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cjet79  10hr ago (text post)   Edited 1hr ago   329 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 hope this isn't too consensus building, but I think the way AI posts (meaning posts that mainly consist of AI-generated text, not discussion of AI generally) get ratio'd already gives a decent if rough impression of the community's general sentiment. ...eh, on second thought it's too subjective and unreliable a measure, nevermind.

If we allow AI content but disallow "low-effort" AI content, I guess the real question here is - does anyone really want to be in the business of properly reading into (explicitly!) AI-generated posts and discerning which poster is the soyjak gish-galloping slopper and which is the chad well-researched prompt engineer, when - crucially - both outputs sound exactly the same, and will likely be reported as such? If prompted right AI can make absolutely any point with a completely straight "face", providing or hallucinating proofs where necessary. I should know, Common Sense Modification is the funniest shit I've ever prompted. You can argue this is shitty heuristics, and judging the merits of a post by how it "sounds" is peak redditor thinking and heresy unbecoming of a trve mottizen, and I would even partly agree - but this is exactly what I meant by intellectual DDoS earlier. I still believe the instinctive "ick" as it were that people get from AI text is directionally correct, automatically discarding anything AI-written is unwise but the reflexive mental "downgrade" is both understandable and justified.

Another obvious failure mode is handily demonstrated by the third link in the OP: AI slop all too easily begets AI slop. I actually can't see anything wrong with, or argue against, the urge to respond to a mostly AI-generated post with a mostly AI-generated reply - indeed, why wouldn't you outsource your response to AI, if the OP evidently can? (But of course you'd use a carefully-fleshed out prompt that gets a thoughtful gen, not the slop you just read, right.) If you choose to respond by yourself anyway, what stops them from feeding your reply right back in once more? Goose, gander, etc. And it's all well and good, but at this point you have a thread of basically two AIs talking to each other, and permitting AI posts but forbidding to do specifically this to avoid spiraling again requires someone to judge which AI is the soyjak and which is the chad.

TL;DR: it's perfectly reasonable to use AI to supplement your own thinking, I've done it myself, but I still think that the actual output that goes into the thread should be 100% your own. Anything less invites terrible dynamics. Since nothing can be done about "undeclared" AI output worded such that nobody can detect it (insofar as it is meaningfully different from the thing called "your own informed thoughts") - it should be punishable on the occasion it is detected or very heavily suspected.

My take on the areas of disagreement:

  1. Disallow AI text in the main body of a post, maybe except when summarized in block quotes no longer than 1 paragraph to make a point. Anything longer should be under an outside link (pastebin et al) or, if we have the technology, embedded codeblocks collapsed by default.

  2. I myself post a lot of excerpts/screenshots so no strong opinion. AI is still mostly a tool, so as with other rhetorical "tools" existing rules apply.

  3. Yes absolutely, the last few days showed a lot of different takes on AI posting so an official "anchor" would be helpful.

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