I agree disclosure is for the benefit of the reader—I’m saying that, as a reader, I disprefer having to skip through a sentence at the top of many new posts disclaming that they used LLMs for copy editing and feedback.
I think the main thing I care about is “were large sections of this written directly by LLM” which I would prefer as first sentence so I know when to not read (which is actually the policy as written here, though I only realized that as of writing this comment). But—it appears that the default warning box has started scaring people into disclosing all forms of LLM usage at the top of essays, which I argue is a bad norm.
I wonder if the disclosures could be non-text by default—e.g. colour-coded with an optional footnote for details.
The thing I’m not liking as a reader is having words to process on this stuff at the start (for me this isn’t just cases where people aren’t following policy; I’ve felt it some about a case where the words were one of the suggested wordings from the policy). Non-text ways to signal could potentially get best-of-both-worlds in terms of reader attention.
Hmm yes—would it also work if it was a coloured callout you could get used to and ignore? I explicitly want newer users to know what the disclosures mean—i.e. a colour code without any text would be too esoteric.
Yeah I think that would be an improvement over the current behaviour. I’d still probably prefer something very short (“LLM usage: zero/minimal/moderate/major”) which can be expanded if people want more texture.
From what I can see, the main issue here who writes the words, about how much LLMs are used in the process.
If most of the brainstorming, research and structuring was done by the LLM but you wrote the words yourself, from my perspective that wouldn’t require any caveat at all. But if LLM’s wrote half of the words than I would definitely want to know at the top of the post (and personally I probably wouldn’t read it).
That’s why it’s so important that we get clear labelling. On this forum we should be able to choose whether or not to read something not written by a human. I would hope that only a minority of posts will have heavy LLM writing, so most posts won’t need any disclosure at all.
I completely agree with @Austin that people shouldn’t write anything if they use LLMs for feedback and copy editing—like he said they shouldn’t have to under this policy. I have seen people stating doing that, but hopefully it will settle down when they realise it isn’t necessary.
I don’t understand why you put such a significance on the drafting of the material. Someone could have more problematic use of AI if they simply deferred to erroneous AI research findings and made a post in his/her own words. Someone could brainstorm and follow the erroneous reasoning of an AI and do so in human words. Conversely, AI could draft words where the research and reasoning is checked and the words to express the thoughts are iterated many times between human/AI to come to a very strong and clear method of expressing it.
Your drawing the line at drafting both does not capture many bad uses of AI and also captures many good or great uses of AI, in my view.
I think your perspective is reasonable here, it’s just not what’s important to me. Genuine unfiltered human interaction is important to me. Knowing that I’m talking with someone without an AI in between is important to me. If that’s not important to you that’s fine. This is important to me not only because I value true direct human interaction, but also (as a secondary problem) because I think AI writing is samey and boring. Maintaining a public writing space with true diversity, quirkiness and strong voices is part of what drives engagement and excitement.
When I see your name on something, I want it to be 100% your voice and your words like we are talking in a public space. Or at the very least I want you to tell me if it’s not. If you’re not concerned with that, then we have a fundamental almost axiomatic difference about what matters in a forum like this. I think that’s part of the reason why there’s a bit of a chasm between our views, and those who are happy with AI writing things. The quality of ideas and reasoning is only half of what matters for me. The other half is the discussion and interaction between us—the mingling of our minds. I’m not sure we can resolve this difference. If you genuinely don’t mind who’s “brain” words came from, and think that other’s don’t have the right to know that as well, that’s reasonable but we may have fundamentally different beliefs.
A human or an AI could do good or bad research, I’m less concerned with that. Karma will sort that out. Karma can’t answer the human interaction question above. We can discern from outside whether an argument is good or not. We can’t discern from outside whose words they are—that’s why we need the start-of-post disclosure at the very least (I would go further). An analogy might be if someone did a bunch of research for you and sent it to you, and then you used half of their words in your post. Ignoring the plagiarism element, that wouldn’t be you talking with me it would be someone else which would be dishonest—unless you said “hey this article is half my research assistant’s words and half mine).
I think as a human I have the right to know who I’m interacting with.
We updated the policy in a way that you guys might both like :) We’re using Pangram to assign a label, and there is no longer any need for manual disclosure.
Thanks both for your thoughts! (This won’t be exactly what either of you had in mind, but I’m sure your feedback fed into it).
scaring people into disclosing all forms of LLM usage at the top of essays, which I argue is a bad norm
Yep, that’s different. I’ve only seen one example of this so far, but if it continues it’s probably just a design issue we can tweak (i.e. maybe the copy isn’t clear enough on the post-page).
I agree disclosure is for the benefit of the reader—I’m saying that, as a reader, I disprefer having to skip through a sentence at the top of many new posts disclaming that they used LLMs for copy editing and feedback.
I think the main thing I care about is “were large sections of this written directly by LLM” which I would prefer as first sentence so I know when to not read (which is actually the policy as written here, though I only realized that as of writing this comment). But—it appears that the default warning box has started scaring people into disclosing all forms of LLM usage at the top of essays, which I argue is a bad norm.
I wonder if the disclosures could be non-text by default—e.g. colour-coded with an optional footnote for details.
The thing I’m not liking as a reader is having words to process on this stuff at the start (for me this isn’t just cases where people aren’t following policy; I’ve felt it some about a case where the words were one of the suggested wordings from the policy). Non-text ways to signal could potentially get best-of-both-worlds in terms of reader attention.
Hmm yes—would it also work if it was a coloured callout you could get used to and ignore? I explicitly want newer users to know what the disclosures mean—i.e. a colour code without any text would be too esoteric.
Yeah I think that would be an improvement over the current behaviour. I’d still probably prefer something very short (“LLM usage: zero/minimal/moderate/major”) which can be expanded if people want more texture.
From what I can see, the main issue here who writes the words, about how much LLMs are used in the process.
If most of the brainstorming, research and structuring was done by the LLM but you wrote the words yourself, from my perspective that wouldn’t require any caveat at all. But if LLM’s wrote half of the words than I would definitely want to know at the top of the post (and personally I probably wouldn’t read it).
That’s why it’s so important that we get clear labelling. On this forum we should be able to choose whether or not to read something not written by a human. I would hope that only a minority of posts will have heavy LLM writing, so most posts won’t need any disclosure at all.
I completely agree with @Austin that people shouldn’t write anything if they use LLMs for feedback and copy editing—like he said they shouldn’t have to under this policy. I have seen people stating doing that, but hopefully it will settle down when they realise it isn’t necessary.
I don’t understand why you put such a significance on the drafting of the material. Someone could have more problematic use of AI if they simply deferred to erroneous AI research findings and made a post in his/her own words. Someone could brainstorm and follow the erroneous reasoning of an AI and do so in human words. Conversely, AI could draft words where the research and reasoning is checked and the words to express the thoughts are iterated many times between human/AI to come to a very strong and clear method of expressing it.
Your drawing the line at drafting both does not capture many bad uses of AI and also captures many good or great uses of AI, in my view.
I think your perspective is reasonable here, it’s just not what’s important to me. Genuine unfiltered human interaction is important to me. Knowing that I’m talking with someone without an AI in between is important to me. If that’s not important to you that’s fine. This is important to me not only because I value true direct human interaction, but also (as a secondary problem) because I think AI writing is samey and boring. Maintaining a public writing space with true diversity, quirkiness and strong voices is part of what drives engagement and excitement.
When I see your name on something, I want it to be 100% your voice and your words like we are talking in a public space. Or at the very least I want you to tell me if it’s not. If you’re not concerned with that, then we have a fundamental almost axiomatic difference about what matters in a forum like this. I think that’s part of the reason why there’s a bit of a chasm between our views, and those who are happy with AI writing things. The quality of ideas and reasoning is only half of what matters for me. The other half is the discussion and interaction between us—the mingling of our minds. I’m not sure we can resolve this difference. If you genuinely don’t mind who’s “brain” words came from, and think that other’s don’t have the right to know that as well, that’s reasonable but we may have fundamentally different beliefs.
A human or an AI could do good or bad research, I’m less concerned with that. Karma will sort that out. Karma can’t answer the human interaction question above. We can discern from outside whether an argument is good or not. We can’t discern from outside whose words they are—that’s why we need the start-of-post disclosure at the very least (I would go further). An analogy might be if someone did a bunch of research for you and sent it to you, and then you used half of their words in your post. Ignoring the plagiarism element, that wouldn’t be you talking with me it would be someone else which would be dishonest—unless you said “hey this article is half my research assistant’s words and half mine).
I think as a human I have the right to know who I’m interacting with.
We updated the policy in a way that you guys might both like :) We’re using Pangram to assign a label, and there is no longer any need for manual disclosure.
Thanks both for your thoughts! (This won’t be exactly what either of you had in mind, but I’m sure your feedback fed into it).
Yep, that’s different. I’ve only seen one example of this so far, but if it continues it’s probably just a design issue we can tweak (i.e. maybe the copy isn’t clear enough on the post-page).