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FWIW, I also instantly clocked it as at least partially AI writing. Though I agree that it looks mostly like someone using AI as a helper as opposed to full AI, which is fine by me.
As an example this sentence and the follow-up: "So my ultimate question isn't "Is the State a religion?"—because clearly, it lacks the supernatural elements. Rather, my questions are: ..." This sounds exactly like what Chatgpt would write when I ask it to give me counterarguments to some random idea I had.
I have always had problems ordering my thoughts. But that's not ChatGPT, it's Deepseek. I don't want to waste people's time on something AI can answer, so I actually talk a lot with Deepseek first and it helps me order the comment I'll write. The whole point of the post was to ask people on things I was missing, that I didn't think about. What's the point on me writting stuff to waste people's time? I would waste my time too then. That is pointless.
AI is quite good at saying what you're right at (even when it lies). I want to know what I'm missing.
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I don't mind if someone uses AI, even to produce a full draft of their comment; as long as what they publish is hand-written, or somewhat if they gave the AI a unique-enough prompt that nobody notices.
A big problem with AI is sameness. Echoed by this short blogpost, where someone looks up "100,000 whys" books on Amazon, and all the covers are indistinguishable. 1 of the covers would be interesting and acceptable, 100 are boring and the flaws stand out. Besides desensitization, sameness also leads to model collapse and its cultural equivalent: AI and humans need to experience diverse writing (including bad writing) in order to write better.
This is also why I don't really mind if AI is unnoticeable. Because, if my thesis is true that AI output has inhuman similarities no matter how it's prompted, eventually humans would begin to notice. I say "really mind" because the realization may happen too late, when subliminal desensitization and model collapse have already caused serious problems. But it's an improvement, because right now I see serious problems from AI output that is obvious at least to me.
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