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cjet79  17d ago (text post)   Edited 17d ago   1382 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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Can't we just... not?

Using AI as a (lazy) reference (eg. "ChatGPT says the GDP of Elbonia is $1.5B") is bad -- because nobody can be sure that GPT is correct in this, and therefore if you want to engage with the point you need to look up the number yourself first and make sure it's not a hallucination.

Using AI as a source of argument (eg. "ChatGPT says that Roko's Basilisk is baloney: <insert long AI argument> I think this is wrong because...") is bad for all the reasons many have pointed out (boring, low effort...), and putting it in spoiler tags, quotes, offsite links, smoke signals, whatever -- doesn't change this.

Quoting AI output as an example in a discussion about AI quality (eg. "Look what ChatGPT can do; the singularity is surely nigh!") or similar is probably OK -- but in most cases might be off-topic in the CW thread, and better placed in "Tinker Tuesday" or something.

So how about:

"No use of AI output in posts, with the distinction between 'use' and 'mention' subject to mod judgement -- keeping in mind that relevance and 'don't be annoying' rules still apply".

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