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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   36069 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I can't stop people from going and consulting AI. I did say in the original post, that using it as a sort of sanity check or impromptu polling seems fine.

I'm personally not very interested in talking to the "centaurs" as you describe them (human centaurs seems redundant, unless you mean human legs and horse torso). I think there is a value in having another human brain process your words and spit back a disagreement about those words. If they are offloading the processing and the output to an AI they have just become a bad/slow interface for that AI.

I think we are basically at AGI right now. So hold the gates as long as we can and enjoy this space until the internet as we know it is gone in a flood of digital minds.

'Centaur' is sometimes used to describe an AI/human merger or collaboration. Half human, half machine, as it were. So, for example, a human using an AI for digging up sources / fact checking / style improvement is sometimes called a centaur. Anything where a human is still a significant part of the process.

I think it's wholly fair not to like AI writing; there are users I don't engage with either. I would merely ask the mods to be careful before they ban things that don't interest them, and to use a scalpel rather than a hammer where possible.

Your specific usage of AI also has a major problem here, which is that you were basically using it as a gish gallop attack. "Hey I think this argument is wrong, so I'm gonna go use an AI that can spit out many more words than I can."

For example, I would agree with banning this, but in my opinion we should ban it because it's gish galloping not because it's AI. We should penalise bad AI writing for the same way we would penalise bad human writing: it's tedious and prevents good discussion.

I think we are basically at AGI right now. So hold the gates as long as we can and enjoy this space until the internet as we know it is gone in a flood of digital minds.

I don't, oddly enough, which is perhaps why I'm more enthusiastic than you are. AIs have certain idiosyncracies and weaknesses that cripple them in important ways, and they need a human hand on the tiller.

I know what you meant with centaur. I just thought it was redundant to say "human centaur".

Penalizing Gish Gallop specifically is hard. People may legitimately have many questions or objections to a specific point. It's just far more obvious of a problem when you have an AI churning out text that.

Fair.

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