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cjet79  1d ago (text post)   Edited 18hr ago   752 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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A common criticism of AI slop is that it's not really that creative. It's mid. It only gives you a sort of average (let's set aside the question of whether you can make that sort of average still be approx academic tier average). That is still useful for at least one type of application - when an extremely obstinate commenter acts like their words don't mean things that regular, average people would think they mean. An example here, where someone basically just tried repeating a phrase, as if it was an argument on its own, as if saying it again made it mean something else that it didn't mean.

In these cases, it's useful to just ask the AI, "What does this mean?" It gives you a perfectly mid interpretation. A basic, what does this mean to a normal person? A "duh" check. An obviousness check. An easy way to point out, "If you want this to have some esoteric meaning, you need to put in a modicum of effort to justify that esoteric meaning (and explain it as though everyone is reading), because it doesn't mean that to anyone else."

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