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Notes -
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:
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.
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.
Well, to shift the frame a bit, does it matter? Of the people who read an article titled "Will an Egg a Day Keep the Doctor Away, or Will It Simply Raise Your Cholesterol?", how many do care about whether its contents are factual and well-sourced*, and how many just want the qualia of reading an article about something to while away their time on the mortal coil? Depending on what the product of human writers that the market actually demands is, yours might just be yet another case of writing off cars for being inadequate horses.
*and does it even make a difference if the source chain just bottoms out in some garbage p-hacked nutrition paper that will be forgotten in five years when some slop research lab decides to p-hack up a new paper on the topic? What fraction of writing anywhere is about something more than the qualia of writing and reading something like the thing it pretends to be? Perhaps straight up making up citations is just cutting out some layers of indirection in the con.
tl;dr: Rather than being more bullish on AI, I think you ought to be more bearish on humanity.
In my imo it matters whether or not people are reading fake slop articles in fake hallucination la-la-land rather than real human slop. If the reader really needs the sensation of reading something with no truth value, there are plenty of mlp fanfics out there to help satisfy the qualia.
Yes every clickbait article about a p-hacked paper about how a glass of wine a day is good/bad is bad. But at least if it goes viral it's a sort of shared experience. Something that can be debunked. And something that can be talked about. If someone tells you he just read that a glass of wine a day is good you can roll your eyes and start talking about p-hacking or experimental methodology.
If AI slop makes it up, it can't be debunked. It's harder to disprove something nakedly asserted than something eventually attributed to an unreliable source. And there's a literal infinite supply of AI slop, so there's no point.
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