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cjet79  10hr ago (text post)   Edited 1hr ago   333 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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I think the difficult thing is, as with most arguments here, is that context matters.

When I've seen AI used here, it's usually as a stick to beat each someone else with ("look, it agrees with me!"), or a stick to beat AI with ("look at how wrong it is!"), or a stick to beat those in control of the AI with ("look at how wrong they made it!").

The only other case I've seen it used is "I'm too lazy to write my argument to the level of wordcel you guys want for a top level post, AI wrote it for me".

The easiest thing to do is to just ban all of it, because it's onerous to sort the wheat from the chaff. But I also see it becoming non-trivial to do so in the near future. The smarter artists are already using AI as part of their workflows or to make some of their work easier. And I've definitely seen worse arguments by people here than Deepseek manages to make on occasion.

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