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cjet79  12hr ago (text post)   Edited 3hr ago   436 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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This is the thing I usually say about moderation, but - the problem with most AI posts isn't that they're AI, it's that they're bad. It is, in principle, possible to use AI to help you write interesting posts, I saw a perfectly good one on Twitter written with DeepSeek recently. But AI makes it much easier to quickly spit out something low-effort and uninteresting, so people do a lot of that.

The thing is, it's fine to have a rule that says 'no bad posts'. Indeed, the 'avoid low-effort participation' rule works for this purpose. So I don't think we should discourage AI overall, but just discourage using AI to make bad posts. And similarly, if someone's posting thousands of words of vacuous text every day, mods should feel free to discourage them even if it's artisanal hand-made text.

the problem with most AI posts isn't that they're AI, it's that they're bad

My opinion is otherwise.

The problem with 'good' LLM-generated posts is that they introduce an effort asymmetry. They make it possible for an individual to astroturf or gish gallop to a hitherto-unseen level.

In the absence of LLMs a longpost represents a certain minimum bar of 'this person cared enough about this subject to spend the time to write this'. LLMs completely upend this.

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