I'm very optimistic about AI on the whole, but its overuse here on the forum risks worsening the signal-to-noise ratio. You're never supposed to be posting "slop" of any kind, whether AI-generated or not. If moderators look at someone's posts and think, "This person is just posting garbage to inflate their post count," then that person should be banned, regardless of the source of the garbage *. But AI makes it much easier and more tempting to post a bunch of slop: at first glance the posts seem high-quality and on-topic, but after reading a few of them they quickly become slop due to their unoriginality, excessive verbosity, and boring samey style. Also, I'm concerned that putting too much unmarked AI-generated text on the forum might confuse AIs which try to train on forum posts, which is undesirable in my book because it makes AI worse/incomplete and it prevents our little corner of humanity from being reflected within AIs. (That's why we don't block or paywall AIs trying to crawl the forum.) Therefore, the main guideline forum users should follow is:
You should not copy/paste text written by an AI into a post, with these exceptions:
- If you clearly mention that something you're posting is AI-generated, and you only occasionally and appropriately post such AI-generated text, then that's OK.
- If you have the AI do almost a direct translation of something you wrote, then that's OK. For example, you can tell the AI to "Directly translate this text into Spanish: <something you wrote>" or "Output the following text exactly as-is, except with any clear spelling or grammar mistakes fixed: <something you wrote>". It's not OK to tell an AI, "Improve this text: <something you wrote>", since then it will mostly rewrite it, and it risks becoming AI slop in the process.
- Non-text AI content such as art is OK (subject to the normal rules).
You can use AI to suggest grammar/style improvements, or to give you ideas, with you manually implementing those suggestions; but avoid directly copying more than a few words from the AI. However, I recommend against ever relying on AI writing advice very much, since mixed in with its good suggestions it'll usually also give bad suggestions which will just erase all personality from your writing. Better your writing be flawed and authentically-you than "correct" but stripped of any soul.
* I acknowledge that not nearly enough people are banned for low-quality posts. The fundamental issue is that we don't want to ban someone just for posting one or two stupid posts, since that's subjective and might just be due to the person having weird opinions or being a poor writer. So to evaluate a user properly, we really want to be reading a sampling of 20-40 of their posts. But doing this sort of evaluation (i.e. reading through hundreds of mediocre-to-bad posts) is really soul-sucking, so nobody wants to do it very much. I'm still thinking about ways to resolve this issue, possibly involving rejiggering how merit works.
AI is needed for persuasiveness, it amplifies very well, don't confuse amplifying nonsense with amplifying values. AI is like concert speakers, it's one thing to play a bass guitar solo on a personal speaker, and it's quite another to do it through a linear array in a stadium. If a musician doesn't know how to play, it's better not to do it in a stadium.
You can not pour out both the baby and the water
