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Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

satisfice.com

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Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#81

Post by ElProlactin »

satisfice wrote: post #74
ElProlactin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are serious, then AI has already begin to rot your brain. First, it's not a good look to start off your rebuttal with an ad hominem. Based on the high standards you speak to in your post, and your concern about reputations, I would have expected more. > I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much wr…

It's not a good look to start a comment with any variation of "you're being rude," either. So I guess both of us are prickly? You misunderstood my blog post in an odd way that's hard for me to account for unless you just didn't read carefully. Hence, my annoyed quip. I wrote in my policy, referred to in the post, that I never have AI draft anything for me. But I was quite explicit that I may use AI to aid my research…

> I don't have AI draft any text for me. I type it all myself. I choose the words and sentence forms and rhetorical structure and overall strategy myself. That's how you know it's me and not some AI masquerading as me.

Let's walk through this very carefully.

Your post states:

> If AI deeply collaborates with you to write something, why am I saying you shouldn’t say you used AI? Because all I have is your word for it that you did any work at all. Unless I know exactly how you did that work– which would have to have been from personal observation– I can’t know the truth.

Now let's look at your policy, which states:

> I allow myself to use AI to help develop or critique ideas or to critique text. I hate to be wrong. If AI can help me be less wrong, I welcome it. Although I always start with my own ideas, I might ask AI to challenge those ideas, or independently research the topic. I would then look over its work and decide if I want to cover a new topic or angle that the AI may have indicated.

> I might also ask AI to review the final text and spot typos or sloppy writing. In other words, I can use AI the same way I would let a human colleague help me write a piece for which I would nevertheless declare myself sole author.

Do you not see the problem here? You admit that you use AI as a stand-in for a human editor. You admit that you use AI to "help develop or critique ideas or to critique text". You admit that you use AI to do research. You even admit that this process might lead you to decide "to cover a new topic or angle that the AI may have indicated."

Do you not believe that some of this falls afoul of your own standard ("if AI deeply collaborates with you to write something...")? If you don't, please explain why you believe AI helping you develop and critique your ideas and text is not "deep" collaboration. And please explain how anyone reading your work, without the "personal observation" you referred to in your post, would know how much influence your use of AI had on the words you wrote.

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#82

Post by hombre_fatal »

beej71 wrote: post #53

We should be better than genAI. For me, with things like coding and writing, I think I'm better than it. For painting? It wins over me. But I'd never in a million years claim creation of a painting I prompted, even if I went and modified it after. Same with code or writing, for that matter. For the record, I never use AI in writing. First, it's no fun, and that's really reason enough. It'd be like sending a bot to wa…

On the other hand, you might be better than AI if given maximal time, attention, and energy.

But the question is how often are you better at all the tasks where you don’t have maximal time, attention, and energy - and it would make no sense to invest it.

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#83

Post by queenkjuul »

scotty79 wrote: post #73
beej71 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> We should be better than genAI. > Why exactly? I think the top reason for most people is so that they're worth hiring. If you offer no more than an AI, what is your value? Is scotty79 human? Was this written by you? Or are you just an AI? And if you are human and wrote it, why did you do that when an AI could do it better than you? And if an AI could do it better, why even communicate with you? I could just go tal…

[flagged]

I will be sure to die before living in your future

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#84

Post by queenkjuul »

kalcode wrote: post #66
torben-friis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the somelier argument. It doesn't work for me sorry, because you wouldn't accept a book by John, a friend of Hemingway, as a Hemingway book no matter how much he assisted in editing. Nor a Picasso museum exhibition is by Marie because Marie chose which paintings to display. Authorship and edition are different claims.

I think a better analogy is cartoon or animated films. The artist, creator, engineer lays the key frames, the plot points, characters, etc. The team builds it. Fills in gaps, especially with direct input from the creator. The creator still gets the credit. LLMs can just be the part that accelerates laying the code down. I think folks are just too emotional over a tool that we are ignoring drawing similarities on purp…

> The creator still gets the credit.

Actually, they all get credit, at least in Hollywood

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#85

Post by solid_fuel »

queenkjuul wrote: post #83
scotty79 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I will be sure to die before living in your future

Right? What a hideous and repulsive vision of the future. No humanity, just artifice and comfortable lies. I’ll take genuine human society any day.

I would pay for any tools that block “ai agents” from talking to me. Hell I would pay for a tool right now to filter ai slop from the feeds.

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#86

Post by solid_fuel »

627467 wrote: post #72
rafterydj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. There's a power imbalance between how easy it is to write something by hand and slap a human label next to AI output. "Let the reader decide" is not fair in a world where the reader then sees >90% AI writing in internet search results.

Remember how the internet works: you request the content. Web content is not a highway billboard you didnt ask for. If you found a "crappy" content consider your referral. We should all consider our sourcing. The world doesn't owe us anything

> Web content is not a highway billboard you didnt ask for.

Web content discovery is almost universally funded by advertisers… while yes the core technology is requests based, the things you get recommended are harder to control.

Unfortunately slop is very cheap to produce compared to human generated content and literally endless, so content providers have an incentive to push as much as their users will tolerate.

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#87

Post by solid_fuel »

ElProlactin wrote: post #46
satisfice wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are serious, then AI has already begin to rot your brain. My post was much more than saying “don’t use AI.” I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much write how I talk, albeit more grammatically. My post was about why you are taking a big risk with your reputation/brand if you let AI draft your writt…

> If you are serious, then AI has already begin to rot your brain. First, it's not a good look to start off your rebuttal with an ad hominem. Based on the high standards you speak to in your post, and your concern about reputations, I would have expected more. > I use AI. I even use AI adjacent to my writing. But with me, you always know that my written words are directly from me. They sound like me. I pretty much wr…

> First, it's not a good look to start off your rebuttal with an ad hominem. Based on the high standards you speak to in your post, and your concern about reputations, I would have expected more.

This is such a lazy and tired way of talking around someone. You started off with a rude, dismissive statement which was intended to cause offense. Now that offense was taken and returned, you’re playing the “you aren’t being polite enough” game.

It’s transparent, and you are not entitled to politeness.

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#88

Post by scotty79 »

beej71 wrote: post #76
scotty79 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Now I just point out behavior that I want to be different and the model figures it out. Often surprisingly quickly. This seems to have low-to-zero value in the medium- to long-term. Probably some 90% of the population has the ability to sit in their living room and ask a genAI to build things. Why do I need to use your software? If I liked it, I'd just have my AI clone it. And if everyone can just groom dogs (using…

> This seems to have low-to-zero value in the medium- to long-term.

On one hand, I don't think so. Because idea guys seemed to be doing well even in a world where it's super expensive to convert the idea into anything of value.

On the other regardless of what you do you can't earn money if the customer for whatever you are trying to sell has no money to pay you and that might be the case if a lot of people lose their income stream and nobody replaces it with something else.

> Probably some 90% of the population has the ability to sit in their living room and ask a genAI to build things. Why do I need to use your software? If I liked it, I'd just have my AI clone it.

Yes. And that's the beauty of it. You won't clone my software. Because it's mine. I won't even show it to you, let alone sell it or give it to you. But I'll happily sit in your living room with you to help you build one for yourself. Provided that you'll compensate me for my time and effort. Most software of the future will have userbase of 1. Everybody can exercise, yet people hire trainers. Everyone can live, yet people hire couches for everything imaginable. Can AI be a couch? Some day, but people stubbornly like human touch in that role.

> And if everyone can just groom dogs (using this to mean "non-information work"), the value of that goes through the floor, too.

My point is, jobs can be invented out of thin air if there's money around to spend. And they were. And they will be.

> Humans are perhaps better than AI at providing flavor?

Yes. And it might stay like that for a while longer. Just because we have billions of somewhat unique brains in stock.

>> Except perhaps a bit of taste when it comes to directory layout and dependencies selection. > And another.

Am I to take pride in my skill of directory naming? Am I to tie my self-worth with that? I don't think that's prudent.

It will go away soon anyways. I'm already learning new worthy dependencies from what AI built for me. And it does quite reasonable directory naming when prompted already.

>> I'm sure this comment would be an easier read if the bot read it for you and relied the ideas and information it contains

> I'm not sure that's the case,

You can try. Don't be afraid to experiment. It might be bad, but you might have ideas how to make it a bit better. You can tell agent your ideas and see how they pan out.

> but if it were and that's what I was doing, there'd be no point in human flavor.

If the human has interesting flavor to provide it tends to show up even in the finished product. Regardless of whether machine that built it was made of people and processes or just weights and loops.

Re: Don’t use AI to write things that you present as your own work

#89

Post by scotty79 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #85
queenkjuul wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will be sure to die before living in your future

Right? What a hideous and repulsive vision of the future. No humanity, just artifice and comfortable lies. I’ll take genuine human society any day. I would pay for any tools that block “ai agents” from talking to me. Hell I would pay for a tool right now to filter ai slop from the feeds.

Oh no. Comfort. How will we ever suffer it!

I don't like lies. So I won't be optimizing for lies. But I also don't like garbage. So I'll be optimizing for filtering it out. Even if the source of garbage are genuine humans.

I had a suspicion some time ago that this craving for genuine has masochistic foundations. You just provided me with another point in the pointcloud, I'm trying to infer the shape of reality out of.

> Hell I would pay for a tool right now to filter ai slop from the feeds.

Agent can build one for you. Even today. But the first step is to take full control of your feed sources. If you are browsing cookie cutter websites with a cookie cutter browser, it might be hard to do.

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