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My man, I quite literally said, in the essay itself, that I used ChatGPT for help. That is not the same as using it to write an essay!
I am not an expert on geopolitics or economics. I asked ChatGPT for help with relevant theories (I do know about the Gravity model of trade and am tangentially familiar with Acemoglu). Why? Because nobody with more expertise brought this up first in a hot minute.
You do realize that's in the context of an essay with no AI involvement beyond feedback? I have few qualms about disclosing it when it's actually relevant, or denying my usage. You don't have to use GPT-Zero, which is an unreliable tool at the best of times. You can just ask. The honest answer here is I ran into a very interesting article, wrote a rough draft of an essay, asked multiple models for feedback and edit passes, then did the tedious work of checking for hallucinations. This was over multiple days, and several good points noted by the AI, such as the applicability of various economic models, was probably accepted by me into the final version. As far as I can tell, there are no hallucinations, beyond quotes from poorly sourced Chinese literature that I can't read (suitably signposted and kept as a joke).
The current moderation consensus is that the use of AI to generate all or even most of a post, particularly in an attempt to pad effort or mislead, is a clear violation of the rules. We have refrained from declaring what proportion of an essay or post must be AI written to be worthy of action. It is a ruling mainly made to dissuade spam or bad-faith actors, and using it for editing or proofreading is, as far as I'm aware, above board.
While it's very kind of you to say that you prefer 100% raw SMH, you haven't even seen the raw essay! How would you know if it's better? I don't, or I'd have posted it.
The previous essay on China was a throwaway written in the middle of the night, it lacks the spit and polish of an effortpost written over hours or days. You will see a lot of variance in my style based on how much effort I'm putting in.
Much like goods "manufactured" in Hainan, I believe I have added enough additional value to the base product to post without qualms. It is, after all, mostly mine. Or perhaps the AI added enough value to my base product. The day I throw raw ChatGPT output in here is the day I welcome public crucifixion.
And this, unfortunately, is why I now skim past your posts without reading them.
I am aware. I find it most unfortunate, since I do genuinely believe that LLMs help make my writing even stronger.
That's not the point. LLMs would make many people's writing stronger (for some value of "strong"). I'd rather read your writing, weaker or not. Now when I read you, every point you make, every turn of phrase, every word choice, I don't know if it was you or the LLM. Sure, maybe 80% to 90% of it was you. I can't know, and that makes me not care. I can prompt ChatGPT for its sparkling shiny opinions all day long.
I genuinely do not understand the intuition at play here. Let's imagine someone who has an instinctual aversion to the use of AI image gen: is using Adobe Firefly to change a single pixel with it sufficient to taint a larger painting? Two pixels? Ten? To finish the blocked-in background that the artist would have been too lazy to finish had he not had the tools at hand?
What if the artist deletes the AI pixel and reinserts one himself, with the exact same hexcode?
(It is worth noting that at one point, in the not so distant past, that even Photoshop itself was treated with similar suspicion)
Where is your threshold for "too much"? When you recognize an AI fingerprint? The problem is that once you begin suspecting it in a particular user, it is easy to imagine that there is more of it than in reality. Of course, if you have an all-or-nothing attitude, then I suppose that sounds less horrible to you than it does to me. I skew closer to a linear-no-threshold model, or perhaps one where, for the average writer, there exists an x% of AI usage that will increase overall quality as measured by multiple observers. Preferably blinded ones.
This x% can be very high for the truly average. I'm talking average Redditor. It can be very low, vanishingly so for others. Scott has mentioned that he has tried using LLMs to imitate his own style and has been consistently disappointed in the outcome.
I think, for me, the optimal amount is 1-10%. 20% is pushing it. This essay is closer to 20%. But even that 20% is closely vetted for factuality. Alas, it has not been vetted for style as hard, or else this topic wouldn't have arisen. In fact, I didn't particularly try. Performing edits to launder AI commentary as my own strikes me as dishonest.
I envision myself as the artist using the tool to finish painting that unfinished background. Sometimes, it makes something so good it's worth bringing to prominence in the foreground. The day where I can see no conceivable value-add from my own contribution is when I pack my bags as a writer. I suppose it is fortunate that I've been at it so long that there is a sizeable corpus of time stamped, archived evidence showing that I am damn good without it. That I don't need it. I still think I benefit from it, though I'm not sure I can change your mind on the topic.
After all, there are a lot of people making pure slop. I try not to ever become one of them.
There's a minor scandal in the tumblr video game sphere, because Studio Larian discussed the use of AI tools in the development pipeline. It's not clear exactly what they were using the tools for, but most critiques have interpreted it as only using AI-gen for concept art that won't even get a pixel in the final game, and they're still very unhappy with it.
((I've been trying to come together with a top-level post on the topic, but I dunno if it'll be interesting enough or if it'll be me going full Gelman Amnesia given that we have actual video game artist experts around.))
There are definitely some hysterics who can't stand AI touching anything whatsoever. And like I've said before, if you integrate AI into your work smoothly enough that we can't tell, well, we can't tell. But I think just about everyone who read @self_made_human's OP could spot the AI signature.
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.
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):
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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