4 ms·

because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers

by toofy 7mo ago

because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. every book you buy has an author credited. articles in newspapers and magazines have photographer and author attributions. asking an ai to write you a story does not make you an author. if you ask someone to take a photo for you, you don’t magically get to say “look at this photograph, i’m a photographer.” if you ask someone to bake you a wedding cake, and then claim you baked it, you’re a fraud. we deserve to know the actual writer.

KronisLV 7mo ago
> because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do. For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes: 1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam) 2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough) 3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text) In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).
- ijk 7mo ago
  In Peter Watt's Blindsight, the aliens understand language as spam, a hostile intent to waste their time, and respond by opening fire. Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view. I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing. A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications. With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in. LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.
chii 7mo ago
> want to know the writer of a piece but you dodged the question i asked - why can't a piece stand on the contents, rather than its pedigree? Would you care if a writer used a pen name? Does that in any way diminish their works? What about the unknown editors that contributed?
- soco 7mo ago
  [dead]
- vintermann 7mo ago
  It's not about pedigree, but context. Without context our most beloved stories are just meaningless ink on paper.
- fao_ 7mo ago
  If someone couldn't be bothered to write it, I certainly can't be bothered to read it. I did not bother to read the article involved because the continual piss stain on the images, the website itself, and a few key phrases let me on to the fact that it was all generated. When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency. The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.
  - u_fucking_dork 7mo ago
    [dead]
- stingraycharles 7mo ago
  Because you need to do some pre-filtering on where to focus your attention, and you want to make sure the author put some thought into the article without having to analyze it. Due to LLMs making the cost of publishing “thoughts” extremely low, there’s now an over-supply of content that looks decent on the surface, but in reality the author has probably spent less time on than the reader.
Aditya_Garg 7mo ago
I’ve said this many times before AI is just a tool If you used a fancy auto bake cake machine instead of an oven, you still get to claim that you made the cake. 100 years ago someone would be making the claim that using an oven to make cakes “doesn’t count” All AI did was raise the bar It’s quite clear here that the author spent a lot of time on this so he absolutely gets credit as the author
- fzeroracer 7mo ago
  If you commission a baker to bake you a cake, did you make the cake? What if you added sprinkles on top?
  - vintermann 7mo ago
    If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved. If you use an AI, there isn't. Either way, it's clear that the author (yes, the author) put a lot of work into this by iterating and shaping it to what he wanted, and that's a lot more than sprinkles.
    - fzeroracer 7mo ago
      > If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved. > If you use an AI, there isn't. What is the functional difference here? You are commissioning (see: prompting) someone (see: an AI) for a piece of work, or artwork or whatever. The output is out of your control; and I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a human on the other end materially matters. If we had hyper-advanced ovens from The Jetsons where we could type a prompt using a fold-out keyboard and it would magically generate whatever cake we ask of it: did we or did we not bake that cake? And I do not think it is clear the author put a lot of work iterating and shaping it into what he wanted; we have zero insight into that.
      - vintermann 7mo ago
        I didn't say the difference was functional. If you don't think the presence of a human on the other end matters (materially or not), feel free to continue this conversation with an LLM simulation of me. You can even prompt it so that you logically triumph and convince "me".
muyuu 7mo ago
can't reply to your comment below so i will comment here > why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands? clearly it does to you? thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant
throwaway2037 7mo ago
Largely, I agree with you. One famous counterpoint about labeling works of arts with the author: The Economist (the magazine) does not add the author to most of their articles.

by toofy 7mo ago

KronisLV 7mo ago

> because we typically want to know the writer of a piece. we want to know where to lay credit. Does the average person really do care all the time? Maybe the outlet it comes from as a whole (factuality, political lean) but more rarely the exact author. Many don’t even have the critical skills for any of it and consume whatever content is chosen for them by whatever algorithm is there. We probably should care, I just don’t think a lot of us do. For me, needing to know that something’s written by AI serves threefold purposes: 1) acknowledging that it might be slop that someone threw together with no effort (important in regards to spam) 2) acknowledging that depending on the model the factuality might be low when it comes to anything niche (though people are wrong too, often enough) 3) mentally preparing myself for AI bullshit slop language, like “It’s not X, it’s Y.”, or just choose not to engage with it (it's the same disgust reaction as when I find a PDF and realize it's just scanned images, not proper text) In general, unless the goal is either human interaction or a somewhat rare case of wanting to read a specific blog etc., most of the time I don’t categorically care whether something was lovingly created by a human or shoved out by a half baked version of Skynet - only that it’s good enough for whatever metrics I want to evaluate it by. I’m not ashamed of it and maybe that’s why I don’t take an issue with AI generated code either, as long as it’s good enough (sometimes better than what people write, other times quite shit when the models and harnesses are bad).

ijk 7mo ago
In Peter Watt's Blindsight, the aliens understand language as spam, a hostile intent to waste their time, and respond by opening fire. Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view. I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing. A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications. With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in. LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.

chii 7mo ago

> want to know the writer of a piece but you dodged the question i asked - why can't a piece stand on the contents, rather than its pedigree? Would you care if a writer used a pen name? Does that in any way diminish their works? What about the unknown editors that contributed?

soco 7mo ago
[dead]
vintermann 7mo ago
It's not about pedigree, but context. Without context our most beloved stories are just meaningless ink on paper.
fao_ 7mo ago
If someone couldn't be bothered to write it, I certainly can't be bothered to read it. I did not bother to read the article involved because the continual piss stain on the images, the website itself, and a few key phrases let me on to the fact that it was all generated. When you interact with art, you do so to interact with the author and the point they want to make. Writing is something where a skilled writer will be able to make a point tersely and have it stick, knowing where to embellish and where to keep it simple. Every decision in art tells you about the artist. Generative AI may be able to fake the composition process, but the point of composition is it reveals something about the human. All of those are artistic decisions that a machine apparently now "can do", but not with any coherency. The holder of the reigns of slop is not an artist, this is plain to see because they do not interact or engage with their work on the same level as an artist. The produced slop is not art, because it cannot be engaged with on the same level.
- u_fucking_dork 7mo ago
  [dead]
stingraycharles 7mo ago
Because you need to do some pre-filtering on where to focus your attention, and you want to make sure the author put some thought into the article without having to analyze it. Due to LLMs making the cost of publishing “thoughts” extremely low, there’s now an over-supply of content that looks decent on the surface, but in reality the author has probably spent less time on than the reader.

Aditya_Garg 7mo ago

I’ve said this many times before AI is just a tool If you used a fancy auto bake cake machine instead of an oven, you still get to claim that you made the cake. 100 years ago someone would be making the claim that using an oven to make cakes “doesn’t count” All AI did was raise the bar It’s quite clear here that the author spent a lot of time on this so he absolutely gets credit as the author

fzeroracer 7mo ago
If you commission a baker to bake you a cake, did you make the cake? What if you added sprinkles on top?
- vintermann 7mo ago
  If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved. If you use an AI, there isn't. Either way, it's clear that the author (yes, the author) put a lot of work into this by iterating and shaping it to what he wanted, and that's a lot more than sprinkles.
  - fzeroracer 7mo ago
    > If you commission a baker, another person, with wants and desires of their own, is involved. > If you use an AI, there isn't. What is the functional difference here? You are commissioning (see: prompting) someone (see: an AI) for a piece of work, or artwork or whatever. The output is out of your control; and I don't think the existence or lack thereof of a human on the other end materially matters. If we had hyper-advanced ovens from The Jetsons where we could type a prompt using a fold-out keyboard and it would magically generate whatever cake we ask of it: did we or did we not bake that cake? And I do not think it is clear the author put a lot of work iterating and shaping it into what he wanted; we have zero insight into that.
    - vintermann 7mo ago
      I didn't say the difference was functional. If you don't think the presence of a human on the other end matters (materially or not), feel free to continue this conversation with an LLM simulation of me. You can even prompt it so that you logically triumph and convince "me".

muyuu 7mo ago

can't reply to your comment below so i will comment here > why does it bother you to give attribution? why do you think crediting the writer impacts how the piece stands? clearly it does to you? thing is, this is a fool's errand to try to police what people credit when there is zero capability of verification and enforcement the current social norms still value authorship, so people will just take or omit credit as they see most advantageous, even if it's merely an ego advantage, which it typically is but a proxy for brand building what will happen if/when the currency of attribution is completely altered? hard to predict my prediction is that track record will be considerably more important, not less, but human merit will be increasingly seen as irrelevant

throwaway2037 7mo ago

Largely, I agree with you. One famous counterpoint about labeling works of arts with the author: The Economist (the magazine) does not add the author to most of their articles.