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Comment by MrVandemar | Hacker News Reader

This must be so disheartening. To take the time to create something complex and wonderful only to have a bunch of drive-by yahoos shout "LOL! AI!" out the car window.

Creative work is now so devalued the instinct when most people see something is to believe that nobody put the work in and it was generated, because that's suddenly the overwhelming majority of "art" we are seeing. It's horrifying.

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But that's the entire purpose of AI: bring the value of the work of others down so that those at the top lessen the dependence of the economy on the masses. Of course, this will in turn eventually slow down the economy but if AI can take care of the majority of the needs of the rich, why do they need us?

They’re not “drive-by yahoos”, they’re people who appreciate art, and they are necessarily and justifiably skeptical. They’re doing nothing wrong. In another world, many of them would be dedicated fans of the artist.

In this world, however, AI companies have been permitted to cause this massive tragedy of the commons, and they are the ones we should reserve our epithets for.

I think if you have that many false positives, you're doing something wrong, no matter whose fault you claim it is.

I have plenty of epithets for people who accuse others of lying based on vibes alone. It is not necessary or justifiable.

I tend to judge false accusations (when done negligently or maliciously) as harshly as whatever the accusations are of. Falsely claiming somebody is a liar is as bad as lying. Claiming they're racist, as bad as racism. Cheater, fascist, abuser, and so on.

It’s the internet. Whenever there’s a new category of accusation/put-down, there’s soon a thousandfold more “drive-by yahoos” throwing it around without actually understanding it, and definitely not caring about false positives or accuracy/precision in general; the appeal appears to be in the very act of flinging shit, and any pretense will do. Monkey behavior.

That's not being skeptical. It's being cynical. Skepticism is a positive trait. Cynicism isn't and this hurtful mislabeling w/o any gain over skepticism is exactly why it isn't

Incorrect. This is no better than people who claim writing is AI just because the author uses emdashes

In both cases people are using the heuristics they have to deal with the onslaught of slop, nothing wrong with that.

The error rate is what’s wrong. A heuristic which has a high false positive rate is worse than nothing because it trains people to ignore all reports.

It doesn't have a high false positive rate.

I’ve yet to see it claimed here not in error. AI writing has other tells which are far more reliable, use them.

Emdashes as the sole signal is just wrongheaded. Read a piece (a least a little bit of it) to determine if it is slop before calling it AI-slop. Slop is slop but you have to digest at least some of it before the determination can be made.

I sometimes use the Pangram extension for Firefox.

Human slop, as I like to call it, since so many anti-AI protestors unintelligently use the phrase "AI slop".

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