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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19642 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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A distraction from the war and ICE. I was thinking about posting in the fun thread, but it's not really a fun topic, though it may not be culture war either since I expect most people to be on the "this is bad" side. Maybe we should have a recurring "Butlerian Jihad Roundup" for posts like these?

Bots are taking over the internet. Corporate shills and (foreign) government propagandists have upgraded with virtual cybernetics. A related but lesser change is people using LLMs to reword their own posts (+ emails and other communications).

Some AI writing is obvious, but sometimes it's indistinguishable from (if not completely identical to) what a human would write. NYT has a quiz to distinguish human and AI writing. I did bad (3/5), but in my defense, I think most of the human examples are awful, making the quiz harder. See for yourself.

On Hacker News, it’s now so bad there's a new guideline, “don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”. Unfortunately, due to the extreme intellect of the average Hacker News commenter, it can be hard to distinguish their profound technological insights from even a markov chain trained on buzzwords. Indeed, looking at top threads I still notice lots of slop-like posts from brand new or previously inactive accounts, like this one. I've been sarcastic, but I really like Hacker News, and hope it finds a way to stop the slop.

Other networks are taking a different approach. For example, Meta has acquired MoltBook (the AI social network) in an effort to add even more bots to FaceBook. I’m joking — no wait, they may actually be doing that. Not content with the Metaverse, maybe Zuckerburg has become addicted to burning money on uncanny social experiments.

On the Motte, at least for now, I haven't seen any obvious bot posts. There were a couple AI-assisted posts (by "known" humans) over the past couple months that got called out.

How will social media evolve? Will people move to invite-only sites like https://lobste.rs and Discord? Will most people accept AI discourse as natural or even prefer it? Will AI discourse become so good that we prefer it? Right now, it seems even the best AI writing (prompted to be consice and human) is unnecessarily wordy and has certain tropes; but what if someone discovers how to train an AI on a specific human's writing, so that it's effectively indistinguishable?

I got 5/5 on the quizz you linked. For the quizz specifically, The human writing was chosen poorly IMO. It was too obviously good to compare against AI slop; especially the poem.

I'm much, much more anti-ai from a functionalist pov than most; and I think it might be because my standards are higher.

and also, it wasn't comparing like with like.

Over a year ago I had one of the Claudes do a short diversity statement in the style of McCarthy. It wrote:

"The universe brooks no false hierarchies, no arbitrary bounds set upon the human spirit. What thrives in one soul may wither in another, and the wisdom that blooms in difference is beyond price. Even now there walk among us those whose voices have been stilled by custom or by fear, their gifts locked away like water in desert rock. Yet they too are participants in this vast processional, this pageant of minds and hearts that defies all categorization, all neat orderings that men might devise. For inclusion is not a policy but a fundamental law, as inviolable as gravity, as essential as breath".

Now, there are a few things not quite right about it, but that does not ring of AI slop at all to my ear. I'd like to think I could tell the difference between real McCarthy and that, but I'd have to think about it.

E.g. A writer capable of crafting sentences that good would would not carelessly mix their metaphors. "blooms", "desert rock" followed by "vast processional", "pageant".

I would disagree. That reads as soulless undergrad/ai slop to me, there is no character or rhythm to the writing.

When you are at the top of your game you choose your words on account of the syllable sounds and count and plosive arrangements in addition to their semantic content, as it were. The writing ai produces is good in one sense, but completely artless.

And I would disagree that this writing completely fails that test.

Take the last sentence: "For inclusion is not a policy but a fundamental law, as inviolable as gravity, as essential as breath".

I'd say that's a good sentence, and its main flaw is that the meaning is nonsensical. Even being charitable to DEI initiatives, inclusion is not much like a fundamental law at all. Indeed, the whole point of diversity statements is to try and get people to value inclusion. A fundamental law exists whether you value it or not. "Diversity" would fit the meaning better, but not the rhythm. Possibly why it chose "inclusion" there instead.

But, and I'll grant this is subjective, the sentence sounds good to my ear. "as inviolable as gravity, as essential as breath." Takes it from the cosmic/scientific to the personal/human, from five syllables, to three, to one, like a plane touching down, or a single final note of a song.

you choose your words on account of the syllable sounds and count and plosive arrangements in addition to their semantic content

I am convinced there is a huge difference in reading interests between those who hear what they read as an inner voice and those who don’t.

In my native tongue, the sounds and rhythms of what I read mean almost nothing to me. I look at it, and the knowledge it encodes appears in my brain. That means I read very quickly and have very little interest in artful writing or poetry, but a great deal of interest in plot and character.

In my second language, for whatever reason I can’t do this. I read much more slowly and care much more about how things are written.

I strongly suspect this is responsible for much of the gap between ‘literary’ forms and appreciations of writing and ‘genre’ standards of writing.

Do you hear these sounds when you read, or later on analysis of the text?

I switch back and forth depending on context. If I'm wanting to extract info and nothing else, I'll skim with minimal subvocalization. Generally I'll partly subvocalize but at a fast, syncopated clip. When I encounter good writing, I give myself the time to taste if fully. When I read over my own writing, I'm very attentive to rhythm.

Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.

I think one of the main things that makes AI output unreadable for some but not others is how attentive to detail they are. If they don't really care about the overall quality of prose, or say an artwork or anything else, and they don't want to examine it minutely for how the form feeds into substance, for its minute intricacies, then they won't see what AI output is missing.

Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.

I don't actually disagree with this. I enjoy using it for roleplay and I think it does novel-writing fine, but I had to push my CEO quite hard to stop using it for business communications and info summaries because the structure is always wrong somehow. That is, the structure is appropriate for this kind of communication but not for the actual info being communicated. It's hard to describe what I mean but 'arbitrary detail' describes it well. It's like the student essays I used to mark where you aren't sure if it's incomprehensible because you're tired or because the student can't write.

I'm guessing you have an entirely different view of novels than me, but as aesthetic works I can't see how extreme care in the details isn't essential to the form. Like, if you're just skimming through The Drowned World by Ballard and not subvocalizing the prose or catching all the nuances and fine, structural meanings, then I don't see how you're getting anything like a full appreciation of the story, or even really a partial appreciation. But you think AI can write to that caliber?

And even more confusing is that you think AI can do fine at art but fails at business communique, which, though still demanding, is nevertheless much cruder and more template-driven?

Maybe your second language is stuck in 'the virgin internal voice', and only your native tongue escapes to 'the chad cerebration'.

I like to think both have their place, and it is advantageous to be able to swap between them. Internal monologue writes better prose regardless, whether that is highbrow literary or lowbrow pulp. It reads better too, in my opinion. It's slower, but you get to chew on all the linguistic quirks of a writer's language, as if you were having a conversation with them.

Maybe your second language is stuck in 'the virgin internal voice', and only your native tongue escapes to 'the chad cerebration'.

Oh god, my eyes. I cerebrated your meme and now I can't uncerebrate it...

What's the context of it?

I like to think both have their place, and it is advantageous to be able to swap between them.

I take your point. I actually can't swap in my second language (and really want to find out why) and in my first language I've never really dared try because reading and remembering fast is an ability I value and worry about losing.

The grammar is too correct in that AI McCarthy snippet. Intentionally abusing grammar and punctuation is basically McCarthy's most identifying trait. In fact it's how I could tell that the snippet in the NYT quiz was from him even though I still haven't gotten around to reading Blood Meridian.

That's true. The AI snippet also doesn't vary the sentence length much. Real McCarthy does, and with intention and purpose. "War endures." Is deliberately short.

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