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AI could have written this: Birth of a classist slur in knowledge work [pdf]
- andsoitis 1y agoWould love to read, but it seems heavily paywalled, so can't.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _vertigo 1y agoHonestly, AI could have written this.
- readthenotes1 1y agoThat tldr table at top looks a lot like what perplexity provides at the bottom...
- kelseyfrog 1y agoWhile it would have been a better paper if the author collaborated with a sociologist, it would have also be less likely to be taken seriously by the HN for the same class anxieties that its title is founded on.
- miningape 1y agoExcuse us for expecting evidence and intellectual rigour. :D I've taken a number of university Sociology courses and from those experiences I came to the opinion that Sociology's current iteration is really just grievance airing in an academic tone. It doesn't really justify it's own existence outside of being a Buzzfeed for academics. I'm not even talking about slightly more rigorous subjects such as Psychology or Political Science, which modern Sociology uses as a shield for the lack of a feedback mechanism. Don't get me wrong though, I realise this is an opinion formed from my admittedly limited exposure to Sociology (~3 semesters). It could have also been the university I went to particularly leaned on "grievance airing".
- kelseyfrog 1y agoMy exposure to Sociology and Psychology at university made me understand that HN's resistance to sociology stems from the discomfort of being confronted with uncomfortable truths. It's easier to discount sociology than deal with these truths. I get it. I used to be that way too.
- miningape 1y agoSure, but what evidence is there of that claim? Do you have any falsifiable/empirical studies you can cite?
- kelseyfrog 1y agoOf course. But my only requirement is that we pre-register what evidence will change your mind. Fair?
- miningape 1y agoThe study should tackle these questions in one form or another: 1. What specific, measurable phenomenon would constitute 'discomfort with uncomfortable truths' versus legitimate methodological concerns? 2. How would we distinguish between the two empirically? I'd expect a study or numerical analysis with at least n > 1000, and p < 0.05 - The study will ideally have controls for correlation, indicating strong causation. The study (or cross analyses of it) should also explore alternative explanations, either disproving the alternatives or showing that they have weak(er) significance (also through numerical methods). I'm not sure what kinds of data this result could be derived from, but the methods for getting that data should be cited and common - thus being reproducible. Data could also be collected by examining alternative "inputs" (independent variables: i.e. temperament towards discomfort), or by testing how inducing discomfort leads to resistance to ideas, or something else. I'd expect the research to include, for example, controls where the same individuals evaluate methodologically identical studies from other fields. We'd need to show this 'resistance' is specific to sociology, not general scientific skepticism. That's to say: The study should also show, numerically and repeatably, that there are legitimate correlations between sociological studies inducing discomfort, and that it is not actual methodological concerns. This would include: 1. Validated scales measuring "discomfort" or cognitive dissonance 2. Behavioural indicators of resistance vs. legitimate critique 3. Control groups exposed to equally challenging but methodologically sound research 4. Control groups exposed to less challenging but equally methodologically sound research (to the level of sociology) Also, since we're making a claim about psychology and causation, the study would ideally be conducted by researchers outside of sociology departments to avoid conflicts of interest - preferably cognitive psychologists or neuroscientists using their methodological standards.
- kazinator 1y ago[flagged]
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoYour argument would've been much better without injecting ca. 2025 US culture war jargon into it.
- kristjank 1y agoThe prudence of discussing everything in a cultural vacuum comes with the implication of irrelevance to the cultural climate, which could hardly be further from the truth in this case.
- kazinator 1y agoSorry, what jargon is that? I may be able to fix it with your help. I'm not in the USA and don't follow US politics or culture enough to be up to 2025 in jargon.
- VectorLock 1y ago"Woke cretin."
- kazinator 1y agoThat can't be it. Cretin traces back to the 18th century. Etymonline places woke into the 2010s.
- lexicality 1y agoDoesn't matter when the word was created, in the same way furries use ":3" to signal they're a furry, people now use "woke" as a pejorative to signify that they're a member of the "alt-right". I'd suggest avoiding that word unless that's the group membership you want to be advertising.
- stuaxo 1y agoThe state of this headline.
- renewiltord 1y agoThis is just like the way some people decided that "Blue Check" should be an insult on Twitter. Occasionally people still say it but almost everyone ignores it. Fads like this are common on the Internet. It's just like any other clique of people: a few people accidentally taste-make as a bunch of replicators simply repeat mindless things over and over again "slop" "mask-off moment" "enshittification" "ghoulish". Just words that people repeat because other people say them and get likes/upvotes/retweets or whatever. The "Blue Check" insult regime didn't get anywhere and I doubt any anti-LLM/anti-diffusion-model stuff will last. "Stop trying to make fetch happen". The tools are just too useful. People on the Internet are just weird. Some time in the early 2010s the big deal was "fedoras". Oh you're weird if you have a fedora. Man, losers keep thinking fedoras are cool. I recall hanging out with a bunch of friends once and we walked by a hat shop and the girls were all like "Man, you guys should all wear these hats". The girls didn't have a clue: these were fedoras. Didn't they know that it would mark us out as weird losers? They didn't, and it turned out it doesn't. In real life. It only does on the Internet. Because the Internet is a collection of subcultures with some unique cultural overtones.
- throwawaybob420 1y agoSounds like something a blue checker would say. And yes, if you pay for Twitter you’re going to clowned on. And what the hell is that segue into fedoras? The entire meme of them is because stereotypical clueless individually took fedoras to be the pinnacle of fashion, while disregarding nearly everything else about not only their outfit, but about their bodies. This entire comment reeks of not actually understanding anything.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoFound that user who memorized KnowYourMeme and thinks they're a scholar of culture now. Or a cheap LLM acting as them, and wired up to KnowYourMeme via MCP? Can't tell these days. Hell, we're one weekend side project away from seeing "on the Internet, no one knows you are a dog" become true in a literal sense. s/
- renewiltord 1y ago
- yhoiseth 1y agoSarkar argues that “AI shaming arises from a class anxiety induced in middle class knowledge workers, and is a form of boundary work to maintain class solidarity and limit mobility into knowledge work.” I think there is at least some truth to this. Another possible cause of AI shaming is that reading AI writing feels like a waste of time. If the author didn’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it and provide feedback?
- alisonatwork 1y agoThis latter piece is something I am struggling with. I have spent 10+ years working on teams that are primarily composed of people whose first language is not English in workplaces where English is the mandated business language. Ever since the earliest LLMs started appearing, the written communication of non-native speakers has become a lot clearer from a grammatical point of view, but also a lot more florid and pretentious than they actually intended to be. This is really annoying to read because you need to mentally decode the LLM-ness of their comments/messages/etc back into normal English, which ends up costing more cognitive overhead than it used to reading their more blunt and/or broken English. But, from their perspective, I also understand that it saves them cognitive effort to just type a vague notion into an LLM and ask for a block of well-formed English. So, in some way, this fantastic tool for translation is resulting in worse communication than we had before. It's strange and I'm not sure how to solve it. I suppose we could use an LLM on the receiving end to decode the rambling mess the LLM on the sending end produced? This future sucks.
- xwolfi 1y agoIt is normal, you add a layer between the two brains that communicate, and that layer only add statistical experience to the message. I write letters to my gf, in English, while English is not our first language. I would never ever put an LLM between us: this would fall flat, remove who we are, be a mess of cultural references, it would just not be interesting to read, even if maybe we could make it sound more native, in the style of Barack Obama or Prince Charles... LLMs are going to make people as dumb as GPS made them. Except really, when reading a map was not very useful a skill, writing what you feel... should be.
- satisfice 1y agoThis paper presents an elaborate straw-man argument. It does not faithfully represent the legitimate concerns of reasonable people about the persistent and irresponsible application of AI in knowledge work. Generative AI produces work that is voluminous and difficult to check. It presents such challenges to people who apply it that they, in practice, do not adequately validate the output. The users of this technology then present the work as if it were their own, which misrepresents their skills and judgement, making it more difficult for other people to evaluate the risk and benefits of working with them. It is not the mere otherness of AI that results in anger about it being foisted upon us, but the unavoidable disruption to our systems of accountability and ability to assess risk.
- forgetfreeman 1y agoAdditionally their use of the term "slur" for what is frequently a valid criticism seems questionable.
- satisfice 1y agoIt is itself a form of bullying.
- strangecasts 1y ago> Generative AI produces work that is voluminous and difficult to check. It presents such challenges to people who apply it that they, in practice, do not adequately validate the output. As a matter of scope I could understand leaving the social understanding of "AI makes errors" separate from technical evaluations of models, but the thing that really horrified me is that the author apparently does not think past experience should be a concern in other fields: > AI both frustrates the producer/consumer dichotomy and intermediates access to information processing, thus reducing professional power. In response, through shaming, professionals direct their ire at those they see as pretenders. Doctors have always derided home remedies, scientists have derided lay theories, sacerdotal colleges have derided folk mythologies and cosmogonies as heresy – the ability of individuals to “produce” their own healing, their own knowledge, their own salvation. [...] If you don't permit that scientists often experiencing crank "lay theories" is a reason for initial skepticism, can you really explain this as anything other than anti-intellectualism?
- mgraczyk 1y agoI'd like to brag that I got in trouble for saying this to somebody in 2021, before ChatGPT
- andrelaszlo 1y agoI put a chapter of a paper I wrote in 2016 into GPTZero and got the probability breakdown 90% AI, 10% human. I am 100% human, and I wrote it myself, so I guess I'm lucky that I didn't hand it in this year, or I could have gotten accused of cheating?
- tough 1y agomaybe gptzero had your paper on its training data (it being from 2016)?
- mgraczyk 1y agoI wasn't being serious when I said it, I was using it as an insult for bad work
- rcxdude 1y agoThat's more an indictment of the accuracy of such tools. Writing in a very 'standard' style like found in papers is going to match well with the LLM predictions, regardless of origin.
- s0teri0s 1y agoThe obvious response is, "Oh, it will."
- vanschelven 1y agoThis reads like yet another attempt to pathologize perfectly reasonable criticism as some form of oppression. Calling “AI could have written this” a classist slur is a stretch so extreme it borders on parody. People say that when writing lacks originality or depth — not to reinforce some imagined academic caste system. The idea that pointing out bland prose is equivalent to sumptuary laws or racial gatekeeping is intellectual overreach at its finest. Ironically, this entire paper feels like something an AI could have written: full of jargon, light on substance. And no, there’s no original research, just theory stacked on theory.
- raincole 1y ago> Calling “AI could have written this” a classist slur is a stretch so extreme it borders on parody. In AI discussions the relevance of Poe's law is rampant. You can never tell what is parody or what is not. There was a (former) xAI employee that got fired for advocating the extinction of humanity.
- kristjank 1y agoI don't think we should as a wider scientific/technical society care for the opinion of a person that uses epistocratic privilege as a a serious term. This stinks to high hell of proving a conclusion by working backwards from it. The cognitive dissonance to imply that expecting knowledge from a knowledge worker or a knowledge-centered discourse is a form of boundary work or discrimination is extremely destructive to any and all productive work once you consider how most of the sciences and technological systems depend on a very fragile notion of knowledge preservation and incremental improvements on a system that is intentionally pedantic to provide a stable ground for progress. In a lot of fields, replacing this structure with AI is still very much impossible, but explaining how for each example an LLM blurts out is tedious work. I need to sit down and solve a problem the right way, and in the meantime about 20 false solutions can be generated by ChatGPT If you read the paper, the author even uses terms related to discrimination by immutable characteristics, invokes xenophobia and quotes a black student calling discouragement of AI as a cheating device racist. This seems to me an utter insanity and should not only be ignored, but actively pushed against on the grounds of anti-intellectualism.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- randomcarbloke 1y agoBeing a pilot is an epistrocratic privilege and they should welcome the input of the less advantaged.
- terminalshort 1y agoReading this makes me understand why there is a political movement to defund universities.
- laurent_du 1y agoIt makes me sick to my heart to think that money is stolen from my pocket to be given to lunatics of this kind.
- throwaway2562 1y agoThe real shame of it is that OP claims affiliation to two respectable universities (UCL and Cambridge) and one formerly credible venue (CHI) Mock scholarship is on the rampage. I agree: this stuff does make me understand the yahoos with a defunding urge too - not something I ever expected to feel any sympathy for, but here we are.
- miningape 1y agoOverall, this comes across as extremely patronising: to authors by running defence for obviously sub-par work, because their background makes it "impossible" for them to do good work. And to the commenters by assuming mal-intent towards the less privileged that needs to be controlled. And it's all wrapped in a lovely package of AI apologetics - wonderful. So, honestly, no. The identity of the author doesn't matter, if it reads like AI slop the author should be grateful I even left an "AI could have written this" comment.
- mvdtnz 1y agoGosh I wonder why there's a cultural backlash against the "intellectual" elite.
- UncleMeat 1y ago"We have to use AI to achieve class solidarity" is insane to me. People realize that the bosses all love AI because they envision a future where they don't need to pay the rabble like us, right? People remember leaders in the Trump administration going on TV and saying that we should have fewer laptop jobs, right? That professor telling you not to use ChatGPT to cheat on your essay is likely not a member of the PMC but is probably an adjunct getting paid near-poverty wages.
- sshine 1y agoSynthetic beings will look back at this with great curiosity.