False equivalence here. The slop generators are not the tooling used to fingerprint you. But you should fear the slop generator anyhow, because even if it's shitty, your boss might not be aware and might fire you anyhow thinking your coworker can handle two people's jobs now with the tool. And maybe the wheels don't even come off with that decision because it isn't like engineering quality is 1:1 correlated with sales.
>This is a paranoid and cynical strategy that doesn't win out in the known history of life. What works is grow, expand, mingle, maintain - assimilate but don't annihilate.
Uhh, yes it does. You are thinking of humans. Humans can mate with other humans. They can assimilate. Now, think of invasive species. What do they do? They don't mate with the natives, learn their culture, respect and give them space. Quite the opposite on all counts. They do what they do in their resource game. They might not out compete the natives and they might peter out. Or, they do out compete the natives, and before long, there aren't any natives or that careful equilibrium that was established beforehand.
And what would you learn from that? Even if it could be said that those things attempted to implement that strategy and failed, you can't really infer much about its overall viability by looking only at losers.
The dodo bird is an example of something that was isolated and then got steamrolled when the herd came around.
You can always zoom out and look at the bigger picture, it's not even about individual species but life as a whole. "Hide and isolate and wall off" is not successful in the long run.^ Your only chance is to keep up with the herd.
If we look at human civilizations, which ones successfully isolated and hid from (real or hypothetical) bigger badder ones? Neither isolation nor annihilation is ever a winning strategy. Fear is the mind-killer.
^ Save for things like extremophiles that have found their way into a tiny niche that nobody else wants. They may survive but they don't flourish and prosper.
Another thing the author makes a note of is the idea of the prompts getting logged. I can imagine with some clever statisticians, before you even formulate the idea yourself of some product or company, the model can construct this before you even do, just based on what you already prompted. Then it can evaluate market fit, estimate return, start its own version of that company and make money and beat you to market should it turn out to be a good idea.
Now before you say this is unrealistic or isn't done today, just know this is all perfectly possible with existing technology. In fact this is a lot how adtech works already, using metadata to predict products you might want to buy before you even realize you want to buy them.
I mean, even north korea has figured out the nuclear bomb, the original greatest secret deep stack of compounded tech. Seems like anyone can figure out anything if they are hell bent on it on this earth. Engineers seem to be more fungible than people anticipate I guess, and no one really comes up with unprecedented unique ideas. The whole research process incentivizes incremental work on known concepts to justify receiving funding at all, since it is in high demand and short supply.
It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.
For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.
If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.
I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.
Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there.
That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.
I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.
One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss writing for form rather than for content.
Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page:
> It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never...
Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I)
> ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer.
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1
> Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection.
Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one
> Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament
Other pages 1s:
* Murakami - 1Q84: 1
* Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1
* Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1
* Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4
* Caro - The Power Broker: 5
* Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3
Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.
No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly.
Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)
Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users.
(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)
On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.
I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.
Why should they care about new content? Game over already. Just keep regurgitating the same slop to the masses. Even before ai it was like this. How many 2 minute pop songs use the same chord structure? Just keep selling the same thing slightly permutated (or not) from the last. That's capitalism, baby. This isn't a science.
Very few of them actually made money though, compared to people who tried to just take an existing idea they could already order from china in bulk and market the living hell out of it. These companies obviously don't care about art and stuff like that, they really just care about the money.
Does that make it okay? Some websites weren't free enough and their owners not passionate enough, so wholesale destruction of that ecosystem is acceptable?
Yeah, it is somewhat funny to read the kind of people that for years looked down on humanities suddenly coming-up with ideas that were described decades or even centuries ago.
Marx, Nietsche, Debord, Foucault, Baudrillard, Adorno - they already saw writing on the wall, or at least fragments of it.
I'm not sure that is the case in all sports. For example in golf, the top women golfers on LPGA tour in distance are only about as long as the shortest men on PGA tour off the tee, about 290 yards average. However, the women are generally vastly more accurate than the men in pretty much every distance tee to green. Their swing is just a different style of swing afforded by female anatomy. It is more hip driven, "textbook," in fact they have higher hip speed than men who rely more on hand speed.
Now imagine a pro golfer who was born female with those anatomical advantages for golf flexibility, and is now taking testosterone for power, ostensibly to identify as male. Not only do they have the anatomy advantage, they now have the power. They would probably dominate pro golf overall, both sides of the game I expect, whichever one they choose to compete in.
You still have your larger bone structure. Larger musculature structure and different muscle insertions. different ligament structure. different skin structure. different grip strength. Broader shoulders, narrower pelvis, different angled limbs. all of that isn't going away even if it atrophies. And you aren't going to let it atrophy because you are an athlete in training managing your dietary macros. Maybe recovery isn't as efficient lacking so much excess testosterone but you still have some.
Starting out with this: are you proposing a height limit on female athletes? If having a larger bone structure is an unfair advantage, surely tall women should be banned from competing?
It comes down to where we draw the line. We limit healthy women from competing in paraplegic games for example, because of inherent advantages.
In certain sports, height might not be formally regulated, but weight classes are regulated. And in those sports it is arguably an advantage to be shorter, as you can be bulkier overall and dedicate more of the limited weight to pure muscle mass vs your skeleton. Although there are also considerations for things such as reach in some circumstances.
Overall though, the difference between a slightly taller athlete of a given sex is nowhere near the athletic prowess differences between a given athlete of the same height and of different sex. A 5' Lebron James would still dominate a 7' Caitlin Clark. Maybe there would be height classes just like there are weight classes and sex classes, if height were such an influencing factor.
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