[paulpauper]

Nah, AI writing is bad because it breaks the implicit trust between the reader and the author. It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it. It's not merely a tool. the writing is worse, and people feel like they are being ripped off when they see it and it's undisclosed.

[capyba]

This is my thought, exactly. Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it: “these are my thoughts, recorded to share with you.” When reading LLM-generated text that purports to be a real person’s that contract is broken. Verification that even just the basic ideas are the author’s is impossible. It feels cheap and deceitful.

[infinite_spin]

> Reading has always been a contract between the person who wrote the text and the person who’s reading it

I don't think an author is bound to their readers via contract, implicit or otherwise. I have no obligation to tell people what tools I use, or how I've arrived at a final product. That might be upsetting to hear, but authors don't owe their readers anything, just as readers don't owe authors anything.

There is a precedent for this, many auto biographies are actually ghostwritten, demonstrating that this contract you speak of has never actually existed.

[pseudalopex]

Ghost writing is fraud.

[infinite_spin]

I don't think a single ghostwriter has ever been convicted of fraud for writing an auto biography on behalf of another person. Do you have some evidence to back this claim or am I expected to take your word for it?

[bscphil]

> It's implicitly assumed when you read something that a person write it.

I basically agree, but it's more specific than that, I think. The basic promise is that the writer believes the thing you are writing. This is a feature of human speech that is so central that Grice made it part of one of the maxims of his pragmatic theory of conversation: "do not say what you believe to be false" or "that for which you lack adequate evidence."

In writing, using generative AI destroys the pragmatic basis for this conversational maxim, because it means that a consequential number of "people" you and I talk to online are not really people at all. They're entirely artificial, and the text generated was never even read by a human, certainly not a statement of a human's actual beliefs about anything. (This isn't even a human-preferring standard, the problem with LLM text is that even the LLM doesn't believe it.) Even in cases where a human does interact with the text in some capacity before it is published, it's likely that a plurality to a majority of the ideas reflected in the text come from a language model that does not actually believe them.

Writing is something that aids in the development of human ideas. It's not just that in the ideal case, a human being will have certain ideas and be able to communicate them to other people. Rather, we often have inchoate, unclear, or even contradictory ideas and opinions, and the process of writing itself leads us to figure out what it is, exactly, that we believe. So even in the "ideal" case of someone like OP who engages with LLMs more critically, and claims responsibility for every bit of text they publish, the process is still detrimental to the production and communication of true beliefs because their ideas were formed in dialogue with an agent that did not actually believe them. It's a process that is dangerous to bypass because you skip most of the thinking involved in writing without even realizing it.

[hodgesrm]

How would you feel about an article if you knew the author circulated it to respected friends for review? That's another way to use LLMs. I do it all the time. LLMs are great sounding boards.

Similarly how would you feel about writing that the author passed over to an editor?

p.s., I'm just echoing the arguments of the orginal article's author, who has a talent for reductio ad absurdum.

edit: added p.s.

[danwitt]

I think the real contract being violated is a bit narrower than that. More precisely, the pre-LLM assumption was that producing a piece of content took more effort than consuming it, so the content existing at all signaled that someone cared enough to put some time into it.

AI can definitely be used as a tool in a workflow that's mostly driven by human effort. But as a reader, it's hard to tell whether a particular piece of AI-assisted writing came out of that kind of workflow without investing the effort yourself, and the prior of AI Writing == AI Slop is pretty strong. Attribution seems like a partial solution, since someone putting their name behind it will suffer reputational harm if they're producing nothing but slop.