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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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That's fair, and further I like to think keeping a "you have to actually read and rewrite the AI's output" principle is optimistically going to get a best-of-both-worlds situation where the human's writing benefits from the machine's access to information, and pessimistically at least reduces some of the spam potential. But I will caveat that you're vastly overestimating the ability of the casual reader to spot AI signatures without a very high false positive ratio.

"you have to actually read and rewrite the AI's output"

I think one of the issues is that people won't read the AI's output.

So earlier this year, I was applying for jobs - originally, I wrote each cover letter individually for each posting. This slowly made me suicidal, as spending 15-30 minutes per job application where I was unlikely to even hear back from the majority of them was soul destroying. The next thing I did was take a "template" cover letter, and swap out a few things (so like, in my "accomplishments" section, I'd rewrite it to emphasize the skills the job requested). This took around 5 minutes per job application, and was still soul destroying, because I still wasn't hearing back from very many jobs. So eventually I started pointing ChatGPT at the cover letters, and I promised that I'd rewrite it every single time.

Well, that lasted around 5 attempts until I basically got sick of it and started skimming. I went and took a look at some of the cover letters I "wrote", and about a third of them have obvious ChatGPT-isms like emdashes, that specific phrasing half-fawning phrasing that ChatGPT uses, etc. Thank god resumes were being read by LLMs too, or I'd never have gotten a new position.

Humans are lazy - they're going to take the path of least resistance every time. They'll claim that they read the whole thing, and for some definition of "read", they will have - but they'll be stuck with the LLM's phrasing and concepts.

Here's an example I fed into ChatGPT for rephrasing (my words first):

LLMs will introduce their own biases into the resultant writing. If everyone uses them, this will lead to less ideological diversity as every person will be essentially arguing as an AI, not as a human.

Because LLMs impose their own biases on generated text, universal use could erode ideological diversity, with people arguing through an AI lens instead of their own.

You can obviously tell that the concept is the same, but there are subtle differences in the meanings. If I were writing a larger text, I'd probably accept the AI text as "essentially the same thing" - but they're not. My text is much more emphatic about it being what will happen, whereas the LLM text is downplaying it. Multiply this by a much larger text, and you have an entirely different emphasis.

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