The Dark Herald Turns AI Detective

In which AI writing is detected in Star Fleet Academy

There is absolutely nothing wrong with utilizing textual AI. I use it extensively, both for writing new books as well as translating them into everything from German to Japanese.

But you really have to know what you’re doing if you’re going to get a good result. And the fact of the matter is that most people don’t view AI as a tool that can be mastered, but rather, as a magic black box that will do all of the creative work for them. Which makes sense, because if Twitter and Facebook have proved one thing over the last decade, it is that most people are not at all creative.

So the Dark Herald put his metaphorical houndstooth hat on as he threw himself on the grenade that is Starfleet Academy in order to spare the rest of us the experience. His conclusions were insightful, and even a little educational for those of us with an interest in textual AI.

Read the whole thing at the Arkhaven stack.

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Exhibit A: The Klingon-Jem’Hadar Hybrid

The show’s designated bad-ass is Lura Thok played by Gina Yashere, an obese black woman from the UK in her fifties who harangues all of her lines. This is meant to be the R. Lee Ermey character, She comes across as the wife of the black guy you pity the most on Earth. She’s isn’t intimidating, she’s shrill which is about as close to masculine dominance a man like Alex Kurtzman can come.

Lura Thok is the famous Klingon-Jem’Hadar hybrid, when she declared her proud heritage of being of the Klingon House of Wordhere and the Jem’Hadar lineage of Wordhere I got the distinct whiff of AI hallucination. The Jem’Hadar are, famously, a completely artificial race, sexless and sterile. They have no more lineage than a Star Wars Clone Trooper.

I asked my AI’s opinion:

“Your instinct is dead-on because this hits the classic hallucination pattern:

• ✔️ Uses correct-sounding Star Trek nouns

• ✔️ Mimics franchise cadence (“House of… Lineage of…”)

• ❌ Ignores foundational constraints of the setting

• ❌ Confuses aesthetic identity with biological canon

It’s what happens when AIs:

• scrape wiki vibes

• prioritize representation beats

• but don’t understand the systems underneath”

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Exhibit B: “Collapses Like an Origami Chicken”

At one point, a clearly baffled Paul Giamatti bellows the line:

“It collapses like an origami chicken.”

Humans do not reach for that image instinctively. AI does.

Again I asked my AI’s opinion:

Origami → folded
Chicken → collapse / cowardice
Mash together → metaphor-shaped noise

The result is syntactically clever and semantically empty.

And Giamatti’s delivery screams “I have no idea what this means.”

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Exhibit C: SAM, the Hologram That Makes No Sense

There is an obese hologram named SAM. She is:

• Four months old

• Instantiated at age 17

• From a colony of holograms (?!?!?!)

• Attending school to learn things she logically should already possess

• Heavily coded as “neurodivergent”

This violates every prior Star Trek artificial-being framework.

Data had encyclopedic knowledge but no emotion. The Doctor had medical expertise but limited social modeling. Seven of Nine had lived experience without individual life.

SAM has none of these constraints.

A hologram is not born, socialized or educated. A hologram is compiled.

If she lacks knowledge, the show must explain why:

• Ethical restriction

• Legal constraint

• Hardware limitation

• Philosophical taboo

The show gives us nothing.

Instead, SAM is written as another tag bundle, not a character:

• Obese

• Neurodivergent-coded

• Artificial being

• Innocent

• Marginalized analog

This is exactly how an LLM constructs personas when prompted with:

“Write a diverse Star Trek character representing neurodivergence and AI identity.”

Every character in this show is written this way.

The gay Klingon who is a medical student.

The nepo-baby who is ambitious and wants to impress his family.

The Admiral’s daughter who is a born leader and better then any man on the show at everything.

Caleb the angry rebel who just wants his Mommy back. And incidentally, only survives at the academy because of the constant direct intervention of Holly Hunter.

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The “Comedy” Problem

A cadet blurts, “I just swallowed my comm badge.”

That is physically impossible. Or at least can’t be done without trauma. It certainly can’t be done by accident.

The Doctor replies, “Already?”—implying this happens every year. Also, this is the first class at the Academy in 100 years, so it couldn’t have happened before.

This is not Trek humor. This is Monty Python absurdism dropped into a setting that insists it is serious.

Again: AI joke logic. Unexpected ≠ funny. And it didn’t notice that it couldn’t have happened before or really — at all.