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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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If AI posting is normalized, I will skip over any post that doesn't get to the point in the first two sentences. Length was always a bad predictor of how much effort someone put into their post, but with AI, it will be a negative.

I will skip over any post that doesn't get to the point in the first two sentences.

I already do that for anything that doesn’t get to the point within the first paragraph. I strongly recommend everyone else to do the same and think this place would become much better if everyone did that.

Beware that this tends to exclude any point that is sufficiently complex that it cannot be simplified to a paragraph without presupposing the audience is already an expert in the topic.

This may be acceptable fallout, but is still worth explicitly noting.

The point doesn't have to it in a single paragraph but the comment absolutely does have to get into it within a paragraph.

Or to put it another way, FFS people, stop waffling around like Scott and start with your point right away. Then you can expand around it after you've shown the reader that you're not just wasting their time.

I don't know. Every longer text needs a good hook, but there are other ways to do it than by spilling the main point in the first paragraph.

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