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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19868 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".

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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