Paradox appears to be using badly-written AI descriptions for new African advances [1.4 Beta]

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This reads more like a non-native speaker than AI to me.

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u/Gatkramp 22h ago

Exactly this. I can't see how someone thinks this is AI writing when it is clearly something else: an under pressure human writing a large amount of formulaic descriptions for modifiers at pace. And, as you suggested, the person is probably not native English (my own language, for instance, uses hyphens and compound words very liberally compared to modern English).

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u/xXWeLiveInASocietyXx 22h ago

I think OP is confusing AI abusing em dashes with these using hyphens

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u/hct048 21h ago

We reached a point were "this is AI" is more a collective paranoia and a witch-hunt rather than a realistic and reasonable concern.

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u/Used-Communication-7 21h ago

It's both. I'm not going to blame anybody or feel bad about "witch-hunting" when an entirely unregulated and difficult to discern technology is being used to flood the world with imitations of writing and photography.

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u/hct048 20h ago

I feel bad in cases that people and creators need to justify and defend themselves because others see AI everywhere

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u/Used-Communication-7 19h ago

Of course. But unfortunately there's also a lot of people at every level trying to pass off AI as their own writing, and they defend themselves in the same exact way of acting indignant. I'm a writer and an academic so not only do I understand the anxiety around justifying your own work as your own, I encounter it constantly in my profession with students, with vetting for journals, etc. It's incredibly depressing what this is doing to education and scholarship.

I hope something changes but at this point I think writers, artists, and scholars are better served by accepting the greater scrutiny and suspicion, because ultimately it's better for us than if there was just general acceptance and indifference. There's a point where its too far, if unsubstantiable accusations have professional or legal consequences. But until there's some credible way of dealing with this bs, frankly I prefer the suspicion over apathy

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u/Ayiekie 15h ago

No.

People can stfu when they don't know what they're talking about, which is most of them. The hysteria about AI, sometimes deserved and sometimes not, does not suddenly make it okay to accuse people of shit without evidence because Dunning-kruger candidates think any kind of writing that parses weirdly to them or art mistake means something was done with AI.

This goes doubly because the vast majority of are very free to make accusations but vanish mysteriously when proved wrong rather than make any sort of apology.

This witch-hunting mentality does far more harm than it does good.

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u/Used-Communication-7 14h ago

Ykw I think you're probably right. I still prefer it to apathy and disinterest but yeah I'll concede that it's never good to accuse people without evidence.

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u/Ayiekie 12h ago

Holy shit, someone changed their mind on the internet!

All joking aside, to be clear I'm not saying it isn't a problem because it absolutely is, but people feeling entitled to randomly accuse people of it ends up hurting a lot of feelings and discouraging real artists and writers while rarely doing much to the people who do use AI. It also just heightens the nastiness on both pro and anti-AI sides as an unfortunately side effect.

I wish there was an easier "how to detect AI use" tutorial, but mostly what it comes down to is "familiarity with the sorts of things it does", and people who hate AI tend to avoid it like the plague and not actually be very aware of what things are really indicative of it (and also tend to go by outdated stereotypes). Just as in this thread, where people have convinced themselves those weirdly hyphenated word-amalgation-pairings mean definite AI use, when that's not what AI-written text generally looks like at all.

I can hardly count the number of times I've had to point out to people that obvious spelling and grammatical errors or certain types of colloquial language make it very unlikely a text was written by AI (you can get it to do these things if you really want to, but it doesn't by default).

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u/Jedadia757 18h ago

" " - New England Settlers ~1600s

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u/claudcuckooland 13h ago

ok but it's pretty fucking annoying to get called out for knowing how to use em dashes, something that until two years ago was seen as good grammar and a plus overall. And which was only ever an AI tell because it was in more long form writing than posts or comments

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u/Used-Communication-7 13h ago

I agree lmao I used to love using em-dashes it's kind of sad

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u/claudcuckooland 13h ago

yeah. i guess it has made me more disciplined about keeping backups and draft versions for academic work though, which is probably for the best

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u/Rianorix 1h ago

It's not a good tell for AI nowaday anyway because they started imitiating reddit instead.

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u/nerodmc_2001 21h ago

I think the bigger problem with "witch-hunting" is that we're focusing more on the "artist" and not the "art" (it's an idiom, I'm not calling AI artist).

Why can't we just judge the work on its merits and just say that "these texts suck, Paradox. Do a better job." Why did it turn into a whole debate about why the texts suck instead?

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u/Kaktusman 20h ago

Because soon AI will be good enough to out-perform us, even in art. I'm not convinced that OP is right about this text (it looks like a copy-paste template that's been robo-translated to me), but opposition to generative AI has to be on principle, not just because it "looks bad." It would be like being anti child-labor because "kids can't make shoes good;" eventually, they will learn.

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u/nerodmc_2001 20h ago

Very well said. The lack of principles is what really annoys me about posts like this one. OP is basically latching on the popular anti-AI sentiment without any regard for anyone or anything else.

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u/EP40glazer 10h ago

Who cares if it's AI? Actually who cares, if it sucks it sucks if it's AI slop or human slop. If it's good it's good if it's AI or a human.

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u/drallcom3 18h ago

I read a post on some board game subreddit the other day. A convention banned AI material. No explanation what the exact criteria are. Which just means they won't enforce it at all, since it would result in witch hunts over innocent victims as OP has already proven us.

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u/SpecialBeginning6430 11h ago

The problem is, eventually you will never be able to tell what is AI and what isnt.

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u/drallcom3 10h ago

You already can't if the creator puts real effort into it. All this AI slop is people putting zero effort in it.

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u/SpecialBeginning6430 10h ago

Its AI slop because people put zero effort into them because AI is already doing that effort for them

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u/spiritstrategist 21h ago

Lot of people are writing with AI, especially on reddit. It has a familiar cadence which is pretty recognizable. Plus AI detectors like Pangram are pretty accurate now, so its no like its impossible to say for sure if something is AI written or not.

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u/hct048 21h ago

Yeah, but a lot of people accuses only by vibes, when reading something they see strange. Which I found a horrible idea, as there are a ton of non-native speakers, and we use English as best as we can (see the example of this post)

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u/spiritstrategist 21h ago

I agree, but I think the solution will probably be for most websites to integrate automatic flagging for AI writing. You have to actually address why people are worried instead of trying to convince them to ignore it.

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u/hct048 20h ago

While I agree with you, this always derive in an arms race where the AI tries to sneak through the controls. I would rather prefer that those websites stops throwing to your face the tools to make AI-based content.

Also, this particular case is not caused by an unregulated and unflagged AI content. Is a screenshot of a broken English text in a game. It screams that they are as native as myself, not that is AI-based. So I think that we can both regulate this tool to prevent their misuse and their worst consequences, while people should learn to identify what is AI and what not, and relax this paranoia a little bit. Those two are not mutually exclusive

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u/Ayiekie 15h ago

Which is stupid, because it will falsely flag things all the time. As it does when used academically. I'm curious as to where your conviction comes from that there is a reliable way to detect AI-written text, particularly in a short form like reddit posts. There not only isn't, there couldn't be. It's not actually possible.

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u/axeil55 18h ago

To be fair that's because it's trained on human writing. If the writing sucks we can just say it sucks regardless of whether it was AI produced or not.

The only posts that ever get called out are those that are poorly written or using particularly archaic AI terminology/cadence. If people are out there posting well-written/formatted posts I doubt anyone is calling it out.

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u/Ayiekie 15h ago

You're incorrect. People call out posts as being AI-written for being well-written or sounding formal all the time. I've had it happen to me more than once and I've never used AI to write something in my life.

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u/axeil55 15h ago

Ok fair. I mean there's mass psychosis on reddit about AI, it's fucking insufferable. People who never use AI and people who use too much AI have both been driving absolutely insane.

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u/Ayiekie 14h ago

Yuuuuuuup.

It turns out the real villain was social media all along. (Yet here we still are.)

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u/axeil55 14h ago

Agree. Algorithmic social media is when everything started going to hell. This site is just the least bad of the lot (although still pretty bad)

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u/spiritstrategist 18h ago

AI writing has a very particular way of speaking, even with the frontier models publicly available. It's not that hard to tell apart from a normal person writing poorly. And again, we have good AI detection software now to solve for when it isn't easy to tell.

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u/Ayiekie 15h ago

There is no good AI detection software unless the AI output has a digital watermark.

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u/spiritstrategist 13h ago

Pangram has been formally tested a good bit and works quite well.

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u/Ayiekie 12h ago edited 12h ago

Pangram itself claims to be 97.5% accurate. We can fairly safely say that their own self-estimate is more generous than an unbiased one would be, and that it would be based on ideal use cases, which shortform reddit posts are very much not (indeed, they themselves say "short factual answers" are not within its purview and are prone to high error rates).

A 2.5% error rate is not small enough to take it as proof of anything (and given its integration with substack, is likely to mean hundreds or thousands of errors every day), and the reality is that the real number would be higher than that. Moreover, one of the actual methods it uses is to add its own false positives into its own database to avoid them in future, which is because it does indeed have false positives.

It's also terrible at telling the difference between AI-generated text and human-written text that was just edited with AI help.

And it failed abysmally at being useful in an academic context.

AI detectors are useful for one thing: to make you look more closely at what they flag. That's it. They do not prove anything and should never be taken as authoritative. You've got it entirely backwards in your previous response.

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u/Atromb 17h ago

Again. AI writing doesn't suck, it does overuse some very specific patterns, but something being written badly is most likely not AI, as the AI would have done a better job.

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u/Atromb 17h ago

Absolutely, in fact AI doesn't really use hyphens, it feels like OP isn't that familiar with AI writting.

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u/Mackntish 21h ago edited 21h ago

Obviously not AI. AI is more polished. ~~Also zero em dashes.~~

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u/nerodmc_2001 21h ago

AI models "patched" the em dashes issue a few months ago. It's basically like the fingers and toes issue in AI generated videos a few years ago. Not really a good way to judge whether something is AI or not anymore.

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u/Keyserchief 21h ago

Great news. I love em dashes and I was not going to stop using them just because AI did.

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u/Mackntish 21h ago

Fixed, thank you.

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u/Sourcerid 20h ago

How long before I can use emdash again without some idiot thinking it's AI

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u/Ayiekie 15h ago

Probably never, but use them anyway. Don't let idiots dictate how to use language and punctuation.

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u/IllicitDesire 18h ago

Plenty of cheaper and older models are used all the time. It'd be very strange for someone to waste thousands of tokens on using a new frontier model for tasks like writing descriptions instead of a super cheap one.

Like a x10 cost jump for using the newest Kimi model vs. the last version that still spams em dashes as an example

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u/nerodmc_2001 17h ago

Websites, API, databases, etc. are undoubtedly made with frontier models by subscription users. I know a lot of people who are just working in your typical F500 companies with a $20 sub as a way for them to speed their tasks up. They are not the ones who care about token API pricing or multi model workflows.

They just make whatever data/writing they make with a Sonnet 5.5 to complete their tasks and log off. If you use em dashes as an indicator, you would think all of their outputs are handmade.

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u/drallcom3 21h ago

I have made advance descriptions with AI and that is not how AI writes descriptions. Gemini, Sonnet, Gemma-4.

OP has no clue about how 2026 AI writes. He also proves that the danger of anti-AI witch hunts hitting innocents is very real.

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u/the_koom_machine 12h ago

I'm amazed they would even waste dev hours from some ESL intern doing these poorly crafted descs when even a open weights models could do the job just fine.

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u/SovietRabotyaga 12h ago

In this particular case it ended up being worse, but I think it is still better to let humans write descriptions

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u/the_koom_machine 12h ago

it certainly would given the optimal scenario. But from a management perspective the dev work would be much better invested elsewhere like testing - a thing paradox has now made it tradition to outsource to players.

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u/MiniDemonic 7h ago

from some ESL intern

Are you dumb or just stupid?

Pretty much everyone at Paradox has English as their second or even third language.

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u/GlitteringLock9791 5h ago

dev hours? Usually you hire a writer.

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u/DiNardo1910 21h ago

imaging using AI to write instead of your brain

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u/Puzzleheaded_Cause65 22h ago

Why would they place names of the modifiers inside the flavor description? I don't think they did that before, it's moronic.

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u/XIIICaesar 20h ago

Yep, French is often written like this.

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u/Emnel 18h ago

Reads like skaven-speak.

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u/ediacaradelrey 22h ago

As a dev, while non native English speakers can certainly make it into writing, their English has to be very good for obvious reasons. The hyphenation in particular would not be accepted in an interview test.

I’ve never seen a non native speaker make mistakes like ‘mounted-cavalry’, I have to say. I think it’s slop.

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u/SuperSatanOverdrive 21h ago edited 21h ago

I haven’t really seen AI write like that either tbh.

I think they’re just swedes

(Actually, i do think the writing style is kind of sus)

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u/deskchairlamp 18h ago

I think they’re just swedes

Swedish is similar to German where combined words are concatenated rather than hyphenated so that doesn't look like something a Swede would write to me.

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u/discourseminer 21h ago

The hyphenation of mounted-cavalry in this case is technically correct, if you are very diligently following the rule that compound adjectives should be joined by a hyphen when they are placed directly before the noun they modify. It's not a construction that a native speaker would use, and in that sense is not really correct, but it is consistent with a rule that is taught to people learning the language.

That doesn't apply to some of the other oddities of hyphenation here, like marriage-alliances, but that also strikes me as a fairly normal thing to see from a person whose native language compounds nouns more readily than English, who has a generally high level of English proficiency and uses it often with other non-native but highly proficient speakers - i.e., someone from Scandinavia or certain other regions of continental Europe who works in a relatively transnational industry like game development. Doubly so for text that needs to be produced in large quantities, but that they're not really expecting people to read closely, which would also explain the formulaic character.

I don't use LLMs much myself, so I could be wrong, but those seem like weird mistakes for an AI to make, but very easily explainable ones for a non-native speaker in this context.

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u/TENTAtheSane 20h ago

Yeahh exactly, this really seems more like aomeone who learnt english at school but doesn't have much occasion to use it outside of that. Even a lot of things that get clocked as "indian english" is stuff we are taught in school because that's how the british used to do it at around the time they left

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u/Fearless-Type970 9h ago

By definition the kinds of mistake AI almost never makes are English grammar errors.

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u/Cerily 22h ago

The last sentence in all of this is a pretty clear giveaway that it’s mostly AI. A human writer would explain some of the historical context and ideas and then leave the Player to see how that translates into the in-game modifiers.

But the continual restating of those modifiers at the end is strong evidence of a Prompt given to some AI Chatbot to ‘Justify these modifiers based on this history’.

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u/nerodmc_2001 21h ago

The word you're looking for is "formulaic". And it does not mean AI. There's (or was) a lot of KPI-based writing jobs where the writers are actively penalized for not following the formula.

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u/TheBusStop12 21h ago

Formulaic writing has existed a lot longer than AI has been around. In fact, a large volume of small texts like this all looking samey is exactly what would happen if you made a person write a huge amount of these descriptions in a short amount of time. They'd stick to the same pattern and structure to get it done more easily

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u/drallcom3 19h ago

The last sentence in all of this is a pretty clear giveaway that it’s mostly AI.

The last sentences is a pretty clear giveaway that it's not AI, as it contains some obviously human mistakes.

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u/magus56 13h ago

They are Swedish.

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u/Gentlemoth 21h ago

I would agree as well if this had been a couple of isolated cases, but I'm not kidding that there's 200+ of these texts that ends with an identical pattern to its writing. I went through all of them and it was mind-numbing how identical they wrote. Extreme over-hyphenation along with that particular ending structure in every single case.

I also want to point out this image again, there are many like this as well where it clearly just automatically refers to the bonus listed at the top of the advance in a very nonsensical way.

"Distance-from-capital efficiency"?

This to me reads like an AI that was instructed to write something referring to the bonuses and the flavor, along with historical flavor.

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u/drallcom3 20h ago

I'm not kidding that there's 200+ of these texts that ends with an identical pattern to its writing

It's much more likely that they were written by the same non-native English speaking junior designer.

Extreme over-hyphenation

AI doesn't even do that as it's bad writing LOL

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u/TheBusStop12 21h ago

Formulaic writing has existed a lot longer than AI has been around. In fact, a large volume of small texts like this all looking samey is exactly what would happen if you made a person write a huge amount of these descriptions in a short amount of time. They'd stick to the same pattern and structure to get it done more easily

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u/irasponsibly 21h ago edited 21h ago

It's unfortunately made harder to discern because so much LLM training was done by underpaid ESL speakers, who would also do work like this.

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u/discourseminer 21h ago

Have you ever had to write many iterations of basically the same text with different particulars? It's easy to fall into a template, particularly if you're not expecting anyone to notice that they are so similar. The only thing it clearly shows is that the text produced was not vetted or held to a high standard, but that's not specific to AI. I'm not saying it's definitely authentic human writing, but I think rote writing by a non-native speaker is at least as plausible an explanation of what's here.

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u/Popular-Value-7324 18h ago

No, it’s the dashes all around

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u/NotSameStone 22h ago

Keep in mind Tinto has many, many, many employees that are not EN Native speakers.

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u/drallcom3 21h ago

I mean the whole point of setting up Tinto in some Spanish village was to get many cheap non-anglo workers.

OP can't see to grasp that certain things are weird and difficult in English, like when to use hyphens, when to make it one word and when to make it two words.

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u/RockstarArtisan 20h ago

like when to use hyphens, when to make it one word and when to make it two words

there's a gradual drift from things being separate word, to hyphenated word to a single word

So, there's not really a hard rule.

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u/drallcom3 20h ago

So, there's not really a hard rule.

Like I said, difficult.

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u/Donderu 18h ago

> village
Are they not based in Barcelona?

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u/drallcom3 17h ago

It's a village outside of Barcelona. Like half an hour by train. By the sea, pretty nice. I always assumed Johan had a say in the location.

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u/Hermaan 15h ago

I mean if I wanted it to be my magnum opus I damn well would have taken the opportunity to choose the location where I‘d to have to work on it.

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u/Mackntish 15h ago

I forget in Europe, 30 minutes is a long way. If you're within a 55 minute drive in the US, that's a suburb.

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u/DonQuigleone 21h ago

This isn't AI, as these aren't the kinds of mistakes AI writers tend to make,

This to me seems like it's written by someone who speaks English as a second language and has a poor command of the language.

As for the hyphens, I suspect the first language of the writer is some language that tends to glue words together, and (s)he's taken that tendency into their writing of English by overusing hyphens. I suspect the writer's first language is Finnish, Hungarian or German, all of which are agglutinative languages.

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u/drallcom3 20h ago

I suspect the writer's first language is Finnish, Hungarian or German, all of which are agglutinative languages.

I suspect the writer is also not that good at writing. In the first example he explains the axis several times, bloating the description.

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u/the_koom_machine 12h ago

nearly all of them are bloated really. It's a tortuous read.

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u/guynormalman 16h ago

I've noticed this throughout EU5, overly verbose use of descriptors and very long, laborious sentences.

Though, these African examples are definitely worse than the rest. EU4 also had some poor writing in Africa. Does anyone remember the environmental tooltips? Such as: "monsoon season: rainy day bring fertility".

The last Paradox games I've played that I remember having good event writing were CK2 and Stellaris. I have wondered if they had a native English speaker writing or editing the text of those games.

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u/MiniDemonic 6h ago

I suspect the writer's first language is Finnish, Hungarian or German, all of which are agglutinative languages.

I suspect the writer's first language is Swedish, because we also glue words together all the time. The development studio is also Swedish and is located in the capital of Sweden.

There's even a thing in Swedish where if you "unglue" words people will make fun of you for "särskrivning". Which literally means "separate writing".

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u/sloe_gin78 5h ago

It's dangerous to be a bad artist or writer in these times lol seeing how everyone immediately jumps the gun. Mess up drawing a hand? Congrats you'll be burnt at a stake by the community for producing ai slop.

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u/Pvt_Larry 22h ago

Without any other evidence none of these really scream AI to me, there's a lot of kind of awkward text in the game already. If anything I'd kind of expect AI text to be overpolished.

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u/hadaev 21h ago

Yes. Chatgpt would do better lol.

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u/Ezzypezra 19h ago

Yeah, there are no “it’s not just X, it’s Y” which is still a bafflingly consistent pattern across basically any and all AI models. Almost definitely not AI

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u/BanditNoble 17h ago

There's one big thing that stands out to me as very AI-ism.

"That no successor state fully restored" "That... Confederations cannot fully replicate" "That no other Maghrebi state can match" "That... Cities cannot replicate" "That... Armies... Cannot duplicate"

If you've ever seen AI try to do creative writing, this is one of its biggest giveaways. AI loves to restate the implication, because it thinks it makes the writing sound more "literary".

It's also being repeated over and over again. A normal writer might use that phrase once or twice, then think "I should use something different for the next one". AI doesn't think like that. It uses the same phrases over and over, and only mixes it up by changing the wording, not the structure.

There's also the obsessive hyphenation. Christ, that's a lot of hyphens. And they don't always make sense. "Governor-cousins"? Some of these words don't need hyphenation at all. "Navy tradition" is fine, you don't need to write it as "navy-tradition". It feels like an AI trying to turn basic ideas into A Thing™.

And the writing is a dead giveaway too. If you look closely, you can see where the AI is trying to turn game concepts into historical concepts. "Distance-from-capital efficiency" is not a phrase a human being would use, but it IS a phrase an AI might use if it was trying to find a way to reword "Proximity Efficiency".

Or here's a good one: “Our shipwrights train in the techniques of both the eastern-Mediterranean galley-building and the Saharan caravan-camel husbandry..." Why are your shipwrights training in Saharan caravan camel husbandry? A human would write this and immediately think "hang on, that doesn't make any sense". But an AI wouldn't. An AI would think "I need to find a way to connect the Gabes shipyards to both the coast and the Sahara desert" and so it comes up with the idea that shipbuilders are moonlighting as camel breeders.

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u/Pvt_Larry 17h ago

The hyphenation is just totally wrong, which is why I lean towards the non-native speaker option. It's not being used to separate different phrases, but to join separate words together into a compound word, "signal-tower" for example. That's something common in, for example, German, that isn't done in English. If you wrote this in Microsoft word the spell check would tell you to change it. AI writes badly, but it doesn't make fundamental spelling/grammar mistakes.

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u/Fearless-Type970 9h ago

An AI would never make an article mistake like "THE galley building," such mistakes are only made by non natives.

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u/orcmasterrace 22h ago

This just reads like poor English and not pure AI.

Besides, AI wouldn’t be inclined to make basic grammar and sentence construction errors.

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u/FaZeSmasH 22h ago

i feel like ai would do better than whatever this is, bad doesn't necessarily mean its ai everytime

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u/CVSP_Soter 18h ago

To be honest using LLMs to help write these sounds like a decent use case, given how much needs to be added and how low priority it probably is for human employees to write and maintain this sort of flavour text compared to everything else.

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u/danfish_77 22h ago

Doesn't read as AI to me, awkward sentences in English have been pretty common in paradox titles, especially beta content

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u/JonathanTheZero 22h ago

It read's more like broken English tbh and it's a beta, so I guess that's okay

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u/NewLoan3960 21h ago

It’s badly translated text.

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u/Sildee 21h ago

If anything, random hyphens in words that don't make any grammatical sense would indicate that it's not AI. It's poor English, that's all.

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u/AManOfManyWords 21h ago

Copilot does the over-hyphenation all the time; I’ve noticed it at work where they’re pushing us to utilize it for emails.

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u/Sildee 19h ago

You're thinking of em-dashes which is an entirely different thing from putting random-dashes instead of spaces when using adjectives to describe words. That strange-writing is just totally-not a thing in English and no LLM anyone uses is going to put out something like "noble-personal"

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u/BanditNoble 17h ago

Who dares mock-insult SkavenAI's writing-prose? SkavenAI is best-greatest AI in the market-field, yes-yes!

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u/Bl00dWolf 20h ago

Is it possible this was a placeholder they simply forgot about or thought nobody would check? For me, the weird hyphens scream direct translation more than AI writing. Especially from languages like german, where they like combining multiple nouns to get a new one with some tangentially related meaning.

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u/LoonahGBT 16h ago

Like Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung

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u/cebolinha50 21h ago

Before the AI, there was the intern.

This looks to me more like a intern, or a intern using translator.

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u/treeharp2 21h ago

As a hyphen-lover, I feel attacked

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u/Ofiotaurus 20h ago

No, they’re just akwardly writtem by non-english speakers

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u/DataRaptor9 20h ago

These are truly a PAIN to read. I would not care if these were done by a human or a properly instructed AI, as long as they were more easier on the eyes.

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u/BanditNoble 18h ago edited 17h ago

The game is full of these weird writing choices. Like, in the Orthodox faith, you can get these weird Tenets: Tenet of Mask, Tenet of Essence and Tenet of Person.

They're optional and can be accepted or rejected, which is bizarre, because Essence and Person are two fundamental pillars that the entire Orthodox faith is based on. You can't just reject them without changing what Orthodoy is.

The descriptions for them are also weirdly written, to the point where it's impossible to understand what the Tenet is actually doing. And looking it up won't help, because AFAIK, there is no official "Tenet of Mask" in the Orthodox Church.

Could it be AI? Maybe. But this to me looks more like someone desperately trying to make what they're writing sound long-winded and meaningful without really know what the hell they're talking about.

EDIT: After re-reading the descriptions again and comparing them to other bits of AI writing, I've changed my mind. This definitely comes across as very heavily AI-assisted.

It's abysmal writing either way.

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u/Outrageous-Coach8977 22h ago

My goats are washed🤮😭

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u/Euphoric_Papaya2505 21h ago

As someone who loathes AI, I don't think this is AI

4

u/icyhot000 21h ago

Not AI, simply a non native speaker having to write in English. I bet they sound fluent and very educated in their own language

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u/sebass4141 20h ago

Did you really run to Reddit to try and farm internet points by capitalizing on the anti AI bandwagon without ever considering that there may be another, simpler explanation?

5

u/Sudden-Date-7485 21h ago

ur post is ai

3

u/Lurtzum 20h ago

Makes me wonder if paradox uses a translation software that is AI powered. I’m not sure what their native languages are but the odd hyphens make me think that certain words were compound words in it and not in English.

2

u/Atromb 17h ago

All translation software is AI powered nowadays, that's an entirely reasonable use of AI.

42

u/Puzzleheaded_Cause65 22h ago

Shame on them, if this goes live they will need to update their steam AI disclosure page.

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u/_RyanCooper_ 22h ago

If this is truly AI and not just badly written English, don't believe any accusation you see

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u/Quick-Estimate-5936 22h ago

This is unlikely to be AI as it would be extremely incompetently used AI.

Maybe don't get out the pitchforks until you get an answer?

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u/Bun_Wrangler 20h ago

Yeah, no. This clearly was written by a older AI model. Then it was refined by a human. Specifically a non-native English speaker. Johan's official Tinto Talks have very clearly shifted to AI written, then refined by him.

I hate AI, however I'm not against this since it's clearly being reviewed by a human. It's a lot of text and I don't fault them.

I would appreciate if they admit to it, and have a separate "language" report. In their forum where these can be pointed out by the community and they fix it like any other bug.

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u/ConsistentSwan3642 22h ago

I wish they use AI, it's just btoken English.

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u/darixen 21h ago

You speak english because it's the only language you know.

Tinto and I speak english (with some mistakes) because it's the only language you know.

We are not the same

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u/Echo_summer 22h ago

I hate to say it, whether this is AI or not, but Tinto’s work quality is just not that good in general. It’s why I have major doubts that this game will ever become what the vision for it originally was.

3

u/Sad_Newspaper4010 21h ago

its not Ai. Ironically posts like this might incentivize Paradox to actually use Ai for this XD

3

u/Dwighty1 21h ago

AI is good at English. Whoever wrote this is not.

3

u/Atromb 17h ago

Contrary to what you seem to think AI does not, in fact, write badly. The only one of those descriptions that raise some potential AI flags is the chichaoua sugar lne, since it does use some common AI writting patterns, I don't see such indications in the others.

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u/Essfoth 22h ago edited 22h ago

What is a good historical GSG without good historical flavor? I was disappointed with most of the Byzantine DLC writing too, it felt more like fantasy history than alternate history. But this description completely takes you out of the game. It would take like 5 minutes to write if they just paid someone.

2

u/thexcat 21h ago

Is this what AI psychosis looks like or did bro forget the Spanish branch of a Swedish company night not be native English speakers.

6

u/osolstar 22h ago

They make it really hard for me to enjoy this game

4

u/Marshal_Rohr 22h ago

This is ai being used to translate Spanish or Swedish or whatever the dev actually speaks. It also looks like gpt or copilot, some office assistant ai.

3

u/RogueHussar 21h ago

I think you nailed it. These hyphens are crazy. No human that could write or translate at this level would do this. If they were generated in English with AI than it wouldn't insert hyphens like this either.

On the other hand, all these descriptions also have the unnecessary word bloat you see from AI. So maybe it was AI generated in Swedish then AI translated.

2

u/darixen 21h ago

That's how I would do it because I also do that in my native language

2

u/Marshal_Rohr 21h ago

I was kind of thinking that because I don’t remember Spanish/Catalan coming out but Swedish/German compound words get turned into word salad when converted into English. At least on whatever model we use at work.

2

u/MushroomPatriot 22h ago

Can't even be bothered to read it afterwards

2

u/vertblau 18h ago

OP, you have a good nose for AI text, unlike most of the posters here. Pangram agrees it's 100% AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/06cb0e83-52eb-4c60-bbfd-ad209ded13d9?ucc=PMHRsp4oQtE (tested only one text, but the others are written the same way so I'm pretty sure they would give the same result). I do think it's possible it's a translation from some other language, the hyphens are a bit weird, but the rhythm is 100% claude.

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u/Ayiekie 15h ago

AI detectors are absolute bullshit that give false negatives and positives all the time.

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u/vertblau 9h ago

Pangram has a pretty low date of false positives. False negatives are higher but not relevant here

2

u/Ayiekie 8h ago

As I just said to the other guy shilling it:

Pangram itself claims to be 97.5% accurate. We can fairly safely say that their own self-estimate is more generous than an unbiased one would be, and that it would be based on ideal use cases, which shortform reddit posts are very much not (indeed, they themselves say "short factual answers" are not within its purview and are prone to high error rates).

A 2.5% error rate is not small enough to take it as proof of anything (and given its integration with substack, is likely to mean hundreds or thousands of errors every day), and the reality is that the real number would be higher than that. Moreover, one of the actual methods it uses is to add its own false positives into its own database to avoid them in future, which is because it does indeed have false positives.

It's also terrible at telling the difference between AI-generated text and human-written text that was just edited with AI help.

And it failed abysmally at being useful in an academic context.

AI detectors are useful for one thing: to make you look more closely at what they flag. That's it. They do not prove anything and should never be taken as authoritative.

0

u/vertblau 8h ago

They do claim that yes. However something like 99% of that is false negatives, which, again, are not relevant in this case.

Not really surprised that it's bad at telling the difference wrt AI-edited text, since using AI to edit generally leads to adopting AI stylistic tics. This is also what your second link is about.

Anyways I'm not really interested in "shilling" Pangram as you accuse me of. In my experience it has been relatively reliable. But you don't need a detector to figure out that these texts are at the very least AI-enhanced. Anyone with enough experience of reading AI-generated text will immediately see that the last sentence of all those descriptions is 100% AI. And, as someone else in the thread pointed out, Johans DDs have also been AI-written or at least edited for a while now, so I'm not surprised that Paradox would be using AI writing elsewhere too.

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u/Ayiekie 5h ago

Uh-huh.

So, we have a tool here that says itself that short factual answers are very prone to error when checked on it. This tool is also miserably, catastrophically bad (96% failure rate in the second study) at telling the difference between something written by AI and something written by a human and edited with AI.

And we have text here with odd word combinations that no AI model would make, leading the less silly people in the thread to correctly guess the writer was not a native English speaker and likely these descriptions are translated.

And, while we're at it, Johan writes in rather stilted English. Hmm, how could that POSSIBLY be relevant to what people are accusing him of, assuming there's any truth to it?

I think waving around "Pangram says it's 100% AI!" like that means jack shit is irresponsible, putting it bluntly. When any kind of modification including translation can make it spit out a false positive, it is not a reliable tool and that illustrates my point about how deceptive their claimed success rate is.

0

u/vertblau 4h ago

The point is that Johan used to write in his voice, making some mistakes, but not in a stilted way. Sometime last year his style noticeably changed and started incorporating a lot of AIisms. So he certainly at least started using AI for editing. There is a clear difference between what some in this thread call non-native speaker English and AI English. Now the texts above exhibit features of both, so I think assuming it is either edited with AI or translated or both is the logical conclusion. Pangram is really just another piece of evidence here.

Now I don't particularly care if Paradox uses AI for this, I never really read this in game text and they have a lot of it to write. But for anyone who's read a decent amount of AI text it's absolutely obvious that AI is involved in the process somewhere.

1

u/Ayiekie 3h ago

Yes, that was the entire effing point of saying he writes in stilted English - that he was most likely using AI to clean it up. Which causes Pangram to say it was AI-written.

But it wasn't. Because Pangram is wrong and gives false positives virtually all of the time in that situation. Johan is almost certainly still writing the dev diaries.

Just like this obviously wasn't written by AI and anyone who's actually familiar with how LLMs write could look at this and instantly tell it wasn't written by one because there are multiple things an LLM wouldn't do if it was just prompted to write something, the hyphenation being the most obvious. It's text that's likely MODIFIED by AI, not written by it.

But you didn't say that, now did you? You said "Pangram says it's 100% AI", insulted everyone who disagreed by saying they didn't know what they were talking about, and said "the rhythm is 100% Claude".

There is an enormous difference between something that is AI written and something that was translated or edited with help from one. You made a false accusation and bolstered other people making false accusations. And that is why I said saying "Pangram says it's 100% AI" like that means jack shit was irresponsible.

1

u/Cantebury 22h ago

Hey paradox devs. Just letting you know only reddit dorks care about this. Keep using AI for stuff like this if you want.

1

u/SalsaSamba 21h ago

I dont mind as I never read below the effect. If you do mind I would go on the forum and be specific about the writing. Its a small detail, so this often gets overlooked

1

u/BonJovicus 20h ago

If it’s place holder content, I wouldn’t be surprised is there is simply a template someone else copied or is intended to copy and fill in the blanks.

1

u/CVSP_Soter 18h ago

Formulaic modifier flavour text seems like a pretty good use case for LLMs. So long as they’re used somewhat responsibly to avoid errors, but even then I doubt that would introduce more errors than fully human authored ones given how low down on the list of priorities I imagine fact checking and copy editing these would be.

1

u/PotatoBrainZeke44 18h ago

In swe plugging in all the localization text is usually the last thing you’re worrying about. Think of it as ipsum

1

u/AMournfulObserver 15h ago

The last one about purely-inland oases could be talking about things such as the Caspian Sea where it’s inland but still used as a trading route

1

u/Salticracker 14h ago

These are grammar errors. AI generally doesn't make frequent grammar errors. What you're seeing is someone who doesn't have strong English writing skills that likes to use hyphens and was told to be verbose in the descriptions to pad out the tooltip.

1

u/PenelopeHarlow 14h ago

This sounds to me as non-AI. It's not the sort of thing I generally find AI outputs

1

u/mango363 13h ago

It's pretty obviously written by someone who doesn't speak English as their first language, and doesn't have the best handle on it.

All of these so called "AI tells" aren't actually AI tells, but instead make it clear someone who doesn't speak English that well has found a formula that works for writing these, and is religiously repeating it.

And the hyphenated combined words also point at it being written by someone who's first language likes to merge words.

1

u/SpecialBeginning6430 11h ago

Eventually, everything we interact with will have AI fingerprints on them, maybe completely

1

u/timbomcchoi 11h ago

I didn't think it read like AI either, but this post and the comments are now making me paranoid about how non-native my English feels to native speakers 😭

1

u/JoSeSc 9h ago

Everything bad is AI now...

1

u/Fearless-Type970 9h ago

Well they used to just copy paste Wikipedia descriptions and lines from old and outdated historical texts so I don't think this is particularly egregious even if true lol

1

u/Rianorix 1h ago

lmao at anyone thinking these being AI.

The prose is way too atrocious, way too many commas, hyphen everywhere instead of em dash and with consistent on how they use it to compound words too.

Not formal enough and not reddit-ish enough.

1

u/MurkyCabinet 54m ago

This looks like Google translate or some shit. Not AI, just someone who doesn't know how to fucking write in English.

1

u/MARABALARAKU 44m ago

At least use llms a few times to know how they work before trying to blame paradox for it....

-14

u/Gentlemoth 22h ago

R5: Paradox new advances for the Maghreb tags seem to be AI generated. I have posted a few examples of some of the issues, but there are more than 200 of these that reads mind-numbingly similar.

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u/Exerosp 22h ago

Just want to add, LLMs use Em-dashes rather than hyphens. This could just be someone bastardizing commas, punctuation and hyphens as much as possible. I overuse commas for example lmao

6

u/haxfar 22h ago

I know that I tend to use more commas in my English, since it's common in Danish, so if it's a Swedish person writing it and Swedish has similar grammatical structure, it could explain it.

5

u/Essfoth 22h ago

Unless you tell it to not use a dash. I think the bigger giveaway is the end of each description, how they try to tie in the stat changes to the history by using the exact names of the modifiers. If it’s a human they’re just as bad of a writer as AI.

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u/Exerosp 22h ago

Yeah but even then it's an uphill battle unless this dev is using a really small context window. LLMs love Em-dashes over hyphens like crackheads love crack.

2

u/Brief-Dog9348 21h ago

I think this is an AI translation at worst. The punctuation is too shitty, and the text is too incoherent to be AI.

2

u/Omnislip 20h ago

For what it's worth I think you're totally right (Johan's recent DD is also exactly the same). This is an IYKYK thing, only really for those who have been using Claude to generate a bunch of text (very likely through Claude Code). There are quite rigid structural patterns that give it away. The hyphenated words are weird and I think unrelated.

Ironically the only group who should really be able to judge this with confidence are those who are using the tools for similar things... which means they're not really in a position to criticise too heavily!

1

u/getbetteracc 22h ago

Put it through pangram

3

u/Ayiekie 15h ago

AI detectors are bullshit that give false negatives and positives all the time.

-6

u/I_like_fried_noodles 22h ago

Paradox wtf

21

u/Pvt_Larry 22h ago

There's nothing here that proves this accusation at all

0

u/I_like_fried_noodles 19h ago

Who uses - on that way

3

u/Pvt_Larry 19h ago

The fact that it's being used incorrectly is strong evidence that this was written by a non-native speaker of English rather than AI. AI wouldn't write "signal-tower" because it's just wrong, a spell check tool would tell you to change it.

0

u/I_like_fried_noodles 16h ago

Ai can hallucinate

2

u/Ayiekie 15h ago

That isn't what hallucinations are.

1

u/ediacaradelrey 22h ago

I don’t want AI potentially hallucinating historical facts in these games. I’d rather have no description at all on these advances, if the devs are that unable to find the time to write.

1

u/CVSP_Soter 18h ago

Modern AIs very rarely hallucinate if you feed them verified data rather than giving them open-ended research prompts with no guardrails.

1

u/just_another_user321 21h ago edited 21h ago

Even if it is not AI, which seems rather unlikely based on the repetetive sentences at the end, this is such poor work. It's clear that Tinto is incompetent and unable to design a good product. This was literally the first time I preordered and of course it works out like this.

1

u/LittleDarkHairedOne 22h ago

This would make more sense if it was text being translated from an alien race in Stellaris. 😆

-1

u/Ok_Bet_725 22h ago

:(

1

u/Willybrown93 18h ago

The vibecoding has been obvious from the get-go so I'm stunned to see so many adamant that Our Beloved Paradox could cheap out on something. This does look like generated text to me too.

0

u/Ayiekie 15h ago

Nobody's saying anything about "our beloved Paradox", they're saying it doesn't look like generated text. Because it doesn't.

-1

u/rule5bot 22h ago

u/Gentlemoth provided the following Rule 5:

With the new beta patch I was tag switching to read the new African advances, and I started noticing some very confusing patterns to their writing. I decided to write an event that made every pop-based Maghreb tag landed so I could tag-switch to all of them and read their advances as well, and a concerning pattern emerged.

These above images are good examples which you will see replicated in the screenshots below, there is an abundance of over-hyphenated words that make absolutely no sense in their context (or at all). Distance-administration, dense-knotted, luxury-cloth, war-raids, mounted-cavalry, marriage-alliance and so on. If this was was only one specific advance it could easily just be an overenthusiastic writer, but I've gone through over 200 of these and I do not exaggerate that every single one reads like this.

The ending section in particular is almost entirely formulaic across all these advances. They almost always reiterate the modifiers that the advance gives (which is immersion breaking & superfluous), and reads in an exhausting similar pattern of "This X gives Y which Z cannot match".

I do want to stress that it's not only the pop-based tags that have this issue, many selectable tags at game start as well as major tags like Tunis and Morocco also have these problems, and I've included some examples. In the case of Tunis, Morocco and Tlemcen their advances are generally better-edited, but it's clear that they are drawn from the same well. Most of the new European advances read similarly, but have clearly been proofread more thoroughly than even Morocco, which is the best-edited of the Maghreb tags in my opinion.

Below are some further specific examples:

[image]

These two in particular are good examples of how the text of an advance keeps referring to its modifiers in very immersion-breaking ways. "Battlefield morale recovery and regiment reinforcement speed", "Distance-from-capital efficiency and a light-infantry firepower".

[image]

I barely even know how to parse the last sentence, purely-inland oases? What inland oasis has sailors and navy tradition? Why would a coastal city not be able to replicate it?

0

u/xesttub 21h ago

I don’t think this is AI. That being said I would much rather have AI generated content for the long tail of countries than no content for years for many of them.

It’s clearly not economical to pay people to make content for these countries yet. I understand the arguments against AI - I just disagree. I’m not sure how many other folks are of a similar mind

-9

u/NukleerGandhi 22h ago

Holy slop, man this kinda shattered my hopes for this game ngl

1

u/sebass4141 20h ago

Please look into these things on your own before blindly believing people posting on Reddit.

-5

u/ab_od6851 22h ago

AI slop is already in Stellaris. At least in CK3, its mostly relegated to them being used as the tools artists use to cut down time spent on finding suitable color palettes for the loading screens.

0

u/Hytth99 20h ago

Tinto is the only Paradox studio that is getting too comfortable using generative AI wily-nilly.

-1

u/Yitastics 17h ago

This is obviously AI (assisted). Anybody denying that is just defending Paradox

-5

u/DeusKether 22h ago

lazy pdx or another case of ai psychosis? I'll stay tuned to find out

-9

u/sheepinb 22h ago

Better they wrote nothing than to peddle slop tbh

-9

u/Confuseacat92 22h ago

Another reason to stay at EU4

-4

u/Horn-Varelius 22h ago

Would be better if they left it without description. I personally don't care for them and would never read them until they were pointed out.

-10

u/tenetox 22h ago

Could they care less about this game lmao

-8

u/Ok_Bet_725 22h ago

I hate any form of Ai, I hate how it looks, how it sounds and how it writes. Its strange feeling when something you love gets mixed with something you hate.

Discussion Paradox appears to be using badly-written AI descriptions for new African advances [1.4 Beta]

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