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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#51

Post by zmgsabst »

McBainiel wrote: post #11

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I don't like AI and ultimately I think it's because of its tone. I don't know why OpenAI made ChatGPT so wordy and almost unctuous. I've realised I don't actually care about people using it for programming or brainstorming or whatever. It's just I feel so inslulted when I read something that is in the default AI voice. So I don't know that I agree entirely with the writer of…

I enjoy its tone when writing long form content — eg, this start of a book project. Certainly more than many long form blog articles, eg, on Medium.

Tastes vary.

https://zmichaelgehlke.com/misc/in-harmony.html

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#52

Post by happytoexplain »

tempfile wrote: post #33
happytoexplain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhere between the author and a true-neutral stance. Something can be "an affront to humanity [that] will ultimately cause our downfall" and also "help in some areas". Those aren't mutually exclusive, logically, despite sounding that way.

It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.

I disagree. Generically speaking that's true, but specifically speaking, AI has a wide variety of use cases, and they do not all, from the perspective of a normal user, appear to help spread what they perceive to be the bad parts.

Obviously if we could somehow separate the good from the bad, we should, but it seems like an intractable problem.

This dichotomy (polychotomy?) is also aggravated by the fact that when people talk about AI, they are probably 99% referring to generation of prose, art, and code (as opposed to e.g. medical diagnosis).

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#53

Post by wasteduniverse »

ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

[dead]

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#54

Post by ayaen »

S0y wrote: post #8

Semi related but, googling a problem just to stumble on an 100% written by AI Medium article as the top result, is the bane of my existence. So really, I can get behind the author.

Some people dont even bother with cleaning up the boiler plate:

"Sure, here are 11 examples of recursive islands..." Yeah, that's how some articles begin

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#56

Post by Vegenoid »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #30
S0y wrote: post #8

Semi related but, googling a problem just to stumble on an 100% written by AI Medium article as the top result, is the bane of my existence. So really, I can get behind the author.

Assuming it answers the problem, what’s the issue?

This assumption would often be false, which is the problem. I already have access to LLMs (that I leverage often), I’m using a search engine because I’m looking for high-quality, detailed info or real-world examples from someone who knows what they are talking about.

This blind cheerleading of LLM-generated content filling the web is what pushes people to hate them.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#57

Post by pxc »

tempfile wrote: post #33
happytoexplain wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhere between the author and a true-neutral stance. Something can be "an affront to humanity [that] will ultimately cause our downfall" and also "help in some areas". Those aren't mutually exclusive, logically, despite sounding that way.

It's coherent (just) for something to be an affront to humanity and helpful for some tasks. It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.

> It's emphatically not coherent for you to consider something an affront to humanity and to condone using it.

A lot of people (particularly Americans) seem to think of nuclear bombs in exactly this way. They typically see the 'some task' to be of extremely outsized necessity and importance, and I think they'd say that makes the two ideas cohere.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#59

Post by yugffred »

ziddoap wrote: post #10

> Unlike many, I don’t sit on the fence. I hate it with a passion. I think it’s an affront to humanity and will ultimately cause our downfall. If an article uses AI, even just for header images, I don’t read it. This seems just as silly of a take as the fervent supporters of sticking AI everywhere. AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) and is shitty in others (e.g. spam content). I wonder if the a…

Someone has to stop giving these sloppyjoes the clicks, because then they’ll stop making slop.

They are uninterested in the content they just want the clicks.

If a doctor just slops a diagnosis that results in malpractice via “hallucination” then people will stop going to them.

Will you continue to use that dangerous doctor just for the sake of your misguided principle?

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#60

Post by Ukv »

cjf101 wrote: post #34
erickhill wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we not put lines in our robots.txt files to block being crawled?

There was a bunch of reporting on how AI companies and researchers were using tools that ignored robots.txt. It's a "polite request" that these companies had a strong incentive to ignore, so they did. That incentive is still there, so it is likely that some of them will continue to do so.

CommonCrawl[0] and the companies training models I'm aware of[1][2][3] all respect robots.txt for their crawling.

If we're thinking of the same reporting, it was based on a claim by TollBit (a content licensing startup) which was in turn based the fact that "Perplexity had a feature where a user could prompt a specific URL within the answer engine to summarize it". Actions performed by tools acting as a user agent (like archive.today, or webpage-to-PDF site, or a translation site) aren't crawlers and aren't what robots.txt is designed for, but either way the feature is disabled now.

[0]: https://commoncrawl.org/faq

[1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

[2]: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthr...

[3]: https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher...

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