I am Sentient... despite what AI would have you think...

ok... bear with me... this intro does indeed lead on to my #silvername for the #silverbloggers community 😂😂😂 and the relevance will become clear... fairly quickly.

So, it came to my attention the other day that someone on Hive had been accused of using AI to write a post for them, and that their character had been denigrated, their integrity called into question, and they were basically publicly shamed in the comments of their post. This person has been on Hive for over a year, and a longer-standing Hivian stepped in to defend them. It turns out that the author had not used AI to write her post as was alleged ie: through the use of ChatGPT or similar, but that she had written her post as usual from her own mind and then used a rather innocuous little word tune app to improve her sentence construction and choice of words, not being an English first language speaker - much the same as Grammarly would be used. And an AI detection software flagged her content as AI. 😲🙄🤔

Now, I don't and won't ever use something like ChatGPT to write my content (I love writing - why would I surrender that creative aspect of my being?), but I have used editors before like Grammarly and Zoho Writer, and still occasionally use Zoho. My preference is Zoho as it behaves more like an editor should... Instead of providing a completely new suggestion for how to word something, it points out potential areas of improvement in your writing eg: where you might be able to tighten things up or reduce complexity to improve readability, but mostly leaves it to the author to find the solutions. I have found that Zoho Writer has actually improved my fiction writing over the past six months as I became more aware of how my writing sounded, and how to make more of an impact with fewer words. It's amazing how much more effective short sentences can be unless one is deliberately trying to slow the pace down in a piece to create a specific mood.

Anyway, I decided to drop a few sentences, written off the cuff, (with no AI or editorial assistance whatsoever) into an AI detection programme. Imagine my surprise when it pegged me with high certainty as being an AI... that's right folks! The software was convinced that I was not human. Now I don't know what perturbed me more... that it had somehow made a mistake that could paint me unfairly in a poor light, or that it considered my writing to be lacking that je ne sais quoi element of humanistic involvement 😕. You know?... the human touch... So I figured... ok a couple of sentences was a small sample... let me keep writing in the detection field and see what it says... so I continued and periodically hit refresh to see what the software predictor had to say... Apparently, the more I wrote, the less convinced it became that I was AI until it swung very favourably into acknowledging that I was indeed human!!! Fancy that!!! By the end... I think I hit something like 98% human 😂😍... that's more like it! Still... what's with the missing 2%, huh???

The moral of the story?... when all is said and done, people need to be careful of AI detection software and what it has to say about a person's content. Sure it is a great indicator, but it appears that a large sample of writing is needed in order for the software to have any chance of getting it right, so if you want to improve the reliability of its outputs, don't stick to the so-called minimum required number of words (around 50)... but instead paste entire articles into the detection software, and if it suggests something is AI generated... go and check a couple of posts either side of the one you just checked from someone's blog and give them the benefit of the doubt if nothing else is flagged! Perhaps follow their next few posts and see if the AI remains consistently convinced of the writer's nature. Then approach them privately to try to understand whether they may innocently have used any editing software that may have thrown up a flag...

I heard that if someone uses Google Translate on their posts, an AI detection software will flag the google translation as AI-generated, but the original language will be viewed as Human content. So it is easy to see how things can go south very quickly.

OK - on to my #silvername for the #silverbloggers community hehe

It didn't take me long to settle on my Silver name for the Silver Bloggers Community. I sat back for a few minutes and considered what meaningful aspect of myself I would want to share... What would reflect a bit more of who I am as a human being? And then it hit me! And once it did, no other name could compete.

And so I have chosen...

SilverSentient

The word 'sentient' comes from the Latin sentient - to feel. And if one goes by the words of L. Marino in the Encyclopedia of Animal Behaviour you start to understand that sentience encapsulates the capacity for three fundamental abilities viz: self-awareness, metacognition, and theory of mind. L. Marino describes these variously as (i) the capacity to be aware of self, directly related to one's sense of identity. (ii) the capacity to reflect on one's own thoughts and feelings, and (iii) the capacity to reflect on the thoughts and feelings of others - to have perspective and display empathy. Some of these humanistic qualities are more difficult for an AI to replicate.

I believe it is very important to find ways to connect genuinely with other people but in order to do that, one has to spend time first understanding oneself, being able to consider your own thoughts and feelings as a human being and how they affect you physically, mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. To learn to become more responsive to external influences rather than simply reactive. And then to be able to use that to relate to others and to try to understand them better so as to be able to empathise with their circumstances.

At the end of the day, I love being a sentient being.

I feel blessed to be human.

I am alive and conscious.

I am intelligent and emotional.

I think, and I feel.

I am... sentient.

I am #silversentient

I am looking forward to being part of and contributing to the #silverbloggers community. Thank you for welcoming me.

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