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cjet79  15hr ago (text post)   Edited 6hr ago   535 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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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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