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I am pretty sure you cannot send 1000 high value AI generated emails.
i believe the GP is probably acutely aware of that considering they were quite obviously being sarcastic
The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
41–50 of 83 posts
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#42The author's case is not helped by fighting a strawman argument and backing it up with atypical examples of AI usage.
Those who favor human writing are looking for writing where the words are the product of a human mind rather than an LLM. The requirement for every character to be the product of a finger pressing a key is not something I've seen. Alternative input methods doesn't make a writing non-human. Spellcheck and probably even some amount of auto-complete are also generally considered to be fine. Anyone checking for keystrokes is using it as a proxy for human creation, not valuing the physical motion itself.
The pro-AI example is a writer spending hours tweaking a single AI output then later re-arranging and rewriting the piece before publishing. While this would probably still set off some AI-detectors, it does at least include some human effort. Presumably this effort will not be appreciated and readers will assume that the poster simply copied the response directly from their LLM of choice. It may seem a bit unfair to ignore the human effort in revising, but it's a reasonable assumption to make because almost nobody is using LLMs in this way.
Perhaps there's a reasonable amount of LLM use which would be considered a writing aid rather than a writing replacement, but the vast majority are simply mass producing slop so I sympathize with those who favor a blanket ban as a response.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#43Low grade engagement bait that reads like a mediocre attempt at whitewashing slop. If the author's premise holds then we're saying that there's no daylight between the works of an individual who has taken a literal lifetime to hone a skillset and any random dilletante armed with the appropriate AI tools.
That's not what the author is saying at all. You are presuming that AI is capable of generating original thoughts. The author's point is that original thought is what matters. If a skilled writer with decades of experience can generate low effort content just as well as someone using an LLM. Your use of the word "dilettante" is elitist and says that only certain people should be allowed to express themselves.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#44Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#45Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines between human and machine labor: chess computers are banned from human tournaments; race cars and bicycles are not allowed in footraces. And while I am very sympathetic to the advantages of AI writing for the impaired and non-native speakers, we make allowances all the time for this today: handicapped parking, special sporting events, and allowing dyslexics more time on written exams for example. The existence of these does not justify parking in a handicapped spot when you don't need it.
From the title, I expected a different argument, that it's going to be increasingly difficult to determine. Many people have demonstrated that careful prompting can already produce prose that passes as human, and this will only increase as models get better and inevitably are trained to bypass checkers. Maybe someday we'll have novel-writing rooms where, like grandmasters coming into a tournament, the writers must relinquish all their digital tools at the door. Because it's difficult to imagine any other system that will guarantee human authenticity.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#46Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.
> It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it.
I basically agree, but it's more specific than that, I think. The basic promise is that the writer believes the thing you are writing. This is a feature of human speech that is so central that Grice made it part of one of the maxims of his pragmatic theory of conversation: "do not say what you believe to be false" or "that for which you lack adequate evidence."
In writing, using generative AI destroys the pragmatic basis for this conversational maxim, because it means that a consequential number of "people" you and I talk to online are not really people at all. They're entirely artificial, and the text generated was never even read by a human, certainly not a statement of a human's actual beliefs about anything. (This isn't even a human-preferring standard, the problem with LLM text is that even the LLM doesn't believe it.) Even in cases where a human does interact with the text in some capacity before it is published, it's likely that a plurality to a majority of the ideas reflected in the text come from a language model that does not actually believe them.
Writing is something that aids in the development of human ideas. It's not just that in the ideal case, a human being will have certain ideas and be able to communicate them to other people. Rather, we often have inchoate, unclear, or even contradictory ideas and opinions, and the process of writing itself leads us to figure out what it is, exactly, that we believe. So even in the "ideal" case of someone like OP who engages with LLMs more critically, and claims responsibility for every bit of text they publish, the process is still detrimental to the production and communication of true beliefs because their ideas were formed in dialogue with an agent that did not actually believe them. It's a process that is dangerous to bypass because you skip most of the thinking involved in writing without even realizing it.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#47TL;DR, Semi-literate people who get paid to write garbage no one wants to read are just as well served by aiming their fact-free thoughts at an LLM as they would be writing 30,000 meaningless words by hand.
Case in point, this insipid blog post which I didn't bother to read.
Wait, that wasn't the plan? Sorry, with all this fantastic new content flooding the internet, I just don't have time to read whatever this guy or his LLM are trying to say.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#48>I don’t care whether you wrote every word with your bare hands. I care whether the thought is yours, whether you exercised judgment, whether the result deserves my attention and whether you’ll stand behind it once it leaves your screen. Alright, compare the following degrees of autonomy: - I wrote it, made sure everything's correct, let the LLM proofread it/translate it to English, and checked it afterwards - I had…
Those issues existed well before LLMs. Everyone who reads needs a BS detector. It's unfortunate, though, that many such detectors have been replaced with AI detectors.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#49I dunno man. If you had something worth saying I kinda feel like you would figure out a way to say it with your fingers and a keyboard. There is SO MUCH STUFF that you could read. You could read all day every day and not keep up with the human-written output in just a single sub-niche of writing within a niche sector. That being the case, you must use some heuristics to determine what should be read. Whether the enti…
The heuristics you are looking for are "editorial" and "curation". That's why there are things like newspapers and magazines. The world has always been awash in more low effort content than can be consumed. We rely on trusted human editors at these organizations to filter content. There is nothing new going on. Perhaps subscribe to sites with editorial that you agree with.
Re: The whole premise of checking for human writing is daft
#50Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.
This is my thought, exactly. Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it: “these are my thoughts, recorded to share with you.” When reading LLM-generated text that purports to be a real person’s that contract is broken. Verification that even just the basic ideas are the author’s is impossible. It feels cheap and deceitful.
> Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it
I don't think an author is bound to their readers via contract, implicit or otherwise. I have no obligation to tell people what tools I use, or how I've arrived at a final product. That might be upsetting to hear, but authors don't owe their readers anything, just as readers don't owe authors anything.
There is a precedent for this, many auto biographies are actually ghostwritten, demonstrating that this contract you speak of has never actually existed.