A couple weeks ago, I saw a cool video on YouTube. Hugh Howey, the guy who wrote the Silo books (and is executive producer on the Apple TV adaptation) had made a writing application for writers, and everything about it looked awesome, especially the price tag. Not only was it free, but it was open source as well. I installed it, and I shared it to a writing comm.
I expected to get at least one thanks for spreading the good word, but instead people told me I was posting AI slop. I had no idea! It IS open source, but I didn't think to look on GitHub. So, sure enough, I took a look, and the authors were hughhowey, and Claude, Anthropoic's AI chat bot.
I asked Howey for a comment on it on the YouTube video, and he actually gave me a pretty good answer. He said he made the tool he wanted to use to write books, and he figured he'd share it. Also, he said he had been looking for the perfect tool, what he wanted, and he felt it didn't exist. He also implied he was trying to pay people to write his program, but no one would (at least, at what he was offering). I thought, that's fair. He made it for his personal use, and he released it for free, and posted the code so that anyone can see it.
I decided against using the program because I don't want anyone to be able to say that AI helped me write. Although I will say, to the app's credit, as a Mac user here, anything I write in (current choice is Ellipsus, a privacy and anti-AI focused web-based writing tool; freemium; but also iWork Pages, LibreOffice Writer, TextExit (Mac's version of Notepad), whatever — Apple "Intelligence" is going to suggest stuff as I write. Happens in Firefox, too; and Safari. Howey's tool is able to mute that. It also disables the system spell check. Basically he makes it so you can just write, without your OS looking over your shoulder. (There's a toggle to turn this on and off, for editing.) His reasoning is that if you have a character or town that isn't in the dictionary, you shouldn't be pestered by red squiggly lines.
This isn't the first time I've been fooled by vibe-coded AI slop. About a year ago, or so, I downloaded a cool iPhone app where I could enter in something that happened frequently (or infrequently), and log every time it happens. Some call these habit trackers, but I don't use them to motivate me to keep the habit; I use them to look back. Like when I finished a book, or a movie, or a game. Or when I went to a restaurant, or visited another city or something like that. Also some health/home stuff. So I can show my wife the receipts, as it were.
The app was lacking a few features I wanted (like Dark Mode!), so I wrote the author... after paying $5 for his app. He wrote back and said he didn't know anything about coding, he was out of AI tokens, and he wasn't going to pay more until more people bought his app. Like any reasonable person, he was trying to come out ahead, and apparently he wasn't there (or ahead "enough"). Again I made the decision to drop the app, and I found another one that does the same stuff but better.
The first case, it's kind of on me because it's not that hard to look at a GitHub and see Claude as a contributor. With iOS apps, AFAIK you can't do that. With Android apps, I'm pretty sure you can open an APK in a zip program and look at the Java code. (I'm not a programmer but I know a thing or two.) But back when I was big into modding Android phones, I heard they were going to start encrypting APKs so people couldn't just steal the code or whatever. I do not know if that ever came to pass. I never learned anything from unpacking an APK anyway.
Is there another way to tell?
Maybe there should be a repository for AI-generated/vibe-coded apps, but it would be like playing whack-a-mole and it would be hard to keep up or maintain it. I suppose it would be possible to ask an AI chatbot if it can detect AI involvement, but that kind of defeats the purpose.
I don't entirely disagree. The writing app was kind of a struggle. But my wife is an artist, and she takes a hard line against AI. I knew she would disapprove of me using AI-generated tools to write a story, and I absolutely knew that she would never read it if AI made the tool I used to write it.
I think the hard line against AI is going to push a lot of people off technology, or they're going to have to soften the line. It'll come when Windows and macOS are made with AI, at least in some part. Windows is heading that way, and they have the biggest market share by far. It's like Twitter, people say they don't like what Elon Musk does or is about, but they still use it. People don't like things Windows does now, but games still target it. I assume, because Microsoft and Nvidia do so much for gaming as it is, that supporting the bad shit Windows does is an acceptable compromise. I want more developers to support the Mac, but who am I kidding? macOS 27 "Golden Gate" doesn't even let you turn off Apple Intelligence. After being forced to download the 14GB models with no way to remove them (yes I know about the command-line tool, and I do not trust it), your only option is to not use the new Siri/AI stuff. So then there's Linux (which also doesn't work on Macs) and a lot of Linux distros are leaning into AI. Some are rejecting it.
So my big issue with the iPhone app wasn't just that it was made with AI. It was that the guy took money and ran. He wasn't about to cough up more AI tokens to fix his app until a lot more people ponied up for the app. How many? Who knows. And the next time something goes wrong, it's the same situation. Reminds me of my last Android phone. Got shit for support from the community. So the community came together, reached out to a popular custom firmware developer, and said "we will buy you this phone if you port your CFW to it." He agreed. People raised money, and bought him the phone. He released one version, then flipped the phone and kept the money. People asked for a new version. He said he'd need another phone for each new version/update because the one $800 phone or whatever it was would only buy one update. There was some back-and-forth for a while, but ultimately he didn't cheat anybody. He just set the price beyond what they were willing to pay.
Likewise, I could pay about $70 for Scrivener, which is a commercial novel-writing application. You used to be able to get it for half off the first month of December if you claimed to "win" NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month, a sponsored, overly-commercialised writing event that takes place every November. Or it used to, when it turned out NaNoWriMo were using what people wrote and fed into its word counter to train AI. Whoops. So I don't think that deal exists anymore. Plus, Scrivener isn't like using Excel instead of a calculator. It's like using Access instead of counting on one hand. It's like dropping a nuke to kill an ant. Super overkill. Or I could use Neo, and annoy my wife. (The writing tool made with Claude.) But instead, I pay $6 a month for an anti-AI writing tool, because I'm too fancy to use TextEdit (read: Notepad if you're more familiar with Windows).
Anyway, I don't want someone looking at this — multiple paragraphs, em dashes, rich-text formatting, proper use of symbols... and think I'm AI. Because that just really defeats the purpose of communicating with people online. I'm not gonna show my government ID. I'm not going to ask for yours/theirs. People just gotta trust each other, because if we don't... the robots have won.
I really dont think "the line" is going to come when windows is ai written. It is half vibe coded now and it is awful. Ive used windows for 30 years, and im in the middle of moving to linux because it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Wow, that's a lot to unpack but two things:
Linux runs on Intel Macs. After 2019, Apple transitioned to Apple Silicon (basically made in-house). There is work being done on porting Linux to it. I heard about one that works on the M3 specifically. Even before the Apple Silicon move, Apple had another chip Linux couldn't really work with. Before that chip, though, yes — Intel Macs supported Linux just fine, as well as Windows. Because they used the same parts as PCs.
I wouldn't trust custom firmware on my phone that was made by AI. Then again, maybe AI did a lot of the official firmware. Who knows.
You are thinking of Asahi Linux, although it's a project with multiple components and other distributions often take some of the components to add support for the Macs as well. Runs great on M1 and M2, currently GPU broken on M3. One person who was seemingly the only one to fully understand the GPUs and kept fucking with them day and night retired for whatever reason, last I've heard (don't quote me on that), that's probably why.
No LLM code is allowed in Asahi. There's a fork that allows AI and it's not great. Although Linus Torvalds himself decided to allow a little bit of AI through, and allowed a new programming language that itself allows a lot of AI, that's sad. Anyways, OpenBSD also have some very basic support for M1 and M2, although it's for computer nerds and certainly not for writers.
False. I mean, technically the truth, Linux couldn't work with the computers, back when the computers literally just started getting sold. Linux runs fine, and all the major BSDs run fine too, although Mesa3D (the super mega universal GPU driver project) removed most of the GPUs that these computers came with after a while, so only 2D is accelerated for some sufficiently oldskool programs. In fact, there's a big chance that if you grab a random Unix workstation from the 90s, it will run a modern OS but probably without GPU acceleration. A GPU is often more complex than the rest of the computer combined.