Midtermist12's Quick takes

I have a lot of sympathy towards being frustrated at knee-jerk bias against AI usage. I was recently banned from r/philosophy on first offense because I linked a post that contained an AI-generated image and a (clearly-labelled) AI summary of someone else's argument^[1]. (I saw that the subreddit had rules against AI usage but I foolishly assumed that it only applied to posts in the subreddit itself). I think their choice to ban me was wrong, and deprived them of valuable philosophical arguments that I was able to make^[2] in other subreddits like r/PhilosophyOfScience. So I totally get where you're coming from with frustration.

And I agree that AI, like typewriters, computers, calculators, and other tools, can be epistemically beneficial in allowing people who otherwise don't have the time to make arguments to develop them. 

Nonetheless I think you're wrong in some important ways.

Firstly, I think you're wrong to believe that perception of AI ought only to cause us to be skeptical of whether to engage with some writing, and it is "pure prejudice" to apply a higher bar to writing after reading it conditional upon whether it's AI. I think this is an extremely non-obvious claim, and I currently think you're wrong. 

To illustrate this point, consider two other reasons I might apply greater scrutiny to some content I see:

1. An entire essay is written in Comic Sans
2. I learned that a paper's written by Francisca Gino

If an essay is written in Comic Sans (a font often adopted by unserious people), we might initially suspect that the essay's not very serious, but after reading it, we should withdraw any adverse inferences we make about the essay simply due to font. This is because we believe (by stipulation) that an essay's font can tell us whether an essay is worth reading, but cannot provide additional data after reading the essay. In Pearlian terms, reading the essay "screens off" any information we gain from an essay's font.

I think this is not true for learning that a paper is written by Francisca Gino. Since Francisca Gino's a known data fraudster, even after carefully reading a paper by her, or at least with the same level of care I usually apply to reading psychology papers, I should continue to be more skeptical of her findings than after reading the same paper written by a different academic. I think this is purely rational, rather than an ad hominem argument, or "pure prejudice" as you so eloquently put it.

Now, is learning whether an essay is written (or cowritten) by AI a signal more akin to learning that an essay is written in Comic Sans, or closer to learning that it's written by Francisca Gino? Reasonable people can disagree here, but at the very least the answer's extremely non-obvious, and you haven't actually substantiated why you believe it's the former, when there are indeed good reasons to believe it's the latter. 

In brief: 

1. AI hallucination -- while AIs may intentionally lie less often than Harvard business professors, they still hallucinate at a higher rate than i'm comfortable with seeing on the EA Forum.
2. AI persuasiveness -- for the same facts and levels of evidence, AIs might be more persuasive than most human writers. To the extent this additional persuasiveness is not correlated with truth, we should update negatively accordingly upon seeing arguments presented by AIs.
3. Authority and cognition -- If I see an intelligent and well-meaning person present an argument with some probably-fillable holes, that they allude to but do not directly address in the writing, I might be inclined to give them a benefit of a doubt and assumed they've considered the issue and decided it wasn't worth going into in a short speech or essay. However, this inference is much more likely to go wrong if an essay is written with AI assistance. I alluded to this point in my comment on your other top-level post but I'll mention it again here.
   1. I think it's very plausible, for example, that if you took the time to write out/type out your comment here yourself, you'd have been able to recognize my critique for yourself, and it wouldn't have been necessary for me to dive into it.

1. ^{^}

   I still defend this practice. I think the alternative of summarizing other people's arguments in your own words has various tradeoffs but a big one is that you are injecting your own biases into the summary before you even start critiquing it.

2. ^{^}

   Richard Chappell was also banned temporarily, and has a more eloquent defense. Unlike me he's an academic philosopher (TM)

Applying extra scrutiny to AI generated text is entirely rational, and I encourage people to continue doing so. It used to be that if a text was long and structured, that you could be assured that the writer had some familiarity with the topic they were writing on, and that they had put some degree of intellectual effort and rigor into the article.  

With content written in the AI tone, that is no longer the case: we can't tell if you put in lots of thought and rigour into the article, or if you just threw a 10 word prompt into chatGPT and copy pasted what it said. 

The internet is currently being flooded with AI spam that has zero substance or value, but is superficially well written and structured. It is your responsibility to distinguish yourself from the slop. 

I empathise but strongly disagree. AI has lowered the costs of making superficially plausible but bad content. The internet is full of things that are not worth reading and people need to prioritise.

Human written writing has various cues that people are practiced at identifying that indicate bad writing, and this can often be detected quickly, eg seeming locally incoherent, bad spelling, bad flow, etc. These are obviously not perfect heuristics, but convey real signal. AI has made it much easier to avoid all these basic heuristics, without making it much easier to have good content and ideas. Therefore, if AI wrote a text, it will be more costly to identify bad quality than if a human wrote it - AI text often looks good at first glance but is BS when you look into it deeply

People are rationally responding to the information environment they find themselves in. If cheap tests are less effective, conditional on the text being AI written, then you should be more willing to judge it or ditch it entirely if you conclude it was AI written. Having higher standards of rigour is just rational

I'm drafting new rules and norms around AI usage at the moment. It's especially difficult because of this critique - i.e. AI can genuinely help people express ideas when they otherwise wouldn't have the time. 

However, there is an effect where clearly AI generated text causes me (and other readers) to stop reading because the majority of AI generated text on the internet is low quality/ overlong/ contains too few ideas/ etc... 

You can get around this by removing clear signs of AI writing (for example, condense this page and put it in your system prompt), or rewriting the AI's writing in your own words (when I write the EA Newsletter, I often write a bad draft, get AI to rewrite it, and then rewrite it again myself, using some good elements from the AI version). 

The bottom line for me is that if a post is good quality and contains valuable ideas, it doesn't matter who (or what) wrote it. But many AI-written posts (especially ones written without custom stylistic prompts) would (currently) be better off as a series of bullet-points written by the prompter, not the AI. 

 

In general, I don't think that spending time thinking or talking about speculative future possibilities relating to AGI is going to help anyone with depression, anxiety, or suicidal ideation. I think the online communities that like talking about these speculative future possibilities tend to have properties that make them bad for people who are struggling with their mental health. So, even if there is an optimistic story to tell about AGI, which I think is plausible — personally, I'm much more optimistic about AGI than I am pessimistic, although I think AGI is almost certainly more than 7 years away and could be significantly more than 100 years away, for all I know, and I think most current speculation about futures involving AGI is like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin — I think that is outweighed by people with suicidal ideation interacting with communities that are likely to be bad for their mental health overall.

Better interventions for suicidal ideation, beyond the obvious stuff any doctor or expert will recommend like psychotherapy, medication (e.g. anti-depressants), socializing, exercise, or whatever, might include things like finding a hobby that feels viscerally satisfying to the affected individual. Some people like to do things with their hands, like gardening, making crafts, or painting. Some people prefer to write or to study a subject like ancient history. A lot of people like collecting things, like used books. I think letting people follow their natural curiosity or personal interest is the way to go, although that may be hard to someone to access if they're experiencing anhedonia. 

The wonderful Hank Green talked in a video (or maybe it was his standup special) about how, during his cancer treatment, at a time when the disease, the risk of dying, and the side-effects of the treatments were taking a devastating emotional toll on him (in addition to the physical toll), he struggled with anhedonia. He found it hard to enjoy things. But he found that he was at least able to find things he felt curious about, and wanted to learn about, and that helped keep him going. That strikes me as one of the best observations I've heard about depression and mental health. Enjoyment may be too much to ask for someone who's so depressed they're having suicidal ideation, but curiosity might be easier to reach.