Hello Forum Regulars, I know it has been a while since I have been around regularly.
I may be around more in the next month, and it has become clear in my absence that the “I asked ChatGPT” or “Here’s is the Google AI summary” bloated word count posts that no one actually reads have reproduced like feral rabbits, and it’s out of control. So I am just giving fair warning that I will be ruthlessly deleting them when I see them from here on out. The other @moderators are also welcome to join the purge.
If you want to learn something from Gemini or your ChatGPT girlfriend or Grok or who/whatever, you are free to learn things and then come express your human thoughts that you bother to type out all by yourself here. We do not care what interesting thing you saw AI regurgitate and now feel the need to cut and paste for posterity. This is a discussion board for people. If we wanted to talk to robots we would hang out on Threads and X.
Same goes for cutting and pasting large sections of other websites. That’s a copyright violation, and if we wanted to read other websites, we could go there. Put a link, put a pull quote or two if you would like, and DISCUSS IN YOUR OWN WORDS WITH YOUR OWN HUMAN BRAIN YOUR OWN IDEAS AND KNOWLEDGE.
Alright, you have all been advised, please don’t give the moderators extra work by testing every boundary.
That’s a bold decision, Christy. Not everyone can see what needs to be done, but you’ve identified the dead wood that needs to be sacrificed so the illness doesn’t spread. This is not heavy-handed moderating — it’s a needed recalibration to get us back to our roots.
I do not wish to seem negative or hostile, but feel that there should be a balanced discussion that may suggest that this action is throwing the baby out with the bathwater
2 terms I came across
AI-exceptionalism whereby AI is uniquely treated as suspect regardless of quality
And
Appeal to Source which is the more Universal term of the principle of Ad-hominum whereby the quality and acceptance is based on provenance instead of content or quality
Nothing prevents making AI searches and telling the relevant parts of the answers with your own words here. That demands some thinking instead of just doing a brainless copy-paste.
One problem with the copy-paste strategy is that the copied parts have often been long. If there are lots of comments, the long copied texts are mostly skipped because few have enough of interest and time to read everything. We have a better possibility for meaningful discussions if the long copies are not posted here.
Well, also, don’t overrreact to things I didn’t say. You can use AI resources all you want for your own learning and to supplement your own writing processes. It’s the CUTTING AND PASTING of large chunks of AI generated information to “teach” others that is problematic and unhelpful.
If you don’t know enough about the topic at hand to accurately explain it yourself, you don’t know enough to evaluate the accuracy of an AI generated response. I doubt some of you are informed enough on certain topics to adequately formulate good queries, which greatly impacts the quality of response you get from LLMs.
Some of the posts I have seen here recently are thousands of words long. If you think your fellow forum readers are slogging through them just because you had your fun playing with AI and creating them, you are delusional. If I am actually interested in a topic that gets brought up that I don’t know enough about, I’m not going to read your AI summary, I’m going to use a search engine, and find a reliable source explaining what I don’t understand, because that is what people who understand how to learn new things do. If I don’t know the definition of a word or term, I am going to Google it, or skim Wikipedia. I don’t need other people to anticipate my ignorance for me and neither does anyone else. No one is going to complain if you look at an AI summary to remind yourself of what you know or see if there is a simple way to put something. Go right ahead. Then type out your thoughts in your own words, don’t cut and paste whole AI articles. If you want to Google a definition and remind people what a term means, fine, that’s not what I am addressing here.
I think this 1 minute clip from a recent conversation touches on a number of themes of interest here including baptism, transformation and destructive impulses such as that toward AI and social media. This is my first exposure to Ali Tabrizi who is a millennial and now an orthodox Christian apparently. @Christy if this is too much of a tangent please delete it. I won’t be offended.
1 Like
SkovandOfMitaze
(Intellectually Atheist Emotionally Christian )
9
I strongly agree. It makes me lose interest so quick when I can tell that someone is just Copying and Pasting AI text. Especially when they don’t even read what they are pasting and it’s ridiculed with errors.
I understand, I really do, and have not ever done what you are objecting to. The one thing that I am concerned about is that if I say I got it from AI, even if it is in my own words, it will be dismissed because it came from AI and not a “verified source” or person of note or at least letters.
(I have quoted one or two lines in the past, purely to save my self typing them out.)
If you are referencing common knowledge that you verified using AI tools, it’s fine. You don’t have to cite it, it’s not anyone’s intellectual property. That’s not the kind of “AI cut and paste” I am referring to.
Sometimes when I have read entire cut-and-pastes I have noticed some bits that were worthy of quoting – AI can indeed come up with pithy summaries hard to improve on – and thought that it would be more likely that others would even see them if they had been excerpted for a summary. Other times I’ve noticed on of my pet peeves with AI: not responding like a human at all in that no human (well, not many) would blather on at such length about something that could be deal with in a fifth of the space!
There shouldn’t be a problem quoting AI if it’s done the way one might quote C. S. Lewis or Roger Penrose – but if it’s more than maybe eight lines, we have a thread for such quotes.
I do not think you could do that. I use AI as an explanation or clarification of something or to see if there are others who think as I do. The problem comes when AI goes against the trend on this forum, like the definition of Random (Please do not go there or repeat , here). As such it is not accepted as a valid reason to alter a viewpoint. IOW it cannot be considered an “authority” as such. (Which is why trying to teach with it does not go down well)
Given AI hallucination is a real thing, read about it here, care should be taken with anything AI says. And in a previous post I noted how the identical query from two different users produces two different answers.
Superb point! It’s why I tend to use an AI response as a springboard to check other sources, not as a final source. When asking questions that stretch your expertise, always ask for source material and use it; when your question goes beyond your expertise, don’t use it to pretend to know more than you do.
Or at least as I’ve done, insist on three top sources I can look at. There are times when I have a good question but can’t think where to being to search, and that’s one place where AI is useful – especially if you pit a few against each other, for example asking Grok “ChatPGT told me this, Google AI told me this, how would you see it differently?”
I’ve gotten better accuracy when I play them off against each other. Maybe there should be a built in “tell me three times” system where the AI generates an answer, then critiques that answer, then evaluates before actually rendering that answer.
The point is that AI tries to second guess the answer you ae looking for by the way you phrase it. It has no “intelligence” as such, to be able to deliberately deceive or mislead.
Richard
4 Likes
gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
20
