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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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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.

What people dislike about AI sounding texts is that they are trite, not that they are AI generated.

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.

I don't care if they have suffered doing some other thing

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".

at least it actually captures what had existed at some point,

I'm afraid not.

You know what I meant.

I think i do. But that we disagree about the nature of representation as it relates to ontology in particular and metaphysics in general.

Photography does not capture reality in any more meaningful a sense painting does. Which to me is Pratchett's joke.