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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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One of my favorite bands just took a bunch of AI accusations, I guess, and he wrote a somewhat-pissed Substack post. That lead singer doesn't often step into culture war stuff, but this was close enough, I think:

Unfortunately, as soon as we released the other day, people started accusing us of using an AI image. Now, I want to be clear, this is not an AI generated image, and I have the layered design files to prove it, but I get that it has certain features which can easily make someone think it is, particularly the similar-ish smiling faces. And everyone is talking about AI nowadays, and so they’re all primed to think it is AI. Seriously: Fair enough, I’m not blaming anyone. But I’ve seen the design templates, it really isn’t.

and goes on to say that fighting AI art in this way is fruitless:

And so, there is no “solution” to the problem of AI imagery other than the one the Luddites came up with over two centuries ago: smash the machines. Until we can actually smash the machines (literally or semi-literally), the AI will just get better and better until no-one can tell. This day is fast coming. So, I think we should either start figuring out how to smash the machines or accept our fate. There is no middle way. And so, with all due respect for those honorable people who just hate AI and want real art to prevail, calling out artists because you think you can “tell” is just another one of those doomed middle ways.

I regret that the culture war is poking random people in a new way in the last couple of years, and I can't help but cynically laugh at it. Not to mention how short-sighted it is. In that post, the lead singer details how much of a pain it is to do graphic design for music, and videos, and other art, and he hates it. Imagine if you could get a machine to do it? Also, it actually lifts up people who do not have money and allows them to make art like the people who have money do. Look at this VEO 3 shitpost. Genuinely funny, and the production value would be insane if it was real, for a joke that probably wouldn't be worth it. But now, someone with some Gemini credits can make it. This increases the amount of people making things.

I'm not sure I have any real thesis for this post, but I haven't been very good at directing discussion for my own posts, so, reply to this anecdote in any way you see fit. I thought it was interesting, and a little sad.

I agree that this stuff is becoming more and more difficult to tell apart. We even had one of our own posters get falsely accused by the mods of using AI recently. People are going to claim many things are "obviously AI" when they actually aren't, and the mania of false accusations is going to tick a lot of people off. When you're accused of using AI, not only are people saying you're committing artistic fraud, they're also implying that even if you aren't then your output is still generic trash to some extent.

I wish the Luddites would go away and we could all just judge things by quality rather than trying to read tea leaves on whether AI had a hand in creating something.

This also 100% applies to this forum's rule effectively banning AI. It's a bad rule overall.

Falsely accused?

We're (or at least I'm) not particularly against using LLMs to spell check, grammar check or tidy up substantially human written prose. But leaving that bit in? That's extremely low effort, at least tidy up after yourself.

I'll chime in to note that all of my china visit posts went through an ai spelling check pass because as a dyslexic with only a phone for composing them it was that or a lot of typos.

Your mod action didn't make the distinction that you were only against that part, and made it seem like you thought the entire message was AI generated.

I agree having that part at the end is sloppy... but it's sloppy to the level of "a few spelling mistakes". That shouldn't be worth modding someone over unless it becomes egregious.

He didn't get an official warning of the kind that goes on the mod record, despite me putting the mod hat on. We don't officially have rules against AI content, though we're in the process of drafting them up. It was more of a polite but firm suggestion rather than punishment.

Besides, I quoted that bit specifically for a reason.

How are you going to be even able to tell whether something is AI or isn't?

Enough people around here are functionally indistinguishable from LLMs from my point of view. They produce huge reams of mostly waffling text circling at respectable distance off the problem without ever addressing it and it's a chore to read.

Any LLM can do so too, in fact they readily behave exactly like that. With the barest minimum prompting skill all the usuall tells of LLM output disappear.

Enough people around here are functionally indistinguishable from LLMs from my point of view.

Who?

Make an ab test and I'm sure most people here would be able to pick out the human from the ai 10 times out of 10.

Eventually, we won't/can't. Thankfully, the people who are lazy enough to try and pass off AI generated content as their own seem lazy enough to not bother with fancy prompting or editing.

As far as I'm aware, it's an unsolvable problem, but it hasn't caused an apocalypse yet.

Bought a 4x indie game that looked kind of fine but now discovered much of the writing clearly used AI and I hate that cadence. It's not always obvious but if you've played around with LLMs and especially used barely prompted LLMs for RP you just pick up on the stylistic quirks.

After I do a playthrough perhaps I should play around with Gemini, a bunch of SF books from dead guys, derive a workable prompt for voice from them and then have AI rewrite the damned localization to be more tasteful.