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I don't necessarily think this is the case. There are plenty of laws that are impossible to enforce against a motivated actor, and almost all laws are not perfectly enforced, but they still have value in setting norms and shaping culture, for good and for ill.
It's pretty much impossible to catch people in the act doing various anti-social things like littering or cheating on schoolwork (even pre-LLM) but having rules against littering and cheating are still important to set norms. Similarly, the recent wave of underage social media bans and online censorship are impossible to enforce against anyone with a VPN, but are still real laws that end up shaping people's behaviour.
I agree that it's really going to be a symbolic effort at best, but I think it does have value in shaping norms for what the moderators want their board to be, and perhaps in catching some of the most egregious cases.
I agree with this, but at the same time, it's difficult for me to see how a public discussion board is going to be able to stop the impending tidal wave of bots.
Simply require every new account to comment a racial slur before being allowed to post.
I mean: you're not saying the word! Why is that, Leon?
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I'm not claiming that there's zero value from making laws that are difficult to enforce.
Littering leaves litter. Cheating prior to LLMs? Easier to catch. There is far more clear-cut evidence of wrongdoing, or at least some kind of accessible physical evidence that can be used to adjust priors.
This is much harder when the standard is any use of an LLM at all. How do you know? How can you even find out, short of someone being incredibly sloppy or confessing?
It's closer, quantitatively and qualitatively, towards writing legislation against thought-crime without some kind of futuristic machine that can actually parse thoughts. You might have a law on the books saying it's illegal to jerk off while thinking of minors, but even if you catch someone with their pants down, they can just claim they envisioned Pamela Anderson. How can you tell?
Plenty of rules for the Motte hinge on subjective assessments by us mods. But it would be absurd to add one that says that you can't swear aloud after reading a comment from someone you don't like.
The worst part is that false accusations will run rampant. That increases moderation load, and that effort would be better spent elsewhere.
To steelman, there could well be principled AI users who would use LLMs if it was allowed, but will be stopped from trying to covertly do so if they know it's against the rules, whether or not there's an actual enforcement mechanism - whether by their own conscience because they don't want to be knowingly circumventing a rule, or out of pique because they're pro-AI and they don't want to contribute to a forum with a "We Don't Like Your Kind In Here" sign nailed to the door. So I do think an outspoken "No LLM Posts, Pleas" rule can work to reduce the number of LLM posts even if the mods do nothing to actively enforce it. (Whether it reduces it by a useful amount is another question.)
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