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cjet79  12hr ago (text post)   Edited 3hr ago   434 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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TLDR: mod on content, not provenance.

Except the use of AI qualitatively changes the nature of the content, your own suggestions hint at this. A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms, it probably deserves a gentlemen's C by default. If someone put in the time to write it, even if the arguments are hot garbage, other things ngs being equal you can assume they care, that they want to be taken seriously, that they want to improve, etc. None of this holds true when you post AI slop, because you can generate it with all the effort of writing a one-line sneer.

If you're asking for clear labelling and recommending that the use of AI be taken with a presumption of low-effort, you're already moderating on provenance.

A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms

No its not. I could write a full page rant in maybe double the time it takes just to type.

"Pretty much". I'm not saying it can't be done to prove a point, I'm saying next to noone does it in the natural course of posting.

A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms

If average American political consumers started writing walls of text here, we would (and should) start moderating them. Doing the same to AI is fine.

Except a big reason we don't have them in the first place is that we have the longpoast filter. It's the number one complaint of dramanauts, and le average redittors (at least the ones that don't run away screaming about Nazis).

If we came across one that managed to string together a longer sentence by himself, but still didn't make the cut of what we expect here, I don't think it would be proper to ban them on sight. They're obviously trying, and the effort should be commended. With AI there is no effort, so it should be banned on sight.

Kind of? On a technical level, the median AI essay is both easier to create and lower quality than the median motte post. I want to strongly discourage people from spamming bad content because it’s bad content, especially at first while norms are being established.

But lots of other posters are arguing that posting AI-generated words is inherently wrong or goes against the purpose of the site. That if the words were not crafted in the brain of a human then discussing them is worthless and they should be banned regardless of their content. I think some people would be more offended by a good AI post than a bad one, because they’d been lured into paying attention to non-human writing. THAT is what I mean by ‘moderating for provenance’.

I should note that I’m mostly thinking of top-level and effort-posts here. If you’re involved in a downthread debate with a specific person then I can see that drafting in a more eloquent AI to continue the battle when you lose interest is poor form, at least unless you both agree to it.

(The labelling is partly practical and partly a moral conviction that you shouldn’t take credit for ideas you didn’t have).

But lots of other posters are arguing that posting AI-generated words is inherently wrong or goes against the purpose of the site.

I know, I'm one of them.

I wouldn't say I'd be offended by a good AI-post, some of my favorite strings of words are AI-generated, like that Doctor Suess poem about whether armed citizens could win against their military, or that sci-fi story passage about human rebels using the n-word to detect android infiltrators.

I know there are ways to use AI in a way that doesn't go against the point of this forum, I even suggested one myself, but:

a) that's not how AI was used so far, even by some of our best posters, which is why we're even having this conversation, and

b) doing it properly would probably make the use of AI undetectable in the first place.

I can even go further and say it's possible for human posters to make discussion pointless in exactly the same way that talking to an AI is (we've had one or two people like that), but that should get the bamhammer just as much as AI-posting.

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