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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.
I found an interesting YouTube channel all about the history of industry and engineering. I've enjoyed a couple of the videos, they're focused and informative and broadly of the sort of quality you'd expect from a YouTube video essay. Of course all the thumbnails are AI slop because 95% of YouTube thumbnails are AI slop now, but then I looked at the dates on the videos and they're all from this year.
So I think it's safe to assume that the script, the voiceover are 100% AI, and the editing and production are more than likely AI assisted, but it makes me wonder how much of the video is fake too. I'm not sure it is as it's mostly archive footage, and AI video tends to be fairly easy to spot even when it's not dealing with things that involve complex machinery and coordination, but the seed of doubt that it's planted has put me off watching any more of them.
Not quite true. I immediately hit "don't recommend" the moment I see a slop thumbnail. Youtube still manages to deliver many reccs.
I even block formerly good creators who have begun to slop it up for some stock images in the middle of the vids. Hard rule: see ai, block channel. No exceptions. Good riddance, there are many more out there. I still spend hours every day watching human yt content.
Edit: I just checked my youtube, out of 25 top reccs, 2 thumbnails had signs of ai in any form - I consider even minor edits with gpt to be a no-go. I blocked those channels of course.
I also block channels that put out slop but thumbnails? Who gives a shit.
You do whatever works for you, but I'm just making a point that there are tons of channels out there that don't do slop thumbnails. In fact it's likely a minority that does.
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