is it to get airside without a pass?

I once went in through the main arrivals exit doors at Heathrow. I'd forgotten something so I went in, got it, came out again.

It was a stupid thing to do, but I wasn't arrested, stopped, or anythinged.

This was before 9/11 so I doubt you could do it today. But even so.

So while it's an issue, it's not even in the top ten of of the UK's most important practical issues.

And the racism it generates - including Brexit, and currently the collapse of income from foreign students, which was a huge earner for the university sector - does huge and lasting harm.

It's a political shiny penny used for distraction, not a realistic solution to anything. And the people who make careers out of promoting it are provably cynical, corrupt, incompetent, and disinterested in solving real problems.

The UK's real issue is that it is a corrupt hollowed-out plutocracy run for the benefit of corporations and privileged opportunists, many of whom live abroad. They control the media, they buy politicians, they own much of the land and property market, and key companies and resources, and they set the narrative.

They have no ethics beyond power and money, and their signature attitude is contempt for voters.

The result is PR politics where major issues are ignored - climate catastrophe, the dire state of many utilities, lack of investment, lack of national strategy - and the media concentrate on fear-mongering and distractions, including racism (esp. Brexit and Islamophobia), punching down at the weak, and aggressively disproportionate punishment of very mild public dissent.

A series of comically incompetent and personally grotesque figurehead prime ministers - who can be talked up on installation and trashed when minor release is needed - is just another of the distractions. It simultaneously enrages the population, forces them into apathy (because nothing fundamental can ever change), and reassures the country's owners that money and resources can keep being extracted while the government "can't afford" more spending on healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure.

If you're thinking "That sounds like the US" - yes, it does, and that's not a coincidence.

Although if you've ever worked retail, you'll know that plenty of customers are idiots.

Whatever "Surely no one is that stupid!" assumptions you make will be proven wrong no matter what you do.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/ky81y/verbing_...

Genuinely not understanding the chain of reasoning there, unless you start from "Everything generated by AI is plagiarism by definition", which is objectively wrong and not based on how LLMs actually work.

Kids using it for homework is a different issue, and I would agree that's not good.

The results of the experiment aren't clear at all. Increased spending as was done here hasn't had good results. That's not an argument against spending, it's an argument for understanding why it didn't work, and what could be done about it.

Meanwhile the state sector has a lot of crumbling buildings and hand-me-down textbooks.

Public school kids still manage to screw up but they're more likely to land on their feet. Access to the upper levels in careers like law and finance is very much about "polish" (cultural identity) although working class kids sometimes gain entry, often as charity cases.

At the same time public schools used to be notorious for brutal bullying. So survivors are often emotionally traumatised and have had empathy beaten out of them.

But once an empire is established it becomes largely self-sustaining, and the inheritors get a huge head start over everyone else in their cohort.

Claims would literally be on the balance of probabilities, and there would be argument about exactly where the line is, given that some passages could be heavily edited while some might not be edited at all, and does that mean only parts of the work can be copyrighted?

Other countries allow copyright for AI gen work, so there's no issue there.

Both will be proprietary for a closed model, which means the owner will have a monopoly on detecting their own model(s). (They may or may not offer API access, but if they do it will be a closed box.)

Because detection essentially means running the model again, the monopolist will probably charge their usual token rates for detection, which doubles their revenue. If they don't they'll be spending a lot more on compute with little/no extra revenue.

What's more likely to happen is that open models won't have the tech, they'll be used in paraphrase mode to strip watermarks.

But in fact most people will just skip the closed models and use open models by default.

The irony is that the EU legislation is primarily about video deepfakes and AI pseudo-journalism. Fiction, parody, satire, and other creative expressions are explicitly excluded from labelling requirements.

However you slice it, text watermarking is likely to end up being irrelevant.

(Music went through a similar process with MP3s and other audio formats. They were watermarked for a while, until everyone realised watermarked audio is almost entirely useless - although some companies did make a lot of money before the industry got there.)

So the watermark words will be biased towards filler and fluff where invisible substitutions are easier, and the content is less (cough...) load-bearing.

The likely outcome is the development of AI watermark strippers which filter out all the twitches and tells that make default AI writing so annoying.

Google seem to have given up on SynthID for text for now, so this is likely a harder problem than it looks. My guess is Anthropic announced this to meet regulatory requirements. But they don't have a robust detector, and I seriously doubt they have a robust system that can survive trivial rewriting by a different model.

They set out to rob the nation's wealth in the late 70s, and they largely succeeded.

It's possible to get to a certain level without those connections, but it's very hard to get the top jobs. And you'll never be an insider.

Conversely quite a few people in those top jobs are there because of social game playing and status signalling, not because of talent or raw intellect.

I had a friend who started a number of businesses in the UK, including some dating apps before they became very popular. She said that at her public school the teachers would say things like "As the future leaders of the UK you should..."

The bubble never inflated, so the nominal value crashed back down to the real value almost immediately.

Fairly sure there was some money laundering happening too.

It's nice you can view (pirate) whatever content you want, but not so nice that algorithmic platforms pretend to be neutral social spaces when in fact they're being used to promote certain political and cultural beliefs while suppressing others.