Taxi Driver Online

Never really bothered with the AI stuff and chatbots, etc. But I've had my suspicions about certain trade sites I visit regularly in terms of authorship, but in my naivety had never considered the possible AI link

(Although I do recall some sort of international news site that was cropping up on newsfeeds and the like a couple of years ago, and the AI angle stood out like a sore thumb, and which I posted on here quite a few times. But which seems to have completely disappeared off the radar screen, fortunately...)

But it's just in the last few weeks that I've even considered AI as a possible explanation, and it's all falling into place now. Maybe

Anyway, I fed a news article from a certain news site through something called GPTZero, which is apparently some kind of AI detector tool

https://gptzero.me/

(Other AI detector tools are available...)

And the results were as follows:



I also tried an email I sent to the council recently about our fare review stuff, and the result was:




Of course, the results aren't definitive, so maybe the first result isn't accurate. But I can guarantee the second result is 100% accurate, and that my ramblings are 100% human and 0% AI generated

Equally, that's not to say that AI can't be a useful writing tool, and maybe my writing style is such that it couldn't possibly be anything other than generated by a human

But there's just a certain, er, vibe or feel about a lot the newer news stuff that's a tad, er, whatever...

Sort of thing that's difficult to pin-down, or even describe properly. But my BS detector is increasingly seeing it all the time

Anyway, I doubt ChatGPT would replicate my over-use of smilies

That's something AI would say wouldn't it

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

huge numbers of businesses have been jumping on the LLM bandwagon and many subsequently regretting it andI suspect media sites are included so i'm not surprised.

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

The future of publishing/news will be driven by AI, or AI copying/adapting the work of the few remaining human journalists.

As SW alludes to, it's becoming noticeable in the taxi/PH press.

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IDFIMH

The AI detector tool I linked to above only seems to allow a couple of searches before it requires some sort of registration, which I generally can't be bothered with, and others I've tried seem to be much the same in that regard.

But this one seems to allow unlimited attempts...

https://aidetector.com/

I fed in 413 words (one side of A4) I'd drafted on trade-related stuff, and in fact it came up with a similar AI stat as the two Taxi Point pieces I tried this weekend - 30% AI detected

But since I know that it was just done on the 22-year-old version of Word I use for a bit of basic word processing (Microsoft Word 2003, to be precise), and that the extent of the AI is really just a bit of basic spellchecking, then I can confirm that the AI input is actually miniscule, and very primitive by today's standards.

And I like the narrative analysis it provided, and thus can recommend the site to anyone

The lesson to be learned is the odd gramatical mistake is a human trait. Grammatical perfection makes you a robot !

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

Check out some of the photos here - they've been partly anonymised to hide the plate details etc. But pretty obvious that's just a pretence, and the intention is to actually identify the vehicle - why bother with the pretence?

Anyway, have a scroll down a bit, and there are lots of fake photos of spotchecks and the like. They're pretty obvious fakes, in my opinion at least, but I suspect some dafties will think they're real

To be fair, they're marked AI or ChatGPT - who'd have guessed?

But that sort of thing is very worrying. A lot of videos and the like floating around online are so realistic it's genuinely difficult to tell. And they'll get even more realistic in time...

https://www.facebook.com/DriverMatty/photos

That site is the true AI leader in taxi/PH press.

Not sure that's anything to shout about though.

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IDFIMH

Here's DM's recent 'commentary' on the Edinburgh case of the HCD who struck a pedestrian after going through a red light.

It's got a very formulaic style and structure, in fact fairly similar to many articles on Taxi Point.

For example, 'likely to spark debate', 'highlights the wider issue' and the final sentence: 'As pressure mounts on the taxi and private hire sector to improve standards and safety, transparency and consistency in licensing outcomes will remain under close scrutiny.'

Not that there's anything wrong with it all, and the point is well made. And everyone has their own formulaic approach to stuff like that, and their own writing style, traits, and shortcomings

And if you're writing news and commentary stuff like those guys are doing all the time, then of necessity you're going to be repeating certain arguments, structures and cliches in a lot of stuff...been there, done that

Problem is, when reading it a lot of it gives off a distinctly artificial writing construction and feel, and it all looks a bit over-polished. (And the kind of thing that's a bit easier to see than actually describe in words )

...and this is another interesting DM commentary this week on another Edinburgh incident - the PHD at the airport who didn't seem too familiar with his car's controls

This seems a bit more like natural writing. Or, at least, the first paragraph does...