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Essay talk:Lynching songs

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Written by AI?[edit]

I put several passages from this "essay" into an AI writing checker, and they all came back that this was written by AI. I understand those tools aren't 100% accurate but the consistency of the results for every different part of the essay is alarming. If this is AI-generated, it would appear to violate CS. Plutocow (talk) 03:40, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

@DeleteRacism Was this written by AI? Spud (talk) 10:03, 21 July 2024 (UTC)
@Plutocow I think I'll give the page's creator a week to respond (until 28 July 2024). If there's no response by then, I'll nominate the page for deletion on the grounds that it probably is AI-generated and thus against our recently updated community standards. Spud (talk) 09:53, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
It looks like the listed books exist, at least from my sampling of the first five listed. Usually programs like ChatGPT make up nonexistent books so that would have been a tell. Chillpilled (talk) 10:52, 22 July 2024 (UTC)
The problem is there is zero citations linking the books to any quote in the essay. Using those handy dandy pirate rascals at Z-Library, I pulled up two of the books - At the Hands of Persons Unknown and The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. I could not find a reference to these "lynching songs" in any of them. Admittedly, I just used simple keyword searches, but the later book, as advertised, focuses on Abraham Lincoln and doesn't even go past Reconstruction, so why is this even a relevant source? (Generally speaking, lynchings did not occur until after the Reconstruction era.) Also, "lynching songs" is implied to be "pro-lynching songs"; it seems from Google queries that many papers refer to the term "lynching song" as anti-lynching songs like Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit".Wikipedia So it's strange not to mention this if this is the case.
So personally, I smell a wee bit of bullshit here. BobJohnson (talk) 00:11, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

This is my own research. I do not believe any AI would produce this – I mean, what prompt do you give ChatGPT to get it to generate this text? Or even a text broadly resembling it? I challenge you to come up with one. And you cannot trust any "AI writing checker". DeleteRacism (talk) 08:30, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Remember when those New York lawyers used ChatGPT to write their briefs for them, and it cited fake cases? Got them sanctioned by the way. Carthage (talk) 08:36, 25 July 2024 (UTC)
It is indeed a problematic page, particularly because of the unlinked text and citations, as BobJohnson says. It is however in Essayspace, so it is the writer's burden, and Essayspace has fewer requirements than Mainspace. I did confirm that at least one of the cited references mentions songs set around lynchings, though none specificially: Lynching and Spectacle, pages 2 and 263. The RW ban on AI-generated text and images, and that is only for examples on an AI-related page. I ran the text through 5 different AI detectors, and all reported high levels of AI-generated text (5 detectors may not be meaningful because they may all be using the same methodology, though one had a higher percentage than the others). Samples of mainspace pages, Saloon text and other essays that I tried reported none. Bongolian (talk) 18:37, 25 July 2024 (UTC)