4 ms·

Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigati

Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). Hopefully / presumably it would still go through whatever editorial controls are in place. So who does care? If this is rooted in fears of our jobs being taken, the train has left the station and we need to deal with this reality sooner rather than later. If anything, we’re incredibly fortunate ai is taking white collar jobs first (like mine). Hopefully these people have enough social and political capital to ensure laws change in healthy ways (ubi at some point?).

_jal 3y ago
Maybe that works for pure entertainment. I buy a lot of books, including a lot of nonfiction. I care quite a bit about the author. There's a lot of garbage out there with just flat wrong information. One of the few things you have to go on is an author's reputation. Which, if you're making that up, becomes a garbage signal, and something approaching fraud. So for now at least, any outfit that publishes something that's supposed to be informative that's demonstrated to be "genai" derived means they've utterly lost my trust, and I won't be buying from them anymore. There's also an ancillary issue I've never heard a good answer to. If you are publishing "genai" output, why would I pay you for it? I'll just ask GPT4 myself and not pay your cut. If the answer is, "because we larded it up with all the signals that make it look like a human wrote it", well, see above about fraud.
- beandgaethje 3y ago
  GenAi is a tool like any other. If an author has been able to build earn my trust, I’d trust them to use the genai tool responsibly as well. This includes being ultimately responsible for the veracity of any claims made. If the facts end up being wrong, they’d lose my trust regardless of whether genai is in the loop or not. This abstracts to a publisher or company level as well. For now, gen ai has enough issues that a human should probably be in the loop, either as a collaborating author or editor. At some point, that will probably change and that is okay with me. You also make a good point about why buy books. Perhaps at some point gen ai will be good enough to generate high quality, true, and personalized info such that we won’t have to! The fraud issue is interesting. I personally disclose when I use genai. But I wouldn’t be offended if someone else didn’t. Again, if I trust someone, I trust them to use the tool responsible. If I don’t, I’d take what they say with a grain of salt anyway.
jdblair 3y ago
As soon as I get the feeling that an article was written by a LLM, I stop reading. Usually it's repetitive phrasing, or grade school essay style summaries that turn me off. In short, a poor ratio of text to actual information. Even bad writing can have useful information in it, and I will plow through it. But vapid text that meanders without saying anything isn't worth anyone's time. On the other hand, if LLM-generated text is actually good, and I can't tell... I guess then I don't care?
- wolpoli 3y ago
  I was always under the impression that the grade school style summaries started before LLMs. Search engines recommends that kind of writing as condition to get into the answer box. It is bad writing never the less.
  - dartos 3y ago
    The LLMs had to be trained on something.
- beandgaethje 3y ago
  I basically agree with wolpoli and I think you as well. If the content ends up good, who cares. Right now, it takes work and human collaboration to get quality content out of an llm. In the future it probably won’t.
Tommstein 3y ago
> Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). "I was reading something to learn about some topic I don't know about, and it might've all been a bunch of bullshit, but since I didn't know it was bullshit, who cares!" What the . . . .
- beandgaethje 3y ago
  If I’m learning about a new topic, I do assume it might be bullshit and have a variety of sources to help give me confidence on truthiness. The llm really has nothing to do with this! I don’t know if I’d trust a random blog, or a legit looking website, or gpt4 more but I’d read them all and make my own judgement.
dotnet00 3y ago
If I can tell it's AI generated, I stop reading immediately because if the creator didn't care enough to at least edit the article to not be obviously AI generated, why should I care enough to spend my precious time reading it?

_jal 3y ago

Maybe that works for pure entertainment. I buy a lot of books, including a lot of nonfiction. I care quite a bit about the author. There's a lot of garbage out there with just flat wrong information. One of the few things you have to go on is an author's reputation. Which, if you're making that up, becomes a garbage signal, and something approaching fraud. So for now at least, any outfit that publishes something that's supposed to be informative that's demonstrated to be "genai" derived means they've utterly lost my trust, and I won't be buying from them anymore. There's also an ancillary issue I've never heard a good answer to. If you are publishing "genai" output, why would I pay you for it? I'll just ask GPT4 myself and not pay your cut. If the answer is, "because we larded it up with all the signals that make it look like a human wrote it", well, see above about fraud.

beandgaethje 3y ago
GenAi is a tool like any other. If an author has been able to build earn my trust, I’d trust them to use the genai tool responsibly as well. This includes being ultimately responsible for the veracity of any claims made. If the facts end up being wrong, they’d lose my trust regardless of whether genai is in the loop or not. This abstracts to a publisher or company level as well. For now, gen ai has enough issues that a human should probably be in the loop, either as a collaborating author or editor. At some point, that will probably change and that is okay with me. You also make a good point about why buy books. Perhaps at some point gen ai will be good enough to generate high quality, true, and personalized info such that we won’t have to! The fraud issue is interesting. I personally disclose when I use genai. But I wouldn’t be offended if someone else didn’t. Again, if I trust someone, I trust them to use the tool responsible. If I don’t, I’d take what they say with a grain of salt anyway.

jdblair 3y ago

As soon as I get the feeling that an article was written by a LLM, I stop reading. Usually it's repetitive phrasing, or grade school essay style summaries that turn me off. In short, a poor ratio of text to actual information. Even bad writing can have useful information in it, and I will plow through it. But vapid text that meanders without saying anything isn't worth anyone's time. On the other hand, if LLM-generated text is actually good, and I can't tell... I guess then I don't care?

wolpoli 3y ago
I was always under the impression that the grade school style summaries started before LLMs. Search engines recommends that kind of writing as condition to get into the answer box. It is bad writing never the less.
- dartos 3y ago
  The LLMs had to be trained on something.
beandgaethje 3y ago
I basically agree with wolpoli and I think you as well. If the content ends up good, who cares. Right now, it takes work and human collaboration to get quality content out of an llm. In the future it probably won’t.

Tommstein 3y ago

> Who cares? This is both my initial reaction and, on reflection, something I’m genuinely curious about. If one can’t tell the difference without deep investigation, the consumer likely doesn’t care (I don’t). "I was reading something to learn about some topic I don't know about, and it might've all been a bunch of bullshit, but since I didn't know it was bullshit, who cares!" What the . . . .

beandgaethje 3y ago
If I’m learning about a new topic, I do assume it might be bullshit and have a variety of sources to help give me confidence on truthiness. The llm really has nothing to do with this! I don’t know if I’d trust a random blog, or a legit looking website, or gpt4 more but I’d read them all and make my own judgement.

dotnet00 3y ago

If I can tell it's AI generated, I stop reading immediately because if the creator didn't care enough to at least edit the article to not be obviously AI generated, why should I care enough to spend my precious time reading it?