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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Yeah, my point is that you don't need perfect verification, you just need to make the bar high enough that the random trolls (bored idiots who pop in and play their first 20 games throwing all the moves into an engine) aren't going to bother. Even today, people can still get away with cheating at chess online, but they have to put effort into making it more believable. If you just want to play decent human-level chess, you can trust that your average experience online will be decent - you won't be sure the other player never cheated, but you can expect to play a good game, not just be stomped by ganjaboy420 and his ELO 3000 playstyle.

Relevant xkcd.

That xkcd has always been stupid. Before AIs, people kept bringing it up in the context of "if we can get the trolls to post things that don't violate the rules, shouldn't we be fine with trolls?" Trolls can do things that don't violate any rules, but which cumulatively have bad effects that are not accounted for by the rules; it's a form of Goodharting. And it's very hard to make a rule that exactly covers the kind of damage their posts cause.

Also, in that xkcd the system to detect helpful AIs is rating comments. We know how rating comments goes, and it 1) has flaws and 2) does NOT lead to all the comments actually being helpful, particularly when AIs are involved (check any subreddit infested by bots).

Yeah, my point is that you don't need perfect verification, you just need to make the bar high enough that the random trolls (bored idiots who pop in and play their first 20 games throwing all the moves into an engine) aren't going to bother.

Ok, and I think there's a pretty good chance that AI will make it super-easy to get over such bars.

Relevant xkcd.

I would have to disagree with the (apparent) point of this comic strip. Let's suppose that we get to the point where 95% of the comments on this message board are machine-generated with little or no human input. Let's further suppose that all of these comments fully comply with all the rules. They are charitable; polite; and so on. Even so, I am pretty sure I would lose interest in participating.

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