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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.
You are ignoring the widely repeated argument against it that is based on the attention economy - "I read it because you took the time to write it" etc. - which I find much more compelling. Adjacent sentiments were reasonable long before genAI, which I find to disprove the "psychosis" angle: if my long-distance girlfriend wanted to call me to give me an identical 10-second good morning greeting every day, that would be much easier to accept than if she made a 10-second recording and insisted that I play it back at a fixed time every day, and if a friend wrote me a 10-page rant on some topic, I would feel much more compelled to read it than if be sent me a 10-page blog post by someone else that he thinks happens to summarise his exact thoughts on a subject.
More laconically, surely you can't complain if I answer your "I asked AI to write this post for me" by "I asked AI to read your post for me".
Why not use ink and feather then?
It turns out that text has far more uses, even economic uses, than to signal effort.
Because the effort that is being fairly matched is cognitive effort, not incidental physical effort.
I don't deny text has more uses; if the point is to actually obtain information I seek, I don't care for the provenance (that's why I'm happy with a lot of AI-generated documentation, and will ask Gemini to sift through search results). However, the main point of reading and writing on a forum like this, or blog posts on SSC, is not seeking and providing specific information.
Political debate is more akin to technical manuals than it is with literature, in my view. I understand it is not a popular view around these parts, where people think of what they do as philosophy, but it's misplaced in my view.
The internet's conceit has long been to ignore that few things worth reading weren't worth publishing.
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