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cjet79  9hr ago (text post)   Edited 32m ago   308 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

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.

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).

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