> Because, similar to "your color scheme is not a11y-friendly" or "you're posting affiliatate-links" or "this is effectively a paywall", there is zero chance of a productive conversation sprouting from that.
Those are all legitimate concerns or even valid complaints, though, and, once raised, those concerns can be addressed by fixing the problem, if the person responsible for the state of affairs chooses to do so.
If someone is accused falsely of using AI or anything else that they genuinely didn’t do, like a paywall, then I can see your “downvote and move on” strategy as being perhaps expedient, but I don’t think your comparison is a helpful framing. Accessibility concerns are valid for the same reason as paywall concerns: it’s a valid position to desire our shared knowledge and culture to be accessible by one and by all without requiring a ticket to ride, entry through a turnstile, or submitting to profiling or tracking. If someone releases their ideas into the world, it’s now part of our shared consciousness and social fabric. Ideas can’t be owned once they’re shared, nor can knowledge be siloed once it’s dispersed.
It seems that you’re saying that simply because there isn’t a good rejoinder to false claims of AI usage that we shouldn’t make such claims at all, even legitimate ones, but this gives cover to bad actors and limits discourse to acceptable approved topics, and perhaps lowers the level of discourse by preventing necessary expectations of disclosure of AI usage from forming. If we throw in the towel on AI usage being expected to be disclosed, then that’s the whole ballgame. Folks will use it and not say so, because it will be considered rude to even suggest that AI was used, which isn’t helpful to the humans who have to live in such a society.
We ought to have good methodological reasons for the things we publish if we believe them to be true, and I’m not trying to be a naysayer or anything, but I respectfully disagree with your statement generally and on the points. All of the things you mentioned should be called out for cause, even if there isn’t much interesting discussion to be had, because the facts of the matters you mention are worth mentioning themselves in their own right. Just like we should let people like things, we should let people dislike things, and saying so adds checks and balances to our producer-consumer dynamic.