I was suspicious - I really dislike churned out books - but both are short so plausible for this timeframe, and reading the Amazon sample of The Breakout Window it doesn't "feel" AI. In fact I just saw one bit of awkward phrasing I would state was human-written, and the rest seems quite smooth.

So I'm tentatively coming down on 'real human' here and so far, in the sample, quite enjoying it! Light scifi / thriller so far.

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catigula 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I strongly disagree. I kept seeing patterns like this (an actual quote from the sample):

>Vertex wasn't stimulating the global economy. It was compressing itself.

Another quote from the sample:

>It wasn't a malfunction. It was a handshake.

This is textbook AI writing.

	▲	vintagedave an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's true. But OpenAI (which is what generates that style text) has other tells I don't see. No em-dashes. No triples (not X, but a, b, c). The short, pithy sentence pair can, plausibly, be human. It was in many thrillers before AI appeared, and if you write thrillers and have presumably read many, it may seem natural. Thing is, you are right, but it is plausibly human. The bit I spotted was, > ...down in the rack room. "We are seeing a weird harmonic in the cooling loop." First-time writers write stilted dialog, especially avoiding contractions. I think an AI could be smoother than that. Also, Steven, if you are reading, I apologise if this sounds critical. I'm sure as a writer you are, or will be, used to it - criticism is part of literature, or even just learning - but still. I had tried to avoid writing the bit I thought was human because it was negatively human :) As I noted above, I enjoyed what I read of the Amazon preview.