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Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.

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

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