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cjet79  10hr ago (text post)   Edited 1hr ago   324 thread views

Rule Change Discussion: AI produced content

There has been some recent usage of AI that has garnered a lot of controversy

There were multiple different highlighted moderator responses where we weighed in with different opinions

The mods have been discussing this in our internal chat. We've landed on some shared ideas, but there are also some differences left to iron out. We'd like to open up the discussion to everyone to make sure we are in line with general sentiments. Please keep this discussion civil.

Some shared thoughts among the mods:

  1. No retroactive punishments. The users linked above that used AI will not have any form of mod sanctions. We didn't have a rule, so they didn't break it. And I thought in all cases it was good that they were honest and up front about the AI usage. Do not personally attack them, follow the normal rules of courtesy.
  2. AI generated content should be labelled as such.
  3. The user posting AI generated content is responsible for that content.
  4. AI generated content seems ripe for different types of abuse and we are likely to be overly sensitive to such abuses.

The areas of disagreement among the mods:

  1. How AI generated content can be displayed. (off site links only, or quoted just like any other speaker)
  2. What AI usage implies for the conversation.
  3. Whether a specific rule change is needed to make our new understanding clear.

Edit 1 Another point of general agreement among the mods was that talking about AI is fine. There would be no sort of topic ban of any kind. This rule discussion is more about how AI is used on themotte.

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The starting post is my attempt to be neutral and just give everyone the lay of the land.

This post is me being opinionated.

I am very against AI generated content being on themotte. I think it makes the whole place pointless. I'm not against AI in general, it just seems specifically at odds with what makes this place useful to me.

I can have a discussion with AI without showing up here. I do this quite often for various topics. Cooking recipes, advice on fiction writing, understanding some complex physics topics, getting feedback on my own writing, generating business writing, etc. If I am here it is because I specifically do not want a conversation with an AI.

To me there is a value in discussion. Of my brain processing an idea, spitting it out onto a page, and then having other brains process what I have written and spit their opinions back out at me. Writing things is part of my thinking process. Without writing or talking about an idea, I can't really claim to have thought much about it. I believe this is true about many people. If someone else is offloading either part of their thinking process to an AI then the degree to which they have offloaded their thinking (either the initial reading/processing, or the writing/responding) is the degree to which I'm not getting additional value out of them.

Realistically there might not be much of a way to enforce this. Everyone could be going and feeding my writing to an AI and regurgitating its answers back to me. I just have to hope that they recognize how pointless and silly it is to do such a thing. I compared using AI on themotte to bringing a bike or a car to a fun run. It might be objectively better at accomplishing the "thing" we are doing. But everyone has a sense it is pointless and dumb to do so.

My other objection which may be mitigated in the future is that many of the AIs available have a sort of generic sameness to them.

Imagine all viewpoints can be summed up by a number ranging from 1-100. With 50 being an average viewpoint. Most AIs are going to spit out viewpoint 50 by default. I think you can currently make character AIs and have them spit out 40s or 60s with a higher rate of hallucinations. Google's "black nazi" image generator is I think a good example of them trying to push the AI's default opinion in one direction and ending up with some crazy hallucinations.

But there are plenty of real people with extreme viewpoints on any given topic, and plenty of them are here on themotte. Today's 50 is not yesterday's 50, and it likely won't be tomorrow's 50 either. Talking with the tail end view points is something I find interesting, and potentially useful. It is also generally more difficult to find viewpoints outside of the center. Themotte is a place that is often outside the center.

If everyone secretly started posting with AI's tomorrow to play a cruel trick on me, I don't think I'd immediately figure it out. But within a month I'd be gone from this place and would have lost interest. The center viewpoint is widely available and easy to find. I don't need to come to a dark and unknown corner of the internet to get it.

+1. I think it would be good to have a sort of cutout for talking about AI (for example in a pattern like: "Musk's new MechaTrump-3T model has some weird quirks, which will be concerning if the presidency is handed over to it next month as planned. Here is what it had to say about Mexico when I ran its 1bit quantization:").

Other than that, I want to add that the assumption of good faith for me depends on a line of reasoning along the lines of, "Another sentient being, ultimately not that different from you, has taken the time to write this. You can appreciate how long it took and how hard it was. Treat the product with the amount of respect you would like to receive if you put in a similar effort.".
This goes out of the window if the other party may have just written a line, clicked a button and copypasted.

Pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter. +1 for the Buttlerian Jihad from me.

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