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Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

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Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#61

Post by ziddoap »

sofixa wrote: post #39
stonethrowaway wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It wastes your time because it's full of cruft. And you cannot assume to trust it will solve your problem, so you're risking losing even more time.

While I'm not about to defend AI blog spam, what you just said it completely applicable to human-generated blogs as well.

You should not just assume something is trustworthy or will solve your problem just because it was written by a human. And I have read plenty of cruft-filled blogs/articles/etc. from humans.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#62

Post by Vegenoid »

mulhoon wrote: post #35

The quality of Medium articles (and comments) has really gone down over the past few years. Lots of attention grabbing headlines “5 ways to X” “Stop doing X” and less well-written content overall. I’m not sure if most writers hopped over to Substack but it feels like a cheaper place than it used to be.

There was a brief period where seeing a Medium article in a search result made me excited. Now, I avoid them, because of too many experiences with shallow, incorrect, or LLM-generated articles.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#63

Post by packetlost »

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…

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses)

Uhhh, I don't know about that one. Have we seen studies that show real predictive capabilities? Anecdotal evidence is not helpful, and it seems rather risky to depend on something that has not been thoroughly vetted when it comes to people's lives.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#64

Post by helboi4 »

I sort of love that he takes a strong stance here. I think even if you think there are some applications for AI, you should be able to strongly state where it is not useful. Having AI churn out bloat text in the form of terrible blogposts and misleading listicles that makes it harder for genuine information to be found online, is not a good use case for AI. If you want to ask ChatGPT to summarise a topic for you, you can literally just ask ChatGPT to do that. There is zero benefit to having a third party pumping that into websites that we go to to find real human opinions and hopefully a few genuinely great, expert articles - neither of which ChatGPT can produce.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#65

Post by jprete »

poszlem wrote: post #18
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…

The reason people "dislike AI because of its tone" is that they only recognize AI-written text when it's poorly composed. It's likely that you're already interacting with AI-generated text without realising it.

The possibility of well-written AI prose is a big reason why I dislike AI text generation. Writing for an audience refines the ideas being communicated. If the author doesn't do that refinement themselves, then I'm not reading what the author is thinking, I'm reading what the LLM could patch together from their ideas. If I want the LLM's opinion on how to make a concept work, I can ask it directly. If I'm reading something by an author, I want to know what the author is actually thinking!

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#66

Post by JohnFen »

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…

> I wonder if the author would refuse to receive a diagnosis from a doctor if the diagnosis was AI-assisted?

I can't speak for the author, obviously, but personally my answer would be "it depends". If the diagnosis came from a doctor who happened to use AI as one of their tools, I'm OK with that (as long as it was a locally-hosted AI, but that's a different issue). If the diagnosis came from AI without a substantial amount of analysis from a doctor, then I'd absolutely reject that.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#67

Post by JohnFen »

happytoexplain wrote: post #17
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…

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.

This.

The question isn't whether or not there are benefits to be had from the technology. The question is whether or not the cost/benefit ratio is favorable. It's not clear to me what the answer to that actually is.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#68

Post by zmgsabst »

jprete wrote: post #65
poszlem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people "dislike AI because of its tone" is that they only recognize AI-written text when it's poorly composed. It's likely that you're already interacting with AI-generated text without realising it.

The possibility of well-written AI prose is a big reason why I dislike AI text generation. Writing for an audience refines the ideas being communicated. If the author doesn't do that refinement themselves, then I'm not reading what the author is thinking, I'm reading what the LLM could patch together from their ideas. If I want the LLM's opinion on how to make a concept work, I can ask it directly. If I'm reading som…

If you wanted a chair, you could build it yourself. So why do most people buy chairs?

To be direct:

Your post assumes that all users are equally good at producing content with AI/LLMs — but if they’re not, then people who are better providing that to people who are worse will become a market.

Just like with chairs and writing, now.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#69

Post by pxc »

happytoexplain wrote: post #41
poszlem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people "dislike AI because of its tone" is that they only recognize AI-written text when it's poorly composed. It's likely that you're already interacting with AI-generated text without realising it.

I disagree. The "tone" of the vast majority of AI to me has a clear identity, and is not related to poor composition. It is in fact "high quality", technically speaking , and is a separate problem from that of bad/strange genAI writing. In fact, some real people do write in a similar tone, which makes it hard to tell apart sometimes, which is the problem you describe, but that doesn't obscure the fact that it is the…

It takes too long to get anything said and it has a very weak sense of topicality that it papers over with repetitious use of literal words and phrases from the things it's asked.

Afaict, it's 'high quality' only in the sense of not containing many grammatical mistakes or spelling errors, which of course is not 'high quality' so much as 'basic literacy'.

I think I know what you mean about other elements of the tone (staid and obsequious) not necessarily being related to style but they don't quite form a clear identity for me. The defects of the writing are still more marked than its personality.

Re: Why I'm leaving Medium: AI policy

#70

Post by ziddoap »

packetlost wrote: post #63
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…

> AI helps in some areas (e.g. assisting medical diagnoses) Uhhh, I don't know about that one. Have we seen studies that show real predictive capabilities? Anecdotal evidence is not helpful, and it seems rather risky to depend on something that has not been thoroughly vetted when it comes to people's lives.

>In 2020, Zhang’s team developed an AI imaging-assisted diagnosis system for COVID-19 pneumonia and published in Cell. Based on the 500,000 copies of CT images that the team studied, the system was able to distinguish COVID-19 from other viral pneumonias within 20 seconds, with an accuracy rate of more than 90%.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-022-00035-y?error=coo...

>AI improves the lives of patients, physicians, and hospital managers by doing activities usually performed by people but in a fraction of the time and the expense. [...] Not only that, AI assists physicians in detecting diseases by utilizing complicated algorithms, hundreds of biomarkers, imaging findings from millions of patients, aggregated published clinical studies, and thousands of physicians’ notes to improve the accuracy of diagnosis.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8754556/

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