This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A scandal has erupted in the French literary scene after Thélyson Orélien the Canadian-Haitian author of C’était ça ou mourir has been accused of writing his novel with AI.
The novel won the Fnac Novel Prize and is currently a finalist for some of the most prestigious annual French litterature awards such as the Goncourt and the Renaudot.
On Tuesday an X account called Balance ton Claude claimed the book was entirely written with AI using Pangram 4 to attest it, but any frequent user of AI assisted writing can recognize blatant tells in the text of the novel, such as common AI formulations, incoherences between different chapters and a generally repetitive style.
The author denies it, claiming the first draft of the book dates back to 2019, well before AI tools were widely available.
However, beyond the author, the scandal is splashing over the whole Parisian edition milieu, a well oiled book selling machine whose mediocrity and pompousness has long been criticized. Are the people who claim to be the defenders of Eternal France and its prized literary tradition so asleep at the wheel that they'll award prestigious prizes to low quality prompts?
The defense of the author and Grasset, the publishing house, also takes a certain culture war direction, shielding themselves behind the author's origins and "exceptional life story" against "numerous racist attacks".
A recent development of the story may put holes in this defense however, as another X user has discovered that an older award winning novella of Orélien's, Où va le monde, was entirely plagiarized from a 1960s text of Louis Pauwels.
If the first draft dates back to 2019, it's an open and shut case, right? We just need to see the draft.
Is it time for all writers to start using git to be able to prove they really wrote something?
Git history can be faked. I think it should be a timelapse, like the artists do.
Timelapses can be faked, too.
It’s harder than git, which is trivial with AI. But it’s also fakeable, yeah
More options
Context Copy link
This is a solved problem. Just put the commit hashes on a blockchain as you make them.
Of course, there's (by design) no way to do it after the fact; you need to have anticipated you might be challenged on the timeline and set this up in advance. Doubt many people are actually doing this in tech, let alone writing. Certainly no one was worried about proving their novel wasn't written by AI in 2019, though this process does have other uses, like establishing authorship (or at least that you had access to the intermediate versions at the time).
That doesn't make it unfakeable. Just have the AI break down the story into a plausible sequence of edits and schedule for publishing the commit hashes to the blockchain. By design you still have the latency of writing but don't have to actually write anything.
More options
Context Copy link
You can upload them to any website then archive it. archive.org or archive.today tampering with their archive is unlikely (yes I’m aware of the stupid drama between archive.today and this blogger, but that doesn’t translate into him ever tampering your blog for your benefit). Both tampering is even unlikelier.
The downside is your draft must have a public URL. Except it can be someone nobody would stumble on, then the archive sites get too much requests, it’s basically still private.
Sure, I guess? It just seems inferior to the blockchain method, which requires zero trust and has no risk of exposing your work. I'm also not sure how easy it would be to prove ownership over an archived website at the time of archival -- well, you could just put a digital signature on the page, I guess. I suppose the edge is that it's easier to explain how this proves the timeline to nontechnical people? And maybe cost, though I'm not sure about that given opentimestamp's batching strategy; both are free to the user, anyway.
I think the blockchain is technically better, but archiving is more accessible for normies.
OTOH I don’t know how to upload a commit hash to a reliable blockchain. I found https://commitproof.com/, but is it trustworthy? Why Cardano? And it costs ~$0.75 per upload. I suppose I can ask Claude.
Or I think I could upload to IPFS, but this blog post (first search result) makes it seem relatively complicated. Whereas to archive I just paste the URL into an archive site.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link