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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.
“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).
I share your hope but I'm not optimistic. I think a big part of the reason online chess survives is that a lot of people play at fast time controls so that it's difficult for (c)heaters to enter moves into the chess engine. Even now, a skilled programmer could probably set something up so that moves are picked up automatically and entered into chess engine. I think it's likely that AI will make it easy for anyone to create such cheatware.
The other big way that (c)heaters are caught is that their moves are compared to the outputs of the big chess engines. If a player's moves are either (1) substantially the same as those of a major chess engine; or (2) consistently among the top few suggestions of the big chess engines, then it's a strong indication that the player is (c)heating. Again, this seems like something a skilled programmer could get around. And that therefore, in the near future it's likely to be pretty easy to create a program which fixes these issues. Possibly it would be just a matter of feeding 40 or 50 of one's past games into the system and telling the AI to create a chess engine which plays in the same style but simulates skill increasing steadily over the next year or two and ultimately reaching grandmaster level.
I suspect that using a computer to "cheat," so to speak, in online debates would be even easier. And it would surely be tempting for many people to have a system which farms karma points while one sleeps and which grinds one's opponents down without doing the work of actually reading their posts and drafting responses. Especially if they suspect other people are doing something similar.
I'm tempted to say that AI will likely offer ways to circumvent this as well, but I think it's too early to say.
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).
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