[abtinf]

That’s true. Fortunately, by virtue of it being added to the guidelines, quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule. Just search for “shallow dismissal” to see many examples.

It will take time, but eventually everyone will know about it.

[altairprime]

> quite a few folks here are prepared to reply to obviously generated comments by simply citing and linking the rule

Note that the guidelines do explicitly say not to post about guidelines violations in comments, and to email them instead. I know this isn’t a well-loved guideline in this modern era, but duly noted: those well-intended comments are themselves breaking the guidelines.

[lokar]

Are you referring to:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data.

If so, that seems different. If not, can you clarify?

[altairprime]

That one, yes. “Insinuations” is a less conditional form of “Accusations”, connected by the concept of “Claims”; they’re all synonymous from a general perspective:

- I insinuate that you are a bot (often shortened to “Is this a bot?”)

- I claim that you are a bot. (often shortened to “This is a bot.”)

- I accuse you of being a bot l. (often shortened to “Are you a bot?”)

The part where I’m interpreting to include accusations of bottery and slop is “and the like. It”; the first clause, ‘the like’ refers to the generic category of accusations against posted comments, which historically were the listed examples, but is also defined to include others not listed, such as today’s popular accusations of bot or AI; the second clause, ‘It’, refers to all insinuations-class content. Without the list of examples, this reads:

’Please don’t post insinuations. It degrades discussion

Yep, this is true. Accusations, Insinuations, Claims, of bot or AI or astroturf; they all wreck discussions and I end up having to email the mods to deal with them. A lot of people use the rhetorical device of Discredit The Opposition by invoking this sort of thing, and while that’s less prevalent in ‘reads like AI’ insinuations, they still degrade the site.

With AI-assisted writing is a violation of site guidelines, and even before it was, posting of AI-assisted writing was a clear ‘abuse’ of the community’s expectations of unassisted-human discussions. Aside from expectations, I can also classically understand in Internet history that ‘violating the guidelines’ is the phrase formerly known as ‘abuse of service’, by which I interpret the above reference to abuse to refer to breaking the guideline about posting accusations.

The guidelines are not a legal contract as program code, and perhaps this one is clunky enough that it needs to be reworded slightly; thus my intent, once the flames die down here, to let the mods know about the confusion. As I’m not a mod, this is my interpretation alone; you might have to email the mods and ask them to reply here if you want a formal statement on the matter, given how many comments this thread got in a couple hours.

ps. On ’and is usually mistaken’: I’m not a mod, so I can’t judge how often accusations of AI/bot are mistaken, but I’m also an old human who learned em-dashes in composition class, so I tend to view the modern pitchfork mobs out to get anyone who can compose English as being less accurate in their judgments than they believe they are.

[lokar]

I see your point, but I'm not sure. I think if that's what they want, the should say "don't police the rules in comments"

[altairprime]

They’re always happy to clarify questions from users; email [e-mail] (and link the thread if you like) to ask.

[rendleflag]

What constitutes “at edited”. If I throw a block of text in to an ai see if it makes sense — say a response to a post — and fold the suggestions in, is that “ai edited”?

[bigfishrunning]

Yes. That's what the rule is about.

[yellowapple]

Then that's a dumb rule. God forbid someone wants to auto-correct one's own grammar in a comment before posting it.

[duskdozer]

If you look at what you wrote and can't identify what rules you've broken, how are you able to validate that the AI output doesn't change the meaning of what you wrote?

[yellowapple]

Knowing whether or not the AI changed the meaning of what you wrote is not reliant on knowing which specific rules you broke. It's only reliant on you actually reading what the AI spat out and deciding “yes, this is what I meant” or “no, this is not what I meant”.

Unless you're arguing that the rule violations are something the author intends to be part of the meaning of what one wrote?

[duskdozer]

>Knowing whether or not the AI changed the meaning of what you wrote is not reliant on knowing which specific rules you broke. It's only reliant on you actually reading what the AI spat out and deciding “yes, this is what I meant” or “no, this is not what I meant”.

That's fair.

>Unless you're arguing that the rule violations are something the author intends to be part of the meaning of what one wrote?

I think what I wanted to get at is more like this:

1. I think that they may be part of the meaning

2. I think that people would be primed to accept changes even if they change the meaning

3. I suspected that it would always correct something and wouldn't just say LGTM even if the input was fine

To check, and at the risk of this being hypocritical, I asked for a grammar correction on part of your post that I thought had no mistakes, and both in context and isolation, it corrected "spat out" to "produced." Now, this isn't a huge deal, but it is a loss of the connotation of "spat out," which is the phrasing you chose.

I think grammatical errors are low-cost, and changes in meaning and intent are high-cost, so with 2. above, running it through an LLM risks more loss than it gains.

[bigfishrunning]

You're absolutely right! It's not the people correcting their Grammer that are the motivation for this rule, it's the people abusing these tools and ruining every online discussion with cookie-cutter comments.

In all seriousness, if you use some tool to make sure you're using the right "there", noone will mind. Just don't generate another boring predictable comment and everything will be ok

[ASalazarMX]

Um, why would you do that instead of waiting for someone more knowledgable to reply, and learn from? Replies are not mandatory, and experts/insiders participating is one of the best parts of the human Internet. Let them shine.

[rendleflag]

It can catch things that I might miss or might be misinterpreted. I sometime miss simple things, like like repeated words, that an AI point out. Is a spell checker considered "AI"? Is Grammerly? Okay, maybe Grammerly from 5 years ago as opposed to today? If I'm typing on my phone and it pops up the next suggested word, is that AI edited?

And no, I don't have to reply to a post, but when I think it's a bad policy, should I just accept it without discussion? And who determines the "experts/insiders" and which voices should be allowed?

[I_dream_of_Geni]

Yes, these are MY questions and feelings too. In the past, if I just HINTED at asking these kinds of questions, I was downvoted into oblivion (in other accounts. I have to say THAT specifically because some people here dive in to my account and get super anal about my age, my previous comments, my moniker, ad nauseum)

[nobody9999]

>Um, why would you do that instead of waiting for someone more knowledgable to reply, and learn from? Replies are not mandatory, and experts/insiders participating is one of the best parts of the human Internet. Let them shine.

As Isaac Asimov pointed out[0]:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

This thread runs through many cultures and isn't just a problem on the Internet, although the Internet certainly has accelerated/worsened the problem. And it has created a distrust of experts which (as has been obvious for a long time) has made us, as a whole, dumber and less informed.

I recommend The Death of Expertise[1] by Tom Nichols for a sane and reasonable treatment of this issue. If books aren't your thing, Nichols did a book talk[2] which lays out the main points he makes in the book. During that talk, he also gives the best definition of disinformation I've heard yet.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84250-anti-intellectualism-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

[2] https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/the-death-of-expertis...

[rendleflag]

Again, the question is who blesses the expert? There’s a difference in having a voice and your voice being taken seriously.

If someone posts a link on a a new laptop, who should respond? I am not an expert on the current laptop market, but I have options about it. Maybe my English is not the best so I run through an AI to clean it up of ambiguities or wrong wording. Maybe I say “I like to take my laptop from behind” when I meant “I lift my laptop from the back”. An AI could point out this type of error.

[bigiain]

Sadly, I suspect the rate of generation of AI "everyones" vastly exceeds the community's capacity to teach culture.