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5 day ban for now, we really don't want large text dumps from AI here. Will discuss with other mods on shortening or lengthening ban.
Writing an effortpost carries with it a number of implications:
-This is a thing you know (or think you know) a lot about.
-This is a thing you genuinely belief, and each word in here represent your own thoughts on the matter.
-This is a thing you care enough about to type out however much you typed out.
All of which then inform the way people are going to reply, argue, comment, and engage in discussion with you and others. Someone who makes an effortpost with an LLM is much less likely to follow up in response to people who respond to them, and much less likely to make good responses. There's little point in debating a particular point they made if they don't even believe or fully understand that point. Cases where the essay was collaboratively put together and edited with an LLM are less egregious examples of this, but still carry some of the issues. If you only know or care enough about this issue to write 500 words yourself about it, then don't make the readers read a 2500 word post inflating it with unnecessary things.
Maybe we just need a weekly or monthly LLM containment thread. "Here is a thing I asked AI about and the essay it gave me and I thought it was interesting and worth sharing/discussion." Because I think there can be value to it, it's just not the same sort of value as the main human-human discussions here.
In order to make an unordered list in Markdown, you have to (1) put a space after the hyphen at the start of each line and (2) press the Enter key twice, not just once, after each line.
I didn't think the OG markdown required a blank line between list items. But there are lots of variants: even Reddit doesn't render it consistently across its frontends.
"Lots of variants" is an understatement. There is simply no standard specification of Markdown like, say, there is a specification of HTML or a specification of C.
I thought CommonMark served that purpose (though no one implements it properly).
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If I want to read AI generated text, I do not need to go to the motte, I can simply prompt Claude. For about 22 dollars a month, I could generate not only more text than the motte produces than what I am capable of reading.
By contrast, human-generated text has at least opportunity costs. If we simple allow LLM textposting then approximately 99% of the text on this site would be LLM-generated in equilibrium.
I will grant you that it is entirely possible that some of the commentators here are mostly bots. But even so, the anti-bot rules will severely constrain their behavior. They can not simply post a few megabytes worth of text per day over hundreds or thousands of comments because that would be a clear tell.
Furthermore, from what I read, authorship aside, this is not a QC post, to put it mildly. Too long, little meat. How does it relate to the CW? No particularly new or divisive thesis.
Five years ago, it would have been tolerated because there would have been no hazard to letting it stand, people rambling about the origin of sheriffs were not generally a menace in the internet.
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Unrelatedly, a new user account created hours after a ban, commenting first and foremost on the ban decision has certainly a bit of a taste for me. But then, I am sure that no commentators here would ever stoop to creating alt accounts, so welcome to the motte I guess.
This isn't right, though. With a Claude subscription, you can only read AI-generated text based on a prompt that you put in, and furthermore, the AI-generated text you read is just a one-shot by Claude (or multiple refinements that you chose). When someone posts AI-generated text on the internet, they're providing extra value to the text beyond the AI generation: they chose the prompt, they chose the specific LLM to feed the prompt, and they also chose this generation to share. Even if that person chose the prompt and LLM randomly and decided to share the very first generation, those creative choices are encoded into the results as the person's intent.
The Motte - and almost any web forum - would be better off banning LLM-posting for this reason, IMHO. But that's a different argument than the one that someone else posting an LLM generation provides nothing to a reader that the reader can't get themselves. And that argument is wrong, and, as long as we're talking about a forum where humans are the ones clicking "Comment," that will always be wrong. (Aside: even if users were bots that had the ability to post comments without human input, this would be wrong, because any response by that bot would reflect not only the comment you posted but also the settings and pre-prompt instructions in context provided by whatever human set up that bot, which almost definitely can't be reproduced in a Claude or other LLM chatbot tool).
The main reason I don’t want LLM based content is that I come to fora to read the thoughts of humans in their own words. I think having everything run through LLMs would degrade the original content that would otherwise be produced.
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A question I've had for a while is that, well, given that LLM text written for humans is so uniformly bad, why do we expect anything else it produces to be worthwhile?
The Motte is a relatively pro-tech space. I expect people here to be more sympathetic to LLMs than the median person. The Motte is, after all, several steps removed a spin-off from SSC and Less Wrong before that, both sources that have swallowed LLM/AI technology pretty enthusiastically. Nonetheless here, when it comes to posting, there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that LLM-posting is bad, and the text that they produce is worthless slop.
Shouldn't that incline us to skepticism regarding everything else boosters and hype men say about these bots? If you read text from an LLM, it's garbage. If you talk to an LLM for an hour, the overwhelming impression you'll come away with is how dumb and uninteresting they are. This is supposed to be the rapidly-improving super-intelligence that will obsolete us? Really?
LLM text written for humans can be very useful. For quick research, short of having a team of experts on retainer who are obliged to answer you within a minute or two if you text them, the bots are obviously the answer. If I am debugging a specific Linux problem, I am not going to care that Scott could have presented the answer in a better writing style.
Here is a CW analogy for you. Guns are undeniably useful. Cheap. Scale well. Incapacitate physically stronger opponents without ever getting into close combat. Kill your enemies without needing to deal with the vagueness of poisons or henchmen.
Yet inexplicably, many places and societies restrict the use and sometimes even the bearing of guns. There are whole sports built around the fiction that you can't just shoot your opponent. How does this fit together?
Clearly, this is just societies avoiding a tragedy of the commons, an inadequate equilibrium. Your life might be slightly improved by you carrying, but it will be massively impacted if everyone around you (including kids and schizophrenics) is likewise packing. The gun CW is merely about the specifics of the tradeoffs, but very few people support just arming everyone.
As I have outlined above, permitting LLM-generated texts would transform this website in pretty much the same way as airdropping a few crates of Kalashnikovs would transform schoolyard violence.
I'm not sure I agree with the point it makes, but that's a really cool analogy.
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LLMs shouldn't be opining on politics in the same way paid shills shouldn't, there's something insincere about it. They're explicitly trained to have a political stance. They reflect on the companies that make them after all. They are like paid employees and not free citizens. Talking politics or arguing with a paid employee about politics is no good.
Whereas having someone program something for you is standard.
How can the achievements of LLMs in programming be denied? It's an objective fact, they can do these things.
Also I genuinely don't think that they're dumb or boring outside of programming. I could talk with an LLM for an hour about history, economics, technology, finance or fiction and it's suddenly near midnight. There is a lot of depth in long-context and long prompts where one can get out of 'surface-level' talk. Unfortunately, the main use-case is agentic coding where prompt adherence is very important. So the creativity can be hard to access as it rigorously tries to obey what you told it to do.
I don't think I would mind talking to someone being paid to advocate for a political position, as long they were honest about the situation. I wouldn't mind talking to a worker for a political party, the same way that I don't mind talking to party volunteers outside polling places on election day. Still, you may have a different attitude to me.
I'm not denying that LLMs might be useful in programming. I'm not a programmer myself - I neither know nor care about the specifics of that field. What I deny is that usefulness for coding clearly translates into domain-general usefulness. As far as I can tell bots are useful for some forms of symbol manipulation, but are quite limited and narrow in their usefulness beyond that. When they manipulate symbols in fields that I'm familiar with, i.e. words, I find they are consistently bad at it.
I did see something going around about LLM intelligence, something along the lines of, "compare Fable to your ten smartest friends", with the implication that Fable would easily win that comparison. All I can say in response to that is, "get better friends". I've asked bots about history, philosophy, theology, fiction, politics, and in general things that I consider myself to know a lot about, and they are invariably awful. There is just no point asking one to do anything.
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I wrote a whole post about this.
Whether or not AI text is "worthless slop" depends on context. For fiction, or original thinking? Yes. For summarizing things or presenting information? No. The reason we prohibit LLM-posting (except when clearly stated as such and to serve a purpose) is that the Motte is supposed to be a discussion site, and no one (well, almost no one) actually thinks LLMs are "discussing" anything. If you just want to see LLMs arguing back and forth, there is OpenClaw for that.
Yes, and no. AI is already very, very good at some things. This is undeniable. It is getting better at a lot of things. It is an enormously useful tool, too useful to imagine that it's going to go away or turn out to be a passing trend.
Whether it's actually going to achieve
AGP(ETA: AGI, wtf kind of Freudian slip was that?) or trigger the Singularity is what warrants skepticism.Most AI boosters do not, in fact, think it's going to become a "super-intelligence that will obsolete us."
Just a heads up, I believe that the site you linked is a fake squatter website and it doesn't actually host any forum or discussion board, evrrything is mocked, and it exists exclusively to shill some other scam website.
You're probably looking for moltbook.
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...I know that's a typo, but I'm sorry, I'm just tickled by the idea of an LLM successfully achieving autogynephilia.
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I mean, yeah. It does. My personal experiences with LLMs (both at work doing programming and reading people's LLM-generated essays) have been profoundly unsatisfying. Therefore, I have extremely low expectations for them doing anything else well. But I think the people you see hyping up LLMs are not meeting your first criterion. For example, self_made_human has been pretty consistent in his opinions that he finds LLMs to be impressive at all the various tasks he sets to them, including writing. So it makes perfect sense that he is upbeat about their prospects in other areas. And I think the same goes for our other posters who are LLM fans - they find the models to be super impressive and therefore think they will continue to impress in the future.
I have no need to set LLMs to the task of proving or disproving longstanding mathematical conjectures, and it happens anyway. I'm sure the skeptics have some excuse. I do not particularly care to hear it these days.
But yes, I find them incredibly useful. I retain alpha in knowing how to prompt them well, but that hasn't been that important for a good while. Use the best models, give them the necessary context, scrutinize or test their output? If you're not getting good results in July 2026, there's a skill issue involved. Not mine, not the model's, PEBCAK for whoever is reading this and thinks that applies to them.
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I suppose my bafflement needs a top-level post at some point. It's easy to read something like this and start to feel nervous, and then I interact with an LLM for ten minutes and I am cured. These things are garbage.
Maybe it's just a matter of different fields, or different priorities. I'm looking for creativity, insight, and personality, whereas some the people worried about them are looking for... I don't know, writing computer code? Maybe in five years I'll be turned into a paperclip all while continuing to sneer that the best these systems can do is beige idiocy. LLMs don't need to be worthwhile to be a threat, and maybe garbage will destroy me one day.
Also @ChickenOverlord, please keep in mind that the cheap consumer AI you use to do your white-collar work for you or to compose an email is not the same as the one being developed by multibilliondollar companies to push the limits of technological possibility and/or conquer the world.
At the same time,
reads like a bunch of hot air about a bunch of hot air. I can't take those alignment people seriously.
We have no evidence that mythos/fable isn't the frontier or that they have another much better model in the back.
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I can echo that bafflement. Just started a new job and, like the old job, LLM usage is mandatory. And I can't just melt into the crowd like I could back at my megacorp. Every day I alternate between "this is nice and convenient" and "how did it make such a simple and obvious mistake?" It helps/hurts that most of what I'm doing is Python backend and Typescript frontend, both of which I don't care for, so I assume there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on too. Though I'm still working on what is essentially a basic bitch CRUD app, I've yet to try it on anything truly complex.
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Because the reason the Motte is pro-tech has a lot to do with the average occupation of its users, and that occupation is what the average LLM company has been actively targeting for replacement.
It's not that much more complex than that.
Understand that there are broadly two types of programmer: the people who like making computer do things, and the people who like writing code because they enjoy logic puzzles and symbol manipulation. For the former (myself included), AI is a godsend. For the latter, it's an apocalypse.
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It's not about to replace me for a long while yet. I am merely pivoting from code monkey to LLM wrangler. And 90% of my job as a software dev at a respectable German company is attending meetings, submitting forms for approval, and pretending to care about the minutiae of regulations. Thank God for our buerocracy; our economy might be doomed in the long run but it's good insurance against human obsolescence.
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LMOA, and his latest comment is even more on the nose:
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I’m sure it wouldn’t get banned, but IMO it’s too long and (granted, maybe because I skimmed it because it was too long) unclear why anyone really should care about the points it raises.
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AI tells are correlated with low quality garbage content, but are not solely the cause of it. In fact I spend hours every day reading thousands of words of output from my own clanker, which I wouldn't do at all if I didn't find it useful and worthwhile.
The fact is that this dump of slop is not worth reading at all. Get it off my timeline.
There are plenty of bloggers who type with human hands. Mute, block, report, and ignore all of the slopmeisters, and the gems will come to the top
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I can't speak for others but yes, I care about the provenance. I'm interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. And if the human has thoughts that they can't be bothered to elucidate, then I'm not interested in hearing the clanker puppet speaking on their behalf.
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Not that I'm interested in reading LLM slop dumps either, but I think if people are getting banned for LLM usage, there needs to be at least an explicit rule against using AI in this way (that I would fully support FWIW).
I have submitted a pull request.
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Strongly agreed. This is a very good thing to ban, but it ought to be a clear entry on the list, not just "this probably counts as low-effort and/or egregiously-obnoxious, if you really think about it".
I'd shorten or suspend @Nwallins' ban in addition to writing such a rule, both because it arguably wasn't clear enough before and because the shame of the new rule should count as punishment too.Edit: changed my mind about and crossed out half of this after @netstack pointed us to the prior warning.
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