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>shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. >I fear losing the battle. I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021
by protocolture 6mo ago
>shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly.
>I fear losing the battle.
I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021\22. AI wasn't why I was there but I demo'd a few LLMs to a lot of the users in the Off Topic section because people were curious. Even with an explanation of how they operated, almost everyone was at least interested. One author told me how he operated similarly, rote learning how to write like his favorite authors by copying out their texts, hand written, word for word. Their concern was largely that they were too hard to use from a technical perspective.
These people knew I was there to learn, and that I was unlikely to ever try and publish LLM derived content. I said as much often.
Sometime in late 2022, a switch was flipped. And almost all of them started talking about how AI and those who used it were unambiguously evil. They didn't say my name, but they stopped engaging with me. Gradually, they started reposting twitter content from extremely anti AI people. Complained about AI submissions to various publications. Eventually, someone reposted a tweet calling for the death of anyone who used an LLM, with not even a single disagreement (and lots of encouragement)
I just bailed. I had only ever engaged positively, answered questions for the curious and tried to help people out. I posted one AI assisted story, and that was to demonstrate how my contributions were tracked vs AI contributions automatically in the editor to satisfy someones curiosity. Clearly highlighting the bits I had written. Just a technical demo. No one was asked to enjoy or positively engage with it as if it was human written.
A while later, most of their submission rules were updated with a new clause, if it was judged that AI written content was discovered, they would blacklist that person from all submissions across their entire community. Considering I had demo'd LLMs, and the uselessness of AI detectors, it was clear to me that these people would be able to justify blacklisting me if I poked my head up at all. I had been developing my own story for submission (myself, no LLM content), but I just dropped it. I just didn't feel like sticking my neck out for the witch hunt.
I also used to be quite engaged with blockchain. And it went through a similar process, most people ignored it until that paper about the power usage (Claiming it would spike to some level it never reached) and then suddenly being associated with it was an outrageous moral crime. But after a while, when it turned out that the power use claims were largely a nothing burger, people gave up on the hate parade.
I don't think you will "Lose the battle" (at least in terms of keeping AI users out). And its always ok for small communities to be selective about their membership. I just don't think its possible to maintain such artificial rage for more than a few years. The AI Datacenter water/power claims are a clear London Horse Manure problem that looks set to resolve itself, and the copyright issues will get sorted to some degree. Eventually I think you just wont care enough to ban anyone except low effort spammers (of which there are a huge amount, granted).
YMMV
- lelanthran 6mo ago> I just don't think its possible to maintain such artificial rage for more than a few years. What makes you think the rage is artificial?
- protocolture 6mo agoWhat makes you think the rage is sustainable? My first clue is my memory of blockchain as I mentioned. My biggest clue however is that it appears to be a London Horse Manure sort of problem. People stopped hating horses when London didnt end up covered under 20M of Horse Manure. I know there are multiple angles to AI, and people ardently against AI tend to have multiple sets of goal posts prepositioned for switching, but ultimately they tend to come back to the ecological/electrical issues. Those issues are based on projections that rely on speculation that relies on OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure/Amazon plans being fulfilled perfectly + a continuation in that mode. We are already seeing these plans fall over and investment going elsewhere. It will be difficult to maintain the narrative that AI Compute is a direct risk to the environment as the projects dry up.
- lelanthran 6mo ago> What makes you think the rage is sustainable? Where did I imply that the rage is sustainable? I asked why you consider it "artificial", cos it looks damn real to me.
- woah 6mo agoYou're a victim of the uni-cause
- AuthAuth 6mo agoThis is entirely vibes based on reading research on similar campaigns so I cant pull a paper with hard evidence about this specifically. But I believe chinese/North Korean infowar campaigns are behind these seeded talking points. They seed in these far left activist communities and then once they find one that sticks the real people in these communities start carrying the message out to other communities and then the CN/NK botnets amplify the messages and suppress the responses. They dont just do this on the left im just highlight left for this specific point.