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Begrudging congratulations to @self_made_human for producing a book review entry that's good enough to make it as a finalist of Scott's Book Review Contest, yet AI-sloppy enough to make the comments section focus almost exclusively on the (un)acceptability of undisclosed use of AI.
This reminds me of a video I stumbled on the other day. It's a 12-minute "documentary-style" video essay telling the story of a rescue dog that gets dropped off at a shelter without any documentation. It's a cute, healthy dog that should be eminently adoptable except for his utter refusal to engage with anyone. Five months in, the dog's time at the shelter is up, and he is scheduled for transfer to doggy prison (or whatever, the point is that it's the end of trying to get him adopted). But a woman brings in her small, shy six-year-old deaf girl, and amazingly the dog responds to the child alone, and knows all the hand-sign commands. Turns out the dog was raised by a deaf old man, who then had a stroke. That's the gist, though the video packs a whole lot more dramatic beats, twists, and turns.
It's a real tear-jerker... if it describes a true story. Unless it's made up. Which, come to think of it (I say to myself as I review my reaction to the video), it probably is. Because how can there possibly be a dog smart enough to learn sign commands, yet so dumb that it couldn't possibly figure out any other forms of human-dog communication. Yeah, I smell bullshit.
But OK, maybe it's like a video short fiction, it's not supposed to be real, no more than any other kind of fiction. Then I can judge the video on this fictional-short-film kind of merit, and not worry about thinking critically on the veracity of facts. Damn it, they really should have specified that this is fiction. Then I can enjoy it as such. It has good plot beats. The actors are cute and relatable. Especially the dog.
Unless it's AI-generated. Posted March 2026. Possible. Fuck.
When I read something that, presumably, is the human author's thoughts, only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust as when I read something purportedly factual that turns out to be fictional, even if not actively meant to deceive. This is definitely true if the entire output is LLM-produced, and remains partially true if LLM is used for editing that inserts LLM-created phrases. Like this zinger from the review:
I hope this forum preserves the norm of humans writing for humans by humans, even as I know that the overall tide is flowing the other way.
The ai video has far fewer immediate tells than it did a year ago, but it's still completely obvious slop.
These channels are botted so unclear how many people truly watch them.
If you've ever signed out of YouTube and erased all your device history, and looked for anything fresh, it's amazing how much bot slop there is everywhere. Try 'revenge stories' or something for a particularly egregious look at the genre.
I've been a cynic/pessimist/skeptic about 'AI' here before, but one thing I think it will do a lot of is spam, and unless filter technology keeps up and matches it, I think there is a very real chance that platforms like YouTube become genuinely unuseable within the next few years.
Personally I'm a lot more bullish on YouTube. They're very good at serving different content to different groups of people, mostly through wisdom-of-the-crowds / clustering type algorithms that are relatively easy to implement but require a billion users' worth of activity data. (They've gone so far in on this that these days, they just leave the homepage completely blank if you haven't given them enough data to tell what clusters you're in.)
It helps that the current YouTube meta is usually to build a community on a platform like Discord. That gives you a lot of clear clusters of users who are, like, members of a Pokemon Sword & Shield speedrunning Discord group or a Marxist literary analysis Bluesky community or whatever, who watch a bunch of creators and enforce the appropriate norms for those communities themselves. This lets you filter out AI videos in basically the same way that YouTube ensured that last decade's flood of offputting videos for babies was only shown to actual babies.
Platforms that use more simple/global ranking metrics are probably doomed, though. Just look at Hacker News...
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