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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.
There is no other form of writing.
I hope I will live to see this psychosis around text generation not being genuine somehow be ridiculed like the disdain for photography came to be ridiculed. And I further hope that the same will happen to the ridiculous anthropomorphization of these tools.
What people dislike about AI sounding texts is that they are trite, not that they are AI generated. But we somehow have to pretend that most human written text isn't shit and that the painstaking process of communication imbues it with further value, all out of some misplaced luddite syndicalism.
Writing is communication, and at its highest, art. All of which comes from intent and cognition in the mind that originates it, and none of this is untrue of generated text, much like none of this is untrue of photography.
As this place exists to pursue debate in political ideas, and not as an exercise in keyboard assisted calligraphy, I believe the norm in question will come to be seen as not only antiquated, but impossible to enforce.
No. I dislike that it is generated by an LLM. Ultimately it comes down to: I care what humans have to say, not clankers. If you can't be assed to actually write something, then I have no desire to read it.
You claim what you really care about is some commitment that the writer has to the output. You want people to suffer enough that what they have to say may have some value.
This logic contradicts your conclusions. Even granting text generation is free of work (it is not), you would have to be interested in generated texts by authors that have proved their commitment through some other method.
For instance, you should be more interested in a terrorists' generated manifesto than in human written ads.
So either it is untrue that this is the reason of your disdain, or it is untrue that what you dislike about generated text is that it is generated.
No, I just want commitment to the actual writing. If I have to suffer reading it, they had better have suffered writing it. I don't care if they have suffered doing some other thing, and in fact in the specific terrorist example that would count against them.
Why is suffering using a specific tool a different signal than suffering using another specific tool?
The human has picked the words. Yes, yes, I know, I arbitrarily don't value things like "the human has calligraphied the words in a specific handwriting style and ink", etc etc. I value what I value.
And say what you will about photography, at least it actually captures what had existed at some point, not does something like "an imp inside the machine had been told what the picture looked like in order for it to reproduce it".
I'm afraid not.
You know what I meant.
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Despite this uncharitable framing, yeschad.jpg, seeing as being human necessarily entails suffering. If this is the main distinction you want to draw between humans and clankers, I'll raise my brow but shrug and nod along so long as it leads you to the same conclusions, i.e that humans have a certain connection to their outputs in a way clankers don't and can't.
This doesn't follow at all. Writing is both art and a means of communication at the same time, and I am perfectly qualified to check out of the implicit writer-to-reader "conversation" if I sense insincerity, regardless of the "artistic" merits of the person trying to dupe me; failing to do so, to take your example, would necessarily entail taking every human-written ad on its face as long as it looks professional enough (and all ads look professional enough, that's like the entire point). Adsloppers are definitely very committed to their creations, they have a real stake in it, yet I do not find it in myself to care. Same with clankers and their, uh, representatives.
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That's a remarkable amount of words you stuffed in my mouth there. I said what I care about: that a human made it. All that nonsense about suffering is your own invention, not anything I actually believe.
A human made generated text. There's no such thing as non-human-made text. Photographs are taken by the photographer, not the camera.
How much would you pay a photographer for a portrait? How much would you pay an oil painter for a portrait?
Higher productivity means more units offered any price and each extra unit costs less, flattening the supply curve.
On the demand side, photographs face many close substitutes and original paintings do not. So for paintings per-unit willingness to pay will be large an lumpy, for photographs it will be small and they will be a near-commodity.
This provides what we see: photographs are exchanged at low prices in large quantities, paintings are exchanged at high prices in low quantities.
Now if we are to analogize this to text, i would expect indeed that handwritten text becomes determined by uniqueness and provenance while generated text capture all commodity uses of text.
Note that none of this implies that any of the goods described here aren't created by humans.
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No, an LLM-generated text is not made by a human. LLMs are not like a camera, which is a mere tool. They are like hiring someone to write for you, then passing the work off as your own. True, that was something which happened before, but it was never considered as good as actually writing something, nor was it considered acceptable at all in most cases.
I disagree that software has personhood. I think that, much like photography detractors in their time, you're trying to dismiss productivity improvements by anthropomorphizing what it ultimately a tool.
It's not that using an LLM is ghostwriting, it's that writing as a broad category has become so easy that it's commodified. And you think, fairly, that the commodities are beneath you.
If generated text is not made by a human, then who made it?
I don't think that LLMs need to have actual personhood, for them to properly evoke more human-like intuitions about their use than tool-like intuitions.
Take the Huggingface hack for example. I genuinely think a person who anthropomorphizes the LLMs who coordinated on secret message boards to some degree probably has a better handle on what happened, than someone who tries their hardest not to anthropomorphize them.
I think it's similar to dealing with a clever fox that wants to get into your chicken coop and eat your chickens. You have to understand how your adversary is different from a person as well, but thinking about them in personal terms will help you more for dealing with your adversary than not.
Generated text is caused by a human. I think under some circumstances, it would be fair to say it was made by the LLM.
If I give a prompt to an LLM agent like, "Write a 50,000 word Romantasy novel. Research the tropes and techniques that really get readers hooked, and include them in your novel." Then I would say that the result is mostly the product of the LLM, even if it wouldn't exist without the human prompting.
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