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cjet79  7hr ago (text post)   247 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.
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I strongly believe that AI generated posts should be disallowed. Like @cjet79, I think it destroys the entire point of the forum. A bunch of text some LLM came up with is not interesting, it's not worth discussing, and it is really disrespectful to everyone else to even post such a thing. It's basically saying "I don't feel like actually putting any effort into talking to you so I'm gonna have my assistant do it". Hell to the no on this one.

I would say that we should stop short of a full ban on AI generated content, because sometimes you can have an interesting meta discussion about the stuff. See for example recent posts where people were showing off examples of how that Chinese LLM differed from American models. That is actually an interesting discussion, even though it involves posting AI content. So IMO linking for the purposes of discussion is fine, but not having it write for you.

+1. The more AI content TM gets and starts to rely on, the more destroyed TM becomes.

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