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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

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.