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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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DO NOT POST AI CONTENT

We've only said this sporadically in the past. I'm talking to the other moderators and maybe we will have it added as a rule under the "content" section. Or maybe I'm wrong and all the other mods like AI content (highly doubt that).

We all know how to go and use an AI. If you want to have a discussion with AI themotte is basically just a bad intermediary. No one is here to have discussions with AIs. Thus posting AI content is in no one's interest.

You can of course consult AIs on your own time, and maybe they can be used as a sort of sanity or quick polling check.

Well I protest this rule, if such a rule even exists, I find it infantilizing and find your reaction shallow akin to screeching of scared anti-AI artists on Twitter. It should be legal to post synthetic context so long as it's appropriately labeled and accompanied by original commentary, and certainly when it is derived from the person's own cognitive work and source-gathering, as is in this case.

Maybe add an option to collapse the code block or something.

or maybe just ban me, I'm too old now to just nod and play along with gingerly preserved, increasingly obsolete traditions of some authoritarian Reddit circus.

Anyway, I like that post and that's all I care about.

P.S. I could create another account and (after a tiny bit of proofreading and editing) post that, and I am reasonably sure that R1 has reached the level where it would have passed for a fully adequate Mottizen, with nobody picking up on “slop” when it is not openly labeled as AI output. This witch hunt is already structurally similar to zoological racism.

In fact, this is an interesting challenge.

Well I protest this rule, if such a rule even exists, I find it infantilizing and find your reaction shallow akin to screeching of scared anti-AI artists on Twitter.

If you were on a forum dedicated to perfecting your hand-drawing skills, and requested feedback for an AI-generated image, the screeching would be 100% justified.

I was not aware that this is a forum for wordcels in training, where people come to polish their prose. I thought it's a discussion platform, and so I came here to discuss what I find interesting, and illustrated it.

Thanks for keeping me updated. I'll keep it in mind if I ever think of swinging by again.

It is a discussion platform, which means people want to discuss their points with someone. The point where I was absolutely done with Darwin was when instead of defending one of his signature high-effort trolling essays, he basically said this was just an academic exercise for him to see if the position can be defended. The answer is "yes", you can always put a string of words together that will make a given position seem reasonable, and it's not really a discussion if you're completely detached from the ideas you've put to paper.

I find the "wordcell" accusation completely backwards. Supposedly we're obsessed with perfecting form to the detriment of the essence of discussion of ideas, but I think a zero-effort AI-slop copy-pasta is what is pure mimicry of what a discussion is supposed to be. The wordcell argument might have made sense if, for example, you did some heavy analytical work, weren't talented as a writer, and used AI to present your findings as something readable, but none of these things are true in this case.

I am quite happy with my analytical work that went into the prompt, and R1 did an adequate but not excellent job of expanding on it.

But I am done with this discussion.