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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   28685 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I want to revisit the comparison of AI slop with human slop, and whether AI is currently capable of writing.

I recently came across the most mind numbing and soulless writing in this series of articles: https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky . It has all the hallmarks of slop, hundreds of low effort articles, no clear theme, bored and soulless writing, etc. But guess what, it's written by a human! He was also really doing the grind, writing multiple articles per day. I also have receipts because the wayback machine shows his writing years before chatgpt existed: https://web.archive.org/web/20201015131543/https://www.greenmatters.com/a/andrew-krosofsky .

But I noticed something immediately. The writing was obviously human. It didn't have any of that uncanny valley feeling. There are no obvious falsehoods spoken like truth. No hallucinations. And even his worst articles are 1000x better than the typical AI fake news. This just reinforces my understanding:

Even the lowest dregs of the journalistic world write at a higher level than the best cutting edge AI models today.

Now I'm sure the AI bulls here will disagree. So I have 2 challenges for you all:

  1. Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

  2. Demonstrate a technique for an AI model of your choice to reliably copywrite articles of a similar quality, over any arbitrary topic that has reputable sources available. Those articles must not have obvious AI tells, pass AI detection, and have a hallucination rate of less than 1 in 1000.

To put my money where my mouth is, I'll offer a wager of $50 for the first person to complete either of these challenges. But I think the fact that a human who is at the bottom of the journalistic world can handily do this but an AI can't should demonstrate the big gulf between human and AI that still exists.

Find a single hallucination in an article written by this author between 2021 and today. There are quite a few, so this should be easy if human writing is unreliable. For the purposes of this, a hallucination is a statement that is both provably false at the time of writing and not supported by a linked source.

First article I checked (first published March 2021, updated Jan 2023): Sodium acetate crystallization is not a chemical reaction, phase changes are physical. The linked source does not make that claim.

Ouch you're right. I could try to argue that "chemical reaction" coliquially encompasses crystalization, but that's a stretch. This is a clear mistake in the article and probably due to the fact that humanities people know no chemistry

Pm me with PP deets or whatever for prize.

Edit:

Wait no the linked source calls it a reaction:

  1. As the crystals spread, the stored heat energy of the solution is released, heating the hand warmer up to 54°C – an exothermic reaction.

The source has a clear error, but this guy just repeated it.

I'll direct the prize money to https://deltawaterfowl.org/join-us/donate/ instead. Thanks.

Re: Edit:

"Exothermic reactions" can also apply to physical processes like phase changes, but now I'm the one that's nitpicking and asking for a nonstandard definition. I don't think his statements about nucleation sites are clear enough to be "wrong", so I'll withdraw my claim.

I'll send a donation anyways as a thanks for playing.

Thanks for being lenient.

I checked a couple more of his hard science articles, and they have a similar level of rigor. Solar Flares confuses cause and effect with mere association, and has a couple other oddities:

According to NASA, solar flares are defined as intense bursts of radiation that occur as a result of the magnetic energy found in sunspots. Solar flares can also happen when particles like electrons and protons unexpectedly accelerate.

The electrons and protons accelerate because of the magnetic field. That causes a release of radiation, which is the solar flare.

No matter what the composition, solar flares release large amounts of solar, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation into space. They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

Very strange phrasing. Rephrasing it, it is: electromagnetic or particle radiation from the sun, electromagnetic radiation below 10 picometers, and electromagnetic radiation in general.

They can last anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

What do solar flares look like?

Despite the fact that some of them can last for a rather long time, solar flares generally happen too quickly to be seen by the naked eye.

It's not the speed that's the problem ("several minutes to several hours", from the previous paragraph, or minimum four minutes due to the measurement criteria here), but the brightness in the visible spectrum. This might actually be a hallucination, and could've come from the mismatch between human and astronomical time (where a million years can be "fast" and ten minutes can be described as "a flash").

Those circumstances emit X-rays and magnetic fields that travel across the cosmos, bombarding the Earth with geomagnetic storms that can interrupt long-range communication and the like.

The field itself isn't reaching the Earth (any more than normal, at least), but charged particles are, and they can affect us.

Solar flares do ramp up into something called a solar maximum every 11-year solar cycle, but even at their maximum strength, no recorded flares have ever been large enough to reach the planet.

A bit of a nitpick, but the solar flares are the light. All(?) recorded solar flares have reached the Earth, because that's how we recorded them. Solar prominences and flare sprays have never been large enough to reach Earth.

According to NASA, CMEs are similar to solar flares in that they are bursts of solar material that result in the release of particles and radiation.

CMEs and solar flares are somewhat like thunder and lightning. They happen at the same time from the same event, but they are distinct phenomena.

This was a good challenge, and kudos for putting your money where your mouth is. I saw the generation attempt upthread, but I'm still wondering if o3, Opus 4, or another model could outperform him, if given a good bit of scaffolding. The bar is higher than I thought.

Hm I didn't know what solar fares are either, but the author definitely didn't take the time to learn. Good find, hard science is definitely a weak point of human writers that I underestimated greatly.

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