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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.
There’s an abstract idea in the back of my head about “pure” expression, unobstructed by (but requiring some) constraints.
Right now, if you run text through an LLM, it will make it sound less like you and more like every other LLM. I hope we find ways to use AI and other developments to make people more express their pure, unique selves.
Like the invention of new forms of art, back to the first cave paintings, or like the Internet did with personal sites, webcomics, and flash games. Even those constrain the artist to the medium and trends, but I think they are net improvements.
People say this but i think it's completely untrue. You can make the result sound vastly different if you're willing to put some effort into properly using it.
It again sounds to me like criticism of photography "they all look the same", yeah, if you haven't invented or considered a composition grammar or metering and exposure.
What's maybe true is that it'll always sound slightly different than handwritten ways in ways that may or may not be important. But rejecting it altogether as a tool is a stronger claim than that.
I know, survivorship bias, but I’ve never seen a convincing example of LLM-written text that didn’t read at least slightly but noticeably LLM-written, and definitely certain human writing styles I’ve never seen replicated by an LLM. The Unslop Contest tried to produce good AI fiction, and every result has similar LLM prose except the schizophrenic one.
I can think of one but to be fair it's not longform compared to those.
That’s an old post, I think GPT-3. Older LLMs did sound more original, although they hallucinated more. Interestingly, increasing an LLM’s temperature hyperparameter (which I’m almost certain produced the schizophrenic Unslop entry) also makes it sound different and unique, but output nonsense.
Probably because they’re more random, but also (at least GPT-3 does) rely less on fine tuning and more on its training from the Internet.
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