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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Mods, can we get a moratorium on using chatbots to pad out one's word-count?

This does not seem like "padding out the word count". I use AI in this same way when I need an expert-ish opinion on something. I won't always post the exact text of the AI, but it seems fine to do that, especially if you are just gonna ape the conclusions anyways. This was a responsible use of AI.

I'd much rather people wrote thier own inexpert understanding than open the can of worms that is giving people the opportunity to pull an "I didn't say that, Claude did" but it looks like i am in the minority.

If someone says what claude says, they said it. If claude was wrong, they failed to check the claims and they were wrong. If people want to become extensions of their AIs that's fine. But they're still accountable for what they post.

This just seems 1:1 equivalent to a citation.

I find it annoying when people just cite LLM output, but the alternative is they still post LLM blather and lie about it being their own writing, so i will take the minor annoyance instead of the large integrity violation.

I'd still hold people accountable for any rulebreaking that the AI does at their behest. Its certainly not a get out of jail free card. But they aren't going to stop using a useful tool. "I spoke to an AI about security systems" becomes instead "I spoke to a knowledgeable friend about security systems". And then we are just having either less honest conversations, or dumber ones if they don't do the research in the first place.

This isn't padding, though? What's the difference between asking Claude for a technical answer as done here, or summarizing one's own inexpert googling?

I will happily go along with the community norms on the matter, once such become clear. My objective is to be completely upfront where I got the info, and I tried to include only the parts that are relevant to my point. I also put them in block-quote mode, so that they are easy to skip.

It’s already against the rules. Report it if that’s what you suspect.

The OP contains a section explicitly using a chatbot to get a "default answer" to a technical question. That seems like a legitimate use of AI to me, not "padding out the word-count", but apparently @TequilaMockingbird disagrees.

Personally I'm surprised by it not because of any rules about word count or padding, but confusion about why you would trust a chatbot about any information about the real world to begin with. I would never assume that anything an AI tells me about a real world matter is true - not without first checking it myself, or asking a human expert. AIs are just too unreliable.

There has been a lot written about hallucination because some people want chatbots to be worse than they are. With experience you can generally tell when you are asking a question that a LLM will hallucinate about.

The information environment is fraught, and time and effort are not unlimited. It doesn't seem all that different from using wikipedia to me; you're trading hallucination risk for deliberate deceit risk. It's a way of getting a provisional "normie" answer from which to proceed. It looks to me like the information was reasonably accurate, and if it isn't, we can generally rely on Cunningham's Law to secure a correction.

People tend to get banned for that when it's caught / suspected, the problem is that it's hard to detect, and prove objectively. What made you think that this is what happened here?

"I asked Claude" "Claude patiently replies"

Claude is an AI chat bot built by Anthropic.

The OP didn’t hide it, used it to summarise information, which the bot has done correctly as far as I can tell (except maybe the user applied answers about home pc bioses to voter machines)

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