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Notes -
Writing an effortpost carries with it a number of discussions
-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 don't 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.
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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.
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?
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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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