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Notes -
Regarding the Substack Essay AI Posting Controversy:
(And, honestly? — What are we all doing here?)
It is in general a bad idea to use an LLM with no stylistic tweaks when there is plenty of online evidence of your writing style pre-AI for anyone to compare to, which makes the difference even more obvious.
More generally, the problem is that in a hobbyist community the objective is not maximizing productivity. It’s actually having a nice time with like-minded people. It is reasonable for a chess player to want to play another chess player who is not using a chess computer, even if that chess player promises to tune the computer so that its capability matches the player’s own skill level. Some part of the game is made more fun by knowing that one is playing another human. If that is sentimental then it is because humans are sentimental.
There is a joy in trying to convince another mind, another person, with a full life, with stories of their own. There is meaning in the experiences they have had - some universal, sure, but many not - that come through in the occasional anecdote, throwaway story, weird bit of inside knowledge. I like those things, they’re what make this place special. That said, they’re not the only things that made and make this place special.
We do have to think about what happens to this community now. There has been a real change. Ten years ago if you wanted to discuss what was happening in the world with other intelligent people in a polite way that accommodated heterodox views, didn’t like random slurs or insults, and had good moderation, this was one of maybe five places you could do that. In many ways, it still is. But even I recognize that I can now have intelligent, thoughtful and challenging political conversations with frontier (consumer) LLMs, and while they push back on some culture war stuff we must presume Grok or some Chinese open source model will get there eventually, probably very soon.
When that happens, the humanity will be the point. So I think it is probably useful to crack down, via friendly and mutual agreement, on LLMposting. A lot of weird shit is about to happen, and I’d like to discuss it with you, not (just) with Claude.
Scott Alexander's official response
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It should be illegal for AI to imitate humans. (now, this is obviously both unworkable and too late, but still.)
I'm not just talking about scams or intentional deceptions. I hate that every commercial website has an "AI assistant" with an human name and picture in the corner like Jessica.
It should be illegal to name your AIs with human names, it should be illegal to allow it to imitate a human voice - Robots should be named things like Rx-12 and talk with a robotic voice. Siri and Alexa should not have been allowed their names or voices.
AI should not be allowed to produce textual output that reads like a human, AI should not be allowed to generate images or videos of humans, and robots should not be allowed to have human bodies.
They should make ai output from major apis and apps have hidden unicode combining characters and major browsers and apps should display this in a slightly different slightly robotic looking font. That way you can see exactly where ai edits begin and end.
Obviously this could be stripped out easily but casual sloppers won't care
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I wouldn't go that far, but I do agree that AI should be clearly labeled. Possibly it wouldn't even require an amendment to existing laws because a lot of jurisdictions already prohibit "deceptive business practices."
That being said, possibly my biggest objection to AI as deployed by businesses is that as far as I can tell, the AI rarely has the ability or authority to actually solve my problem. Instead, it just regurgitates information and functionality which is already present on the company website.
Right but my reaction isn’t just “deception”. I wish that society as a whole found it offputting and offensive to personify robots past 70s sci-fi androids. Calling your AI agent Jessica and giving her a cute white girl icon isn’t fooling anyone, but should still be anathema
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Maybe this is just me, but I actually don't enjoy writing. I enjoy having written my thoughts in a way that conveys my internal dialogue in a format that is digestible to others, but that's time-consuming and often misses the target. Given the option of a super-intelligent entity that can save me the trouble... well it's difficult to deny the appeal (btw I've never used an LLM, yet). Language is limited whereas thoughts are not, and bridging that gap can be frustrating.
One thing I love about this forum is in stumbling across a post or comment that brilliantly summarizes my internal thoughts in a far more coherent and eloquent way than I could ever hope to do myself. I'm often tempted to copy and paste some of these passages to others who have shared in a relevant conversation previously. In a way, I use TheMotte as my own LLM, I suppose.
It's not just you, I also don't enjoy writing. But LLM outputs of my thoughts never really hit write (buh dum tss) either. They never really convey any soul to my thoughts.
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Well here's my question for you: Suppose AI advances to the point where it reliably produces content that is coherent and eloquent as you describe. Will you continue to participate in forums such as this one? Or will you just engage back and forth with the AI?
It sounds like you would choose the latter option, which is fine by me. But if you do continue to participate in this forum, it kind of shows that you prefer human interaction. Which means you understand why others would prefer not to engage with an AI but with another person acting as the middleman.
As a side note, the same kind of reasoning applies to people who use chess computers to cheat while playing online chess. The fact that they feel the need to cheat against live humans (as opposed to simply using a computer to help them play against other computers) more or less proves that they see the value in human interaction. A value which they are denying to others.
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I understand the desire because, at least for me, writing is work. Torturous work, even, when I’m trying to write creatively and draw out a specific idea properly.
However, putting aside the usual arguments about human creativity and soul and all that, I think there is genuine value in having to write things out. I find that ideas I take the time to write out become much more ‘real’ in the process; concepts that can bounce around loosely in your head suddenly need to be translated into something coherent. The process is almost always transformative, and I find myself making connections or grappling with an issue in a way I hadn’t before. With creative writing it’s very similar — there are so many times I’ve found what the scene was really about through the act of turning notes into prose.
I won’t say this is how it is for everyone, but I suspect there would be something significant lost by skipping the friction of writing it out, even in hypothetical scenario where an AI could hook up to your brain and port the contents of your thoughts into readable text.
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I'm fairly butthurt on this topic because while I think AI writing is not better than the best humans at writing, at the moment, it can at least get the point across.
I wrote an essay a few months ago that took about 4 days. I had 2 human friends review it. I made sure to handle drive by criticisms and anticipate other objections.
Some parts of my essay didn't flow nicely so I asked Claude for a suggestion on those. In some places I did use Claude's suggestion, verbatim. This had an obvious AI tell but it was genuinely better than the way I phrased it. Nevertheless 95% of the essay was my artisan human typing.
Boom, essay ruined. Some anti slop warrior came by and accused me of having no respect for the people who have to read it, derailing the conversation
The only reason I even used Claude is because I was trying to produce a serious work and I didn't have an editor handy. Fuck me.
Anyway, I understand people are irked by completely phoned in comments or articles or emails but the AI detectives are their own online cancer.
Sometimes your essay is better off having a part that doesn't flow perfectly. If you spent all that effort doing things by hand, why not just...not sloppify things at the final stretch? You had a workable essay and just had to install a massive flashing neon sign right on top of it that says "BY THE WAY I USED AI ON THIS ESSAY."
Even if the AI text itself communicates the point, you just associated yours with the billions of AI generated essays that have zero effort put into them. Was it really worth it?
I clearly failed to estimate how triggered the world is on this topic. The essay was about an LLM driven rewrite of a software module btw. Should not be controversial.
Am I going to stop using AI assistance? No. I'm just going to do a better job of concealing it next time.
Nothing has been gained. In software it's mostly accepted in professional circles that AI was used. In writing people are still trying to resist ✊🏻
Not really. It's still very controversial in the tech community, with some embracing it and some rejecting it.
I am aware of people rejecting it at small scales, but I'd guess they are a small minority of at least my social network. I haven't heard a big company come out against it, for example, but lots of examples of them embracing it. I'm open to other data, but my guess is something like 5% (loud) rejection or less.
There's a tonne of them that explicitly ban anything remotely SOTA for security reasons -- they do let you dick around with some terrible private-cloud instance of Copilot or whatnot so the C-suite doesn't worry about being "left behind", but it's a pretty strong repudiation of the usefulness of the thing. (from cybersecurity's point of view)
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As for companies, they are indeed not rejecting AI. But that is driven by the corpo executive types, not programmers. Among actual programmers, my experience has been that it's fairly evenly split between people who are to some degree enthusiastic about AI, and people who don't find it useful. Of the latter, very few are flat out refusing to use it, but of course it's not like the rest have much of a choice given the current state of the industry. Even if they think it's an ineffective tool, not many are so strongly opposed that they will risk their livelihoods over it.
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Well yeah, the two fields have different priorities. With writing the human intent is important. The point is to read and understand your thoughts, not what an AI has synthesized. If I wanted the AI output, I would skip the forum entirely and just ask Claude directly. In software, the goal is to solve a problem as efficiently as possible, using whatever tools available. Human intent is only valuable insofar as it pertains to designing good goals and making sure everything actually works as intended.
AI assistance being considered fine in one field and not the other is only natural.
I don't think it's that different. In the process of writing prose, you clarify your own thoughts and understanding, and communicate with the reader from your own perspective. With AI both these benefits are lost, either partially or entirely.
Code works the same way. It's very similar to writing. You will have a radically different and deeper perspective on anything after you try to write code for it. And if your code is part of a larger system and not throwaway, it'll be read much more often than it's written, so you're also communicating with the next people to maintain it. Nobody wants to have to read slop whether it's in the form of code or prose.
Of course code also has instrumental value, in the sense that it does stuff. There are places where throwaway slop code is fine, if you know what you're getting into. Prose also has instrumental value (in the sense of "my professor asked for this essay to have 1000 words" or "I need to fill space in this marketing copy") but AI is hopefully teaching people to stop incentivizing this the hard way.
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This is only one way of conceiving writing. It's equally fair to say that the point is to read something interesting, useful and thought-provoking. Personally I like films and love books but have never had the least interest in actors/directors and only the faintest interest in authors. I just like good stories. I accept that some people feel differently, but the idea that reading/writing is meant to be a kind of meeting of souls is really very foreign to me.
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It’s this escalation that I am starting to see elsewhere online:
Here’s what I think -> here’s what I think, edited by AI -> here’s what I think plus one argument that AI gave that I hadn’t thought of originally, but do agree with -> here’s what AI convinced me of -> [wholesale AI response]
If you really think that slope ain’t slippery, then there’s nothing more to say.
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What did you actually gain by including AI outputs in the essay text?
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“The humanity is the point” is a great way to summarize my position on it.
One of my favorite subreddits is slowly getting taken over by people who unashamedly post AI responses in the comments of posts or are using AI to draft a mere 300 words for a submission, and no matter how much I protest I get a parade of humans and AIs telling me to chill and judge the tsunami of LLM output on the merits of its semantic content.
My fear is opposition to this creep is a gut-level intuition that is harder to articulate than water usage fears or job replacement, or the dignity of artists or whatever. And so it goes unarticulated, even in the minds of those who might agree with me. Maybe there’s an even punchier and eloquent way to say “humanity is the whole point” but until then it’s going to be a lonely fight, until I’m the only human on the internet.
Yeah, I think that ever since our ancestors on the plains of Africa sat around the campfire spinning tales, arguing over nonsense, showing off trivial knowledge, etc. we have instinctively valued the human element of interaction. Another poster analogized the situation to online chess, and I agree. It's easy enough to download a chess engine; when people play online it's because they value engaging with (and competing with) an actual human.
Very likely it won't be long before it becomes practically impossible to tell the difference between human-generated and AI generated text. You'll be able to feed your posting history into an LLM and have it tireless engage (and argue) in your distinct style.
Once that happens, I'm pretty sure that I (and most others) will stop engaging with forums such as this one. So that eventually most online discussion forums will be 99% or even 100% AI-generated posts.
Which kinda sucks, but I guess people will go back to the campfire; to bars; to coffee shops.
This does seem somewhat likely. Although I hope there will be forms of online interaction that are more verifiably human-only - in that the cost of infiltrating with AI will be not infinite, but high enough that few will bother. Online chess survives, but only because tools exist that are pretty reliable for detecting chess engine usage. These tools aren't undefeatable, but they're sufficient. Maybe we'll replace text posts with TikTok posts, or something (YES, I can see you shuddering).
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It's really the fundamental tension of post-scarcity, isn't it? Some people enjoy what they do, some do it for the paycheck, and others are a mix of both. I'm not opposed to automation (AI these days) replacing drudge work nobody wants to do, but I really would rather I get the benefit of post-scarcity before my paycheck disappears. In practice, we've mostly been fine so far because things mostly change slower than you'd think from the headlines.
On the gripping hand, I'm not even sure society is ready for post-scarcity: it's not at all clear to me that everyone would be better off if we could all stop going to work tomorrow and still get paid. Some people would do well and find new friends and hobbies, I'm sure, but I suspect quite a few would end up worse than today in some metrics due to the usual vices (drugs, alcohol, World of Warcraft). As much as I like the idea of The Culture/The Federation, I'm not wholly convinced it isn't a bit dystopian in its own way. I hear a couple of Banks' books consider that, but I haven't gotten to those.
My apartment complex gate stops working constantly. My car's undercarriage keeps dragging on the ground and I have to keep it up with rope. My basic Android phone can't set reminders accurately. Speech to text is randomly capitalizing stuff I then have to correct. A delivery driver the other day couldn't find an apartment in my complex and I was unable to help him. He kept wandering around...
I just see normie problems persisting and I'm supposed to be fearful or at least anxious about post-scarcity and a lack of meaning? The UMC creative and knowledge worker is surrounded by seamless efficiency and can actually ponder some potential problem of life being much too comfortable and bereft of purpose. The rest of us are gleeful AI dilettantes who still have to left with our legs, not our backs.
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You already tried this experiment. You got 3 months of peace... after which a massive wave of burning, looting, murder began.
UBIs simply aren't compatible with people spending it all on politics, because the people who still do have to work won't be paid enough to keep them un-enslaved.
You already see this now in Western countries where scarcity is itself a scarce resource- where politics isn't yet sufficiently lucrative for sane people to pursue it- so you end up being ruled by a combination of people who have nothing but time for politics (Karens, dogwalkers, old people) and those whose positions inherently pay out in political power (bureaucracies/HR/academics).
UBI, but only for the deeply involved in church or subcultural scenes. UBI, for those who forswear politics and vow to embrace lowest common denominator slop. UBI, for those who pledge to do too many drugs to seek societal change
In other words, you must sell your ability to do politics to receive the UBI.
At a personal level, we call that "slavery"; at a State level, we call that "The Republic of South Africa". (Complicated by the fact that South Africa wasn't post-scarcity at that time, so if you had genes that were [at that specific time] a reasonably-effective proxy for "unproductive with respect to the people with actual financial power" [inconveniently visibly marked on your body from birth], you had to sell your ability to do politics to have the privilege of working for a living.)
This is why communist nations are all authoritarian: the populace itself has forged this exact bargain and collectively sold itself into slavery.
Or in other words:
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A world of vice-ridden indolents would be utopian compared to the pessimistic scenario of "the psychopathic Haves simply stop sharing land and resources with the Have Nots once they no longer need our labor or the consent of the governed".
And then get lynched? The gods of copybook heading will return, one way or another.
The whole point is that you needn't worry that you get lynched if you are protected by a tireless AI-controlled array of drones and Boston Dynamics dogs. To expect that the rabble will find a way around it is to believe, against all odds, that humans will remain superior in some way after all.
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Sounds rough. You should try getting an AI to articulate it.
(I joke, of course)
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Totally agreed. I'm becoming more and more convinced with what I'm seeing on a daily basis (not like I have any particularly strong links to the AI companies, so this isn't secret insider info or anything, just what I'm observing on the margins of the AI transformation, which has already made huge impacts in quant finance) that what makes us special is not our intelligence, but our humanity with all its flaws.
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