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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.
I think it's the other way around. People grow to dislike text that "sounds like AI" because they don't like AI. Em-dashes weren't a problem until AI started using them; "It's not X, it's Y" wasn't a problem until AI started using it; and so on.
Sometimes people dislike AI for inherently ideological reasons, and maybe the tide will shift on that. But I think more frequently, AI becomes synonymous with "a thing that you didn't put as much effort into" because that is factually what it is, and knowing how much effort someone put into something is socially important. (For many people, their biggest exposure to AI output comes from lazy good-for-nothing coworkers/bosses/scammers, and they hate those people!)
Photographs didn't become popular by becoming indistinguishable from paintings. They became their own thing, and people have a decent understanding of how much effort goes into them! If you submitted an inkjet print of a photo to a painting competition, people would still get mad at you.
There are cases where AI that is clearly AI has gotten some mainstream acceptance; people enjoy DougDoug streams and, to some extent, weird demos that obviously couldn't be done another way. But in areas where it's competing directly against art forms that require more effort, people just look for other ways to prove they put in the effort. (Many artists have started recording time-lapses of themselves painting to show that they actually did it; many writers deliberately avoid clichés that AI uses.)
That's perceptive.
But the problem is that this also applies to the printing press. Who actually gives a shit about copyist monk stolen valor when we could make the whole of Europe read?
Type made on a printing press continues to be seen as much less valuable than handwritten calligraphy; that's why some people still hand-write their wedding invitations.
Because "valuable" and "expensive" are synonyms, the printing press brought books into reach of a lot more people. But all the forms of art that AI copies were already broadly accessible to everyone. You could already get a near-infinite amount of drawings and videos and TheMotte comments for free online, that's where the AI companies got their training data from.
It is often argued that AI will allow more people to create those things. From the consumer perspective, that just means it's harder for me to find the people who put a lot of actual effort into them, which is what I was mostly looking for in the first place (especially in a social venue like TheMotte), so it's net-negative.
I just find it funny that people reinvent Guénon's tirades against the reign of quantity the second that industry comes for them.
Your love of handwritten text is the same as my love of handmade objects. Quaint but ultimately secondary to the pursuit of ends.
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