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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:
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.
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?
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.
Oh god, my eyes. I cerebrated your meme and now I can't uncerebrate it...
What's the context of it?
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.
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