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I have to preface this by saying that I normally don't think highly of you as a poster. When I saw your header, my first instinct was to roll my eyes and minimize the conversation. But I did end up reading it, and I'm really glad I did. This was an excellent essay, a worthy indulgence for the sin of a few dozen shitposts.
Dead wrong on every single value judgement throughout, of course, but beautifully, hilariously so.
Excellent trolling. I actually had a few hundred words written before I realized you didn't include any links or real background info, and then realized why.
To hasten things for everyone else, article.
The school in question was a central planning initiative that's been captured by the French deep state since basically the beginning. It's a finishing school and personality-killing brainwashing symposeum for nomenklatura kids, and very very much an example of Selection, to the little extent that entire framing is worthwhile.
Which is, of course, the entire point of the post. Being carefully, forcefully stupid in a way that demands reponse from the 'tism.
Gr8 B8 M8.
So after all the bruhaha, are you genuinely this upset about your betters (America) or is it theater?
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I wonder what your take on AI-assisted writing is. No particular reason, of course, though you might want to look at my mod-hatted reply.
The main paragraph that stood out as AI, which @BurdensomeCount himself acknowledged above, was extremely obvious. I noticed it immediately because, I’m sorry to say, it read a lot like some of the things you’ve written recently in style and tone. The rest was a mix, but clearly quite a lot was written or rewritten by him.
In general, there are two issues with LLMposting. The first is the obvious quality issue. That paragraph and some other text stands out but eventually this issue is clearly going to be solved, this isn’t magic and it is presumably only a matter of time before the LLM can authentically recreate our small foibles and stylistic elements of our writing. The second is the honor system, where this community becomes pointless if we’re all reading LLM writing we could generate ourselves (either directly or prompted by a tweet-length thought).
For this reason, I think people are opposed to LLM users now because of what it bodes for the future. We can detect it (mostly, in some long posts, by regulars) for now, but we won’t be able to forever. Soon, it will be purely the honor system.
I disagree with this. Arguing with a LLM is lame because it'll eventually agree with you. Arguing here is fun because no matter how right you are, they wont agree with you (I also don't agree with people even after they've dunked on me) which is way more fun. A fun means more engagement, I like arguing here as it forces me to think about and articulate my position, which generally means i also refine it and as a result I usually end up believing things that are more "true" which I really like. I have no motivation to do this with ChatGPT.
Plus the LLM just makes the boring logical arguments. Here, with real humans, you get 1) illogical bad arguments, which are fun to tear into, or 2) genuinely creative good arguments with new twists and ideas, which expands my mind and thinking in a way that LLMs very rarely manage to do.
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I did not even need the "main paragraph" to know what he did, it's obvious to me, and probably other people who do use LLMs a lot. I don't doubt that you noticed too. I do not think that his "explanation" is unbelievable, but do forgive me if my reaction to him offering me a sealed bottle of water is to send it off for chemical analysis. If he hadn't admitted to it, I would have banned him. He did admit to it, so I am not sure what to do. I am slightly annoyed none of the other moderators have stepped in and taken the problem out of my hands, but can't blame them for that. My inner conflict is my own, and I am genuinely unsure if more moderation effort is required beyond telling him "We know what you're up to."
I know. I noticed and found it deeply uncomfortable. If it makes you feel better, I've already dialed downed the usage of AI for stylistic advice or editing significantly, because I've increasingly come around to the people who think that that it dilutes my own voice and personality. That, by itself, would not have been enough, but I've noticed other people doing the same thing in the wild: I do not want the primary difference between Count and myself to be the arguments we make, with our style and tone being similar.
Dialing down is, of course, not zero. But you can see how my most recent long-form post is more "me" in style than what came before. This is a recent development, mere weeks. I don't think I did anything morally wrong, but I do not want to become part of a homogeneous blob of writers with pleasant but startlingly similar prose.
For the rest of your points? I don't disagree. We will soon be unable to tell. I'm lucky that I have a digital record predating LLMs that I can point at to show that I don't need them as a crutch or as a total replacement, more as a regular tool or aide. But that is not a binary matter either.
The best use I've found for LLMs is stripping out any personality or style from corporate slop emails I am sending. No fucking way am I bringing my whole self to work - the mask is entirely sufficient for the likes of them.
This also works when you need to write HRese evaluations but your internal engineer would rather slit his wrists with a wooden spoon than manually write such bullshit.
I have used an LLM once in my life, for setting bullshit growth goals at my job. It did a good job. (I'm not against setting goals, but the context and requirements here made it basically impossible to set real, useful goals and required corporate nonsense).
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Hey, I have the same thing as well...
I'm left wondering whether there's a market for me writing a post fully from scratch and then putting it through an LLM before uploading the result instead of my original post so that keen eyed detectives such as yourselves have something to point to below the surface meaning of the text itself; think of it as an Easter Egg (quite topical), if you will. I already strive to make my posts work on multiple levels, and there's always the allure to add yet another an extra dimension in.
.... maybe. This is a very bad time to be fishing for compliments, at least from me. I do not doubt you can write well, or that you are capable of making high effort, good-faith arguments. With no comment on the former, I would prefer to see more of the latter.
Also, you have been warned for LLM-baiting in the past. I would advise, for the health and longevity of your current account, that you do not try this experiment without talking to us mods first.
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I abhor the abominable intelligence, as you may know.
But this is actually an exemption. I loved the early AI stuff because it produced spectacular surrealist humor. The AI generated conspiracy theories is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's hard for humans to be that creative and absurd without descending into lolquirky, but GPT2 did that by default.
I didn't get that impression from the OP, but then I have a lot less experience with explicitly AI written text. It felt like it had Count's signature sneer. Does AI tend to produce that level of quasi-coherent argumentation? If I had to guess, given the prompt "AI was used", I'd say it was a messy screed that was organized and streamlined by an AI.
I think your link might be broken. Leads to a dead reddit link.
Damn. How about this?
That's the sort of nonsensical stuff that people in your dreams say. My dreams anyway.
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This is amazing. Thank you. I absolutely adored the /r/subredditsimulator pre-2022, when it was markov chains and the like. I don't know why early AI slop is so funny, but it would have me laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes every single time I went there.
I remember a subreddit simulator thread where it was just repetitions of "Rabid dog" and "It's just a normal dog." over and over. Stuff that someone like Joyce or Gertrude Stein might write.
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A bunch of those just live in my head. "There are two kinds of food and you will never find out about the third". "The earth has no sky (but the sky does)". "Buckets are real". "The sun is a ghost/ flat moon".
Might try to write an effort post to debunk the bucket deniers.
Flat moon made me burst out laughing and then it didn't stop
Genuinely, thank you. I laughed so hard I was crying a bit. So fucking funny.
That makes me so happy to know someone else reacted like I did.
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Crazy how some people think this essay was better than my unassisted writings while others insist that it's worse.
Were I a tabloid style writer I might make a new post titled "Is AI the new Marmite?" (whether it would be made with or without AI assistance is left as an exercise for the reader).
Makes me feel good inside TBH. When I was in high school and college I can remember two of my professors calling my name out at the beginning of class and asking me to stay behind after class was over because they wanted to know where I learned to write. One of them said I wrote graduate level academic literature, full of citations, extensive vocabulary use, etc. Shocked me both times it happened. I did just enough in English classes to get by because I wasn’t very invested and engaged with the work. But I always had talent as a successful imitator, and knew how things were ‘supposed to look’, all the way down to the finest details. They always thought I had these amazing gifts, and maybe they were right. I always looked at it as being a successful bullshit artist that can produce real work when it came to boring assignments.
I was always one of those guys though who was his own best and worst critic. It’s like someone who’s been typing away at a keyboard all his life. He can type faster than most people he knows, but if you ask him to spell out the first row of keys, he couldn’t do it. If someone asked me to explain the grammatical structure and rules of the English language in detail, I couldn’t do it. I just know how it’s supposed to ‘feel’. You can get very far doing things that way but it isn’t genuine understanding. It’s pseudo-logical.
I always envied my father for this reason. He was one of those people who could just look at something and immediately understand it. And he read like an absolute maniac. When I was extremely young he’d have me look through his telescope outside at the planets and he’d explain how the big red spot on Jupiter worked. I used to ask him all sorts of questions. I remember he explained the chemistry of Titan’s atmosphere to me and how if you could stand and survive on the surface (you couldn’t), you’d be able to “taste,” the climate on the tip of your tongue, and he’d describe how it’d feel. I once saw a car crash through the front door of a pharmacy and spoke to my father about it and how it sounded and he explained “Mm. It sounded like punching through a cardboard box full of crushed glass.” We used to talk science fiction notions and uploading consciousness and being able to transport me into his frame of reference. Would you feel the same internal process of sensations? And he once came up with the analogy of Beethoven’s deafness in his late 20’s; and how even when composing his music although he couldn’t hear it, he knew and understood what he was composing and understood how it felt by abstraction. My father was like God to me. He knew everything on any topic you could put to him, down to the individual details; whether it was the Napoleonic Wars, marine biology, the history of the cosmetics industry, it literally didn’t matter. I always looked up to him like he was omniscient but I was also afraid of him. He was an intimidating and eerie person to be around.
When it came to translating abstractions into concrete notions, it requires genuine intellectual understanding. I never had that to the extent he did. I really miss the long walks I got to go on with him.
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