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Which of these answers was written by AI?

January 10, 2023 Tools, Words on the page, Writing Process

GPTZero is a new service created by Edward Tian designed to sniff out AI-generated text.

I’m dubious, in part because I’m not sure I could reliably spot the differences between sentences assembled by humans versus machines. But maybe that’s just my human bias.

As an experiment, I decided to run a quick, not-at-all-scientific test. I asked ChatGPT to “write three paragraphs explaining what a manager does for screenwriters.” I also looked up the answer for “What does a manager do?” on screenwriting.io.

Here are the two responses, one written by a human1, the other by an AI. See if you can spot which is which.

SAMPLE A

In brief, a manager manages your career.

This includes tangible acts, like setting up meetings, giving notes and feedback, and assisting with deal negotiation, as well as the more abstract, like helping steer your career’s direction.

Managers, unlike agents, are not required to be licensed by the state. They usually have fewer clients than agents, and often take more personal and less business-focused roles in their clients’ careers. Managers, are allowed to take producer credits on their clients movies, which agents are not.

Like agents, a manager typically receives 10% of a client’s earnings. A manager should never ask for an upfront or flat fee.

SAMPLE B

A manager for a screenwriter plays a vital role in helping the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, as well as helping the writer shape their existing ideas into marketable concepts. This often involves providing feedback and suggestions to help improve the story and make it more appealing to potential buyers.

Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things, such as identifying potential buyers and pitching the writer’s work to them. They can also help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. In addition, they can help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, such as agents, producers, and studio executives.

Finally, a manager can also help screenwriters with their long-term career goals by helping them identify opportunities for growth and advancement. This might include working on larger projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand to increase their visibility and credibility in the industry. Overall, a manager plays a critical role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.

For each answer, GPTZero measured the text’s Perplexity — the randomness of the text — across several ranges.

Total Average Highest
Sample A 41 136 219
Sample B 11 36 49

That 219 is an example of “Burstiness,” which GPTZero defines as “spikes in perplexity.” For Sample A, the opening sentence has a perplexity of 219, whereas highest perplexity in Sample B is just 49.

That’s the tell, apparently.

Some human written sentences can have low perplexities, but there is bound to be spikes in perplexity as the human continues writing. Contrastingly, perplexity is uniformly distributed and constantly low for machine generated texts.

After crunching the numbers, GPTZero renders its verdict.

SAMPLE A (score 66.44): Your text is likely human generated!

SAMPLE B (score 9.93): Your text is most likely to be AI generated!

On both counts, GPTZero got it correct.

But how hard would it be to fool the system? I spent two minutes editing the AI-generated version into the following:

Sample C

Managers can play a vital role for screenwriters. Basically, they help the writer navigate the film and television industry. They can assist with finding and developing new ideas, or shaping their existing ideas. They provide feedback and suggestions.

Managers also help screenwriters with the business side of things: who the buyers are and how to pitch to them. They can help negotiate deals and contracts, as well as manage any legal issues that may arise. They help the writer navigate the many different players in the industry, including as agents, producers, and studio executives.

Good managers think about screenwriters’ long-term career goals. This might include working on bigger (or smaller!) projects, transitioning to other forms of media, or developing a personal brand. Overall, a manager can play an important role in helping a screenwriter achieve success in the competitive film and television industry.

Total Average Highest
Sample A 41 136 219
Sample B 11 36 49
Sample C 19 106 439

The verdict:

SAMPLE C (score 118.77): Your text is likely human generated!

Some takeaways

  • The ChatGPT answer was well-written and potentially helpful for someone who didn’t know anything about managers.
  • GPTZero is looking for patterns a human likely wouldn’t notice, which makes sense. But an AI model trained to provide responses with high perplexity and burstiness would likely evade detection. It’s interesting to see this arms race play out, because adversarial networks are already a fundamental tool in AI.
  • It’s currently very easy to fool GPTZero with just minimal rewriting. If this tool meant to detect AI-generated term papers, students will quickly learn how to evade it.
  1. Stuart Friedel wrote most of the early screenwriting.io answers. ↩

The Free Stuff

August 11, 2022 Apps, Bronson, Highland, Meta, News, Software, Tools, Weekend Read, Writer Emergency Pack

My friend Nima recently pointed out that most of the stuff our company makes is free.

That’s probably not a great business model, but it’s always been our culture. We only charge for those things that have significant ongoing costs — like upkeep and hosting — or a per-unit cost to produce.

If you’re a writer, here are the things we offer at absolutely no cost. As in free.

johnaugust.com

This blog has been running since 2003. Nearly all of its 1,500 posts are screenwriting advice. The Explore tab on the right is a good way to get started looking through the archives. For example, you might start with the 129 articles on formatting.

Scriptnotes

Craig Mazin and I have been recording this weekly screenwriting podcast for over ten years. It’s always been free, with no ads whatsoever. The most recent 20 episodes are available in every podcast player. Back episodes are available to Scriptnotes Premium members, or can be purchased in 50-episode “seasons.”

Inneresting

Chris Csont edits this weekly newsletter, which serves as a good companion to Scriptnotes. Every Friday, it has links to things about writing, centering on a given theme. It’s a Substack, but completely free.

Highland 2

For years, I’ve written all my scripts and novels in this terrific app our company makes. It’s a free download on the Mac App Store. The Standard edition is fully functional, with no time limits. Students can receive the enhanced Pro edition through our student license program.

Courier Prime

English-language screenplays are written in Courier, but not all Couriers are alike. Many are too thin, and the italics are ugly. So we commissioned a new typeface called Courier Prime. It’s Courier, but better. Since it’s free and open licensed, you can use it through Google Fonts and similar services.

Weekend Read

Reading a screenplay on an iPhone is a pain in the ass — unless you use Weekend Read. It melts down screenplay PDFs so they format properly on smaller screens. Weekend Read also has an extensive library of older scripts, including many award nominees. It’s free on the App Store.

The Library

The Library has most of the scripts I’ve written, and hosts a few other writers’ work as well. For several projects, I’ve included treatments, pitches, outlines and additional material.

Screenwriting.io

While johnaugust.com offers detailed articles on various topics, screenwriting.io answers really basic questions about film and TV writing. If you’re Googling, “how many acts does a TV show have?” we want to give you the answer with no cruft or bullshit.

100 Most Frequently Asked Questions about Screenwriting

We gathered the 100 most frequently searched-for entries on screenwriting.io in this handy 85-page PDF.

Launch

I recorded this seven-episode podcast series about the pitch, sale, writing and production of my first Arlo Finch book. If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, you’ll want to check it out. Free wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Paid Stuff

Given all the free stuff we put out, how does our company make money? We sell things.

Highland 2 Pro

Highland 2 Standard Edition is free, but most users choose to upgrade to Pro for its added features: revision mode, priority email support, extra templates, custom themes, and watermark-free PDFs. It’s an in-app purchase, $39 USD.1

Writer Emergency Pack

Writer Emergency Pack began its life as a Kickstarter, and is now one of the most popular gifts for writers of all ages. Available through our store and Amazon.

Bronson Watermarker PDF

Bronson is the app I needed when watermarking scripts for a Broadway reading. Now it’s become the default watermarking app in Hollywood. It’s $20 on the Mac App Store.

T-shirts and hoodies

We used to print and ship our own t-shirts, but we now sell them through Cotton Bureau. We put out a new Scriptnotes shirt every year. It’s definitely not a profit center, but it’s fun seeing merch out in the wild.

Weekend Read Unlocked

Users can unlock their expanded library for $10 USD.

Scriptnotes Premium

The Scriptnotes podcast runs out of a separate LLC from our software business. Premium subscriptions pay for the salaries of our producer, editor and transcriptionist, along with hosting and management fees. Craig and I don’t make a cent off it.

  1. Prices may change. Also note that Apple sets international pricing, so some apps cost a little more or a little less in some countries. ↩

Getting the Razer Tartarus Pro keyboard to work with macOS Catalina and beyond

November 7, 2020 Geek Alert, How-To, Tools

As I’ve written before, I use this weird keyboard which has helped greatly with my carpal tunnel issues.

While this odd keyboard is great for normal typing, certain key combinations are unwieldy. So for the past decade I’ve used an external gaming keypad to the left of my keyboard with custom macros set up for some common commands:

  • Select All
  • Undo
  • Copy
  • Cut
  • Paste
  • Paste and Match Style
  • Pasteboard History (which is part of Better Touch Tool)

When my beloved Logitech keypad crapped out, I switched to the well-reviewed Razer Tartarus Pro. It’s nicely built! Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer drivers for the current macOS.

After a lot of googling, I’ve cobbled together a solution. So in the interest of sharing what I’ve learned — and remembering how I got this to work in the first place — let me walk through the steps.

Note that this doesn’t do half of what a proper driver could accomplish, particularly for gaming. So please, Razer, make one! But if you want to use a gaming pad like the Tartarus Pro for keyboard shortcuts, this does the trick.

How to make the Tartarus Pro work on macOS Catalina

It’s important to understand that macOS sees the Tartarus Pro as a plain old keyboard. So if you plug it in and hit the 08 key, you’ll see it type a ‘w’.

Luckily, there’s software that can recognize that and do something useful instead.

Better Touch Tool is best known for getting random mice and trackpads to work, but it does a nice job on keyboards as well. (I’m using the 3.5 Alpha version.)

better touch tool setup

Let’s look at the Select All shortcut. You’ll notice the “Assigned Action” is ⌘A. Now direct your attention to the righthand sidebar. That’s where all the real work happens.

1) For the moment, ignore the “Click here to record a shortcut” section. We’ll come back to that.

2) You want the shortcut Enabled, so check the box.

3) You should put a note in this field for clarity.

4) The HUD overlay is surprisingly helpful. It shows what’s happening, like that you just hit “copy.” I find the Title text to be too large, so I use the Subtitle instead.

HUD display shows Copy

5) For Trigger Conditions, you want to choose “Works on keyboards with the same type as used for recording.” Yes, this is a ridiculously long label.

6) You want it to Trigger on Key Down.

7) You don’t want it to repeat.

You’ll do these steps for each key on the gaming keypad you want to remap. Here’s my setup.

keyboard photo

I also set key 20, the spacebar, to Undo.

In theory, you’re done! For a few weeks, this worked great. And then it started having issues. When encountering password fields, my normal keyboard would start triggering keyboard shortcuts. I had to restart Better Touch Tool multiple times per day.

Basically, the app kept getting my normal weird keyboard confused with my special weird gaming keypad. I needed to call in the big guns.

Enter Karabiner

I’d long heard of Karabiner Elements, a public domain app that can remap any key and do really impressive things. But it’s intimidating as hell.

Here’s what I wanted Karabiner to do: remap the keys of the Tartarus Pro to seldom-used keystrokes so I could then set those as triggers for Better Touch Tool.

Looking through their user forums, I couldn’t find any perfect matches for this use case, but luckily @bradcurtis had built a set of custom mappings (a “complex modification” in Karabiner speak) for a similar purpose.

Installing them is odd. Here’s how you do it.

  1. Install Karabiner-Elements. You’ll have to give it a ton of permissions in System Preferences.

  2. In Karabiner-Elements Preferences, choose Complex Modications and then Add Rule.

  3. On the next screen, choose “Import More Rules from the internet.”

  4. Either search for “Tartarus” or follow this link

  5. Choose the Import button. It’ll ask you whether you want to open the link in Karabiner-Elements. You do.

  6. Click the button to “Enable All”

Karabiner setup

If you have the Tartarus v2 like @bradcurtis, you’re done! All of the keys should be mapped to new, less-common keystrokes. But if you have the Tartarus Pro like I do, you need to modify the settings you just imported to change the product ID. This is where it gets frustratingly user-hostile, because it requires you to modify a JSON file in an external editor.

  1. Navigate to ~/.config/karabiner/karabiner.json — the easiest way to do this is by choosing Go > Go to Folder… in the Finder.

  2. Open this file in a plain text editor (I use TextMate).

  3. Find and replace 555 (the product ID for the v2) with 580 (the product ID for the Pro).1

  4. Save this file and restart Karabiner-Elements.

After doing this, and mapping these new keystrokes to Better Touch Tool, I’m back up to full speed.2

Again, almost no one on Earth will never need or want to do any of this. But if you’re the one person who needs this solution, I hope it helps. Please pay it forward by documenting something you’ve discovered.

  1. If you’re looking for a different product ID, open the Event Viewer in Karabiner-Elements and choose Devices. ↩
  2. I added one additonal modification, converting key 20 (which is coded as “spacebar”) to Left_Shift-Left_Option-s. ↩

A DM’s guide to Roll20

September 5, 2020 Geek Alert, Software, Tools

Since the start of the pandemic, our regular D&D game — which has always been in person — has shifted to online. We use Zoom to chat, and Roll20 to simulate the tabletop.

I’m comfortable using Roll20 as a player, but when it came time to begin planning my own campaign as a DM, I was stumped. The interface is wildly confusing, and the built-in tutorials aren’t up to the task.

Craig offered to walk me through the process of setting up and running a game. We recorded the whole thing, which is now available as five videos.

If you’re considering DMing a game in Roll20, I strongly suggest you start here. Craig’s a good teacher.

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