I don’t know why some are offended so much by this. There’s an endless stream of AI generated stuff on the internet already. You can also generate your own stuff and don’t need every single outlet to mass produce and publish LLM output. It’s ok that some remain human centric.
Because people want to normalize their own backhanded use of AI-generated content. It gives you an edge over human content creators, simply because you can produce more with less effort, but that edge disappears if the content is shunned.
I see this sentiment a lot more recently and I don't understand it. Why is it "backhanded" if someone uses AI to create something. I don't see the connection with ease of creation either.
I'm not offended or anything similar, but such open statements look to me as cheap virtue signalling.
If you are convinced that AI content is inferior and less engaging to human-generated one (and I fully agree with that) then simply enforcing that rule without advertising it should already be effective.
Eh, if they have something to tell their users that's worth telling, what's wrong with telling it?
If you have a discount on socks for your customers, you say "we've got a discount on socks". If your customers don't have to wade through AI slop, you say "we don't do AI (so you don't have to wade through slop)".
This doesn’t make sense, because they are putting their money where their mouth is. They could instead grift, generate much more content and click bait, raise good money with “currentafair agents” or something, all with AI!
> simply enforcing that rule without advertising
From dusk till dawn we are drowning in AI news and advertisements praising AI as if it’s the second coming of Jesus. Why does it bother if someone doesn’t want to join the bandwagon? Why shouldn’t they be transparent about their stance?
I buy products that explicitly mention their quality differentiation, this is no different than “100% Made in USA” or "100% Grass Fed Beef." That’s literally how a free market and value discovery is supposed to work with available information. Provide price, contents, value proposition, the consumer evaluates value received.
If I want slop, I have my own Claude subscription. I’m willing to pay for hand crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought products, not someone else's margin spread between their token costs and their prices. “Vote with your wallet.”
The difference is "100% Made in the USA" does not usually offend most people (it may do if you find it written on a twisted piece of metal where your village used to be)
On the other hand "All USA , no foreigners made this" might offend some.
"No Belgians were involved in making this product" might be found to be more offensive. Yet consistent with "100% Made in the USA".
The distinction is in what they are broadcasting with their message.
I would say the vast majority of people outside a tech bubble will not be offended by "we didn't use AI to write any of this" (the converse might be true though!)
As other people have said, if I wanted AI slop I'd just ask Claude.
Can you share why it would be offensive to not want to pay for LLM produced content in this context? Who might this offend? And why would it offend them?
I'm not "anti clanker" per se but I also don't have strong feelings about when and where this appliance is used. It is an appliance and tool, not a person, not a consciousness. For those who prefer machine generated content, that is a preference one can have.
I don't think I ever suggested that it would be offensive to not want to pay for LLM produced content. I certainly don't think that it should be offensive.
I have only been noting that declarations of position that come across as moral judgements of others can offend people.
> I have my own Claude subscription. I’m willing to pay for hand crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought products. “Vote with your wallet.”
Soon you'll be able to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived prompts for your Claude subscription just like you used to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived code for your computer.
Are prompts covered by copyright? Will we see "Prompt copying is killing the prompt industry - and it's illegal" on the prompt delivery service site?
> Soon you'll be able to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived prompts for your Claude subscription just like you used to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived code for your computer.
I'm unsure Claude will be out there observing and reporting in meat space. "Three months maybe, six months definitely." LLMs and inference only sees what it can access digitally. It doesn't see or experience outside of the aquarium. How much does a goldfish in a bowl know about the world? Only about as far as it can see.
Human content when I want a human perspective, search engine results when I want a search engine for a lossy jpeg of the internet (or a sausage machine pushing tokens through a formal proof based or test driven system).
> LLMs and inference only sees what it can access digitally. It doesn't see or experience outside of the aquarium. How much does a goldfish in a bowl know about the world? Only about as far as it can see.
Most of the (Western?) world is covered in cameras, and I bet the video feeds will soon be feed into the training pipelines. And then as soon as AI is put in control of things like traffic lights, self-driving cars, logistics (e.g., delivery scheduling), then the AI will have a complete loop from which to learn: try something in the real world ("shorten this traffic light by 15s"), observe result ("traffic backs up Wednesdays at 8am"), repeat.
Surely this will teach the machine to love, feel, understand, and self reflect|actualize. The subthread context was human generated content, not machine learning for logistics and meat space Factorio (which good 'ol machine learning already did fine at).
I'm not bothered when people choose to avoid using AI.
Making a declaration that you are rejecting AI can come across as implying use of AI is a moral failing. There are certainly people who overtly claim it is a moral failing.
I think the people who are offended are perceiving this as as statement impugning their character.
Would you think it reasonable for a mens health magazine to choose to not feature obese people on the cover?
But on the other hand,
Would you think it reasonable for people to feel singled out when they choose to make a public declaration that they will never put an obese person on the cover?
I dont get your analogy at all. No it is not reasonable to make such proclamation, because anorexia and eatimg disorders are going up in men. Health magazine should not be the source of further growth of it.
Being obese or saying "thin only" is not the same as "no ai content".
Its sort of like the people whom start gushing about how they are not an alcoholic as soon as you mention you don't drink anymore. Just smile and nod and let them twist themselves into a knot.
Indeed, the linked article goes so far as to explicitly state, "Our magazine is committing itself to remaining handmade. Ensure every publication you support does the same."
Human-written text doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically better. Humans can create slop too. They can publish articles written by a marketing department or a lobbyist. What kind of text was an article written by a human 20 years ago for a free newspaper at a train station?
Sure, AI can generate slop at a very high rate, but it can also help writers reformulate a text or act as a proofreader. The editor's choices matter, as do the result and the audience's taste.
However, lately, there has been growing AI fatigue, and people are probably becoming willing to pay more if they can be sure that there's "No AI inside" (something like "No palm oil inside"). If people are willing to pay for it, we'll see.
Personally, on my blog, which I moved away from Blogger and which has been deindexed by Google, I have the same statement: 100% handwritten (with a disclaimer that I am not responsable for crawler hallucination). Why? First, because writing is really the fun part. I make better editorial choices when I write the text directly. Second, there's the audience. On my blog, over 90% of the audience consists of bots and crawlers. They need handwritten stuff, and if this audience grows, it probably means they like those posts.
In the end, the funny part is analyzing my text with LLMs after a post is published. The result is surprises and more ideas. If I ever ask what I need to change to make the text sound more human, the response is usually that I have to add more slop. That's the part I leave out.
Plus for all good that llms can bring to mankind, they will probably bring 10x or 100x more negative, bordering on evil with no solution in sight.
Unemployment in hundreds of millions globally? Loss of part that makes us humans in many creative aspects? People getting visibly and measurably dumber and lazier, including top performers?
Absolutely 0 solutions, nobody cares. People here on HN often just think its not their problem, they can cash those bonuses and rest of mankind can go fuck themselves and serve them for near nothing, being on top /near top of the pile is the ultimate goal. At least this seems to be unspoken part of many llm discussions here. Pathetic. It seems this is way more typical mindset in US compared to say in Europe and tells a few things about current US society, but nothing nice.
We are losing a significant part of our humanity if llms really deliver on their promise and not just crash global economy big time which on its own is huge problem. People steering this are mostly typical high functioning sociopaths like altman focused on money and power, so dont expect those to care.
So yeah, there are concerns to say the least, not everybody operates on autistic narrow tube view of the world as themselves and thats it. Some of us have kids too.
Our workplace are heavy users of AI for nearly everything, but we still hold to the rule that if the audience of text is a human, it should be written by a human.
I know of one CEO who said "If you copy/paste an AI response and send it to someone else, they didn't need you in the loop and you don't need to work here anymore".
Maybe better phrased as "another human". If you're prompting AI for your own purposes that's totally fine, just absorb the information and summarize it for people instead of just dumping AI output directly on them.
Is it a gentlemens agreement, or do you actually enforce this somehow? What stops anyone from prompting "copy my writing style, use less words, make some small typos and gramma inefficiences
It's expected to call out people (usually in DMs) when they post AI generated stuff. Occasionally people will link to a claude doc as like an "additional details here" type note, but that's the extent of it.
It's entirely possible that people have just finely tuned AI to perfectly mimic them, but if it passes the Turing test, I guess I have nothing to complain about. Our rules are less about some fundamental opposition to AI and more that it's just annoying to read unedited AI slop.
That’s what I am doing. My writing is horrible and i produce much better results when i take AI output as starting point. But I do much more than adding typos (never) and grammar inefficiencies.
Try flipping it, that's what I do. I usually prompt AI for research, absorb thta, write my own thing, and then ask AI to proofread it and I'll let it fix small grammatical errors and typos, while larger structural suggestions I'll still implement myself. It doesn't take much more time in my experience and I'm infinitely more satisfied with my output.
Agreed. We replaced horse carriage drivers with taxi drivers/just driving your own car. You can't put the technology back after it's created. Jobs will be lost unfortunately, but technology will move on and people will adapt.
The false AI generated content getting a lot of milage indeed is the big problem. So many fake AI slop shorts on YouTube for example.
I think one thing to keep in mind as to why all of the other media empires are so quick to roll over and embrace AI - all of these companies are survivors of the massive media purge of the late 2000s, when blogs and cheap online news just completely gutted the traditional news and publishing world.
Outside of a few standouts, the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting.
Now the bloggers and upstart publishers that killed traditional media are the incumbents.
Washington Post, LA Times, Grantland, New Republic, most of the traditional Conde Nast publications.
More importantly, you can add in all of the local independent newspaper, tv, and radio channels that were either shut down or gobbled up by large corporations and gutted (Sinclair, Clear Channel, etc). Over 3000 newspapers were closed down, as well as nearly every foreign or government bureau.
This is when the largest drop ever of professional reporters in the US happened - we entered the 2020s with less than half of the number of employed reporters as we had in 2000.
The article explicitly says "no text that is generated by AI" but is a bit more ambiguous on whether AI can be used as an aide to writing. There's this section:
>This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.
As someone trying to pickup writing fiction after years of doing technical writing, I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...). Since Current Affairs is a commentary magazine and not just straight facts reporting, I could imagine authors wanting similar feedback. Would this kind of usage be permitted? Seems... yes? But I'm not completely sure.
> I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...)
I'm too early in the process to worry about taste. Most of what I produce still has the voice of something like... a test report or design doc. Because that's the kind of writing I produced for decades.
Likely no. Editors and writers at Current Affairs are career professionals and their expertise is not as reproducible as the expertise of software engineers. "Does this code compile?" and "How does the review history describe this change?" are quite answerable to an LLM in a way that "Does this paragraph have the intended effect?" are not.
The only way I see creators can continue earning money is by a new market in which the products they create can not be paid in money but in a new coin. I propose that the coin stays strictly internal and not convertible, that fiat enters only from the outside, and that exit is communal, not automatic. The viable solution is a federated network of small, closed credit loops. Inside each loop, creators use a non convertible token for work and tools. Cash enters through dues or grants, and cash out exit grants are decided by community vote based on need.
Small loops keep social trust high. When loops need to trade, they establish simple bilateral treaties with each other. This preserves value, protects human labor, and keeps decisions in local hands.
I'm kinda ambivalent on the Druckenmiller WSJ case. He's admittedly a poor writer, and probably wouldn't have published anything had it not been for AI.
Obviously the WSJ staff shouldn't be using it in the final output, but if it's a prominent guest's opinion filtered through ChatGPT, I'm mostly fine with it.
> Obviously the WSJ staff shouldn't be using it in the final output
It was an op-ed, it's inappropriate to edit those heavily. So they either had to accept it more or less as submitted (with the usual basic editing around grammar, clarity, and typos), or not accept it. If they'd rewritten it, it would not have been an op-ed by Druckenmiller anymore, but someone else's interpretation of his submission.
If Druckenmiller had published his badly-written, poorly articulated opinions, it would have been more valuable. It'd be what he believes, written in the way he can manage to articulate. Maybe we could form an entirely appropriate bad opinion of him and his ideas and writing.
Whether you're pro-AI or anti-AI, everyone benefits from non-AI-written content. The anti-AI crowd benefits from avoiding content they dislike and the pro-AI crowd gets more quality training data.
I would way rather read handwritten articles. I think everyone should celebrate the human craft of writing. I really hope this doesn't slowly become the "no-VFX" posturing from the film industry, however.
I think we will be stuck relitigating this issue every time AI disrupts an industry, producing a ton of newsworthy proclamations from each organization or project about their AI policy. But they all boil down to the same debate which is getting quite old.
I'd argue that it's more akin to ingredient labeling for food so you can at least have some confidence that you're not reading mindless generated slop. It's not perfect, and the writing can still be bad, but at least it's you're trying to avoid subjecting yourself to LLM generated garbage.
Nobody's saying it should take care of the entire process, but the idea of banning it from all parts of your process is an emotionally charged, short-sighted decision.
> Nobody's saying it should take care of the entire process, but the idea of banning it from all parts of your process is an emotionally charged, short-sighted decision.
Well they didn't do that, and in fact specifically mentioned how they are not doing that. So what are you even talking about?
I'm more concerned with the bizarre choices made by AI recommenders to deliver me human content that is worse than entertaining slop like the LGTM song or anything by Skyebrows on youtube. Unpopular flex I'm sure, but don't enrage me, I just report it as abuse/harassment. Engage me and tame my ADHD-addled hindbrain.
The people reading their magazine do. When "journalists" use LLM to write articles it's painfully obvious, there's a huge dip in quality, and it's an immediate turn off for anyone actually invested in the content.
In what is undoubtedly a fantasy world worth working towards, I envision this happening across various industries, where tiny businesses rise up against the continuing worsening of quality and rising prices, and seek to produce quality goods and services that may be more expensive than their competition, but are worth the cost.
We are witnessing the natural outcome of pursuing higher profits at the expense of everything else; at some point it becomes “as crappy as the market will bear”, and we all lose out. For some of us it may manifest as having to get our car serviced every few thousand miles because the parts are of poor quality (but cheap!). For some of us it may manifest as no longer desiring sweets because they’re now poorly made with substandard ingredients created in a lab somewhere.
It can also manifest in ways that are a threat to public safety; like rollercoaster rides that weren’t properly designed or tested because schools now pursue profits above learning; or because manufacturers somehow rely on regulators to do their job for them.
However it manifests, it’s hard to point to higher prices and lower quality goods and services and say this is the best that capitalism has to offer. If this is it, if this is the capitalist system working as intended, it’s no wonder movements like the Democratic Socialists of America are taking hold.
Every industry will be divided along these lines. But there isn’t an independent auditor or regulator like UL or OU (kosher food) to help instill trust with consumers. So enforcement is impossible.
AI used to be obvious, but the quality has improved — in 6 months it will be impossible to detect.
Eventually you will have to control the entire supply chain, like Dune. You will have to have an entire org policed with anti-AI software, attestation and spot checks to attest that AI was never used in the workflow.
The auditors will have to spot-check every employee randomly the way USADA / IADA (anti doping agencies) do – on-call within 2 hours notice for an anti-AI attestation review.
1 drop of AI taints the entire institution.
(I’m not anti AI, I’m explaining the implications. And I think the principle is good for their journal, though I don’t think they’ve thought through how to manage it yet. )
>So our rule is simple: No AI generated articles or illustrations in the magazine!
This is, I think, as close to ideal as an AI policy for media can possibly be. For certain things - visual art, music, storywriting, game design, and public communications - I think consumers will continue to value the human element and demand it. The optimistic take is that this will line up with the capitalist incentive as well, no matter how much AI reduces the cost of production to nearly zero. People just won't want to engage with slop.
>Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element. But we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied mathematical formulas.
This is another W as far as their AI policy goes. While skeptical of "slop" and other kinds of lazily-generated, low-quality output, I also remain highly critical of anti-AI absolutism. Generally these are the types of arguments you see bandied about on places like Bluesky which lean hard on the environmental impact/third-worldist perspectives, argue for AI-driven skills loss, make tenuous and contrived connections of AI with their hot-button cultural issue, or only seem to view AI through the lens of their own job security. None of these issues are inherent to AI or are insurmountable, and hardliners make an incorrect assumption that the technology can simply be banned or boycotted away. Many of them are feverishly waiting for "the bubble pop", which is barked with the same optimism as evangelical predictions of the Rapture. Some of these people are so obsessive about being anti-AI that they wield whatever diminutive influence they may have to ban your IP address from their website if their server ever catches Claude doing a web search on it.
> I’ll admit, I used to be excited by generative AI. I made goofy little images in DALL-E. I liked the dumb novelty songs. I thought it could be a cool tool for creative professionals to play around with. I forgot for a moment that we live under capitalism, where every new technology will be used by the ruling class to fuck over workers.
I think this is key. If AI wasn't force-fed into every industry in a rapacious grasp for more profits, our society might have been able to grow into a healthier equilibrium where AI is a useful tool for creative professionals.
Even the insiders I talk to at big AI labs express the opinion, "nobody likes where we're going, but the pressures are too strong."
> Two neighbors stop in front of a construction site and look through the fence. Inside, five workers are using two enormous machines to finish digging a massive hole. One neighbor shakes his head. “Fifty people could have dug that with shovels. Everyone would have had a job.” The other looks at him and says, “Why stop at fifty? A thousand people could have dug it with their bare hands.”
Good luck trying to figure out whether something was written by AI or a human. This mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.
Downvoting me or others will not change this fact.
I don't think I've ever encountered something written by an LLM that was better than barely passable prose. It's just about suitable for documentation and mundane news regurgitation, but a piece of creative writing? Please show me your favourite examples where it's better than "passable", I'm open to changing my mind.
Figuring out whether something is written by AI or a human is fairly easy with Pangram, and soon all major models will embed fingerprinting and it will be basically 100% detectable.
A personal account doesn't change the fact that AI will become so ubiquitous that most people won't be able to tell for sure whether something was written by a model, let alone a model following specific instructions like "Write like Mark Twain."
That's a consequence of not using enough compute. The correct way to have an LLM write creatively is to have it try hundreds of permutations and then judge those hundreds. This is basically what humans do anyway. Some models are better than others but you can absolutely write well with it. I generally find that when people say it doesn't work for them they aren't actually trying very hard or they simply do not know what they are doing.
The second I realize that any kind of art was made by AI, I lose all interest in it, because "made by AI" is the same thing as made by no one. Some of us will always care.
Yep, same. AI interesting only in the same way that a forklift is interesting. It's technically remarkable, it can do more work faster than a person, but without much finesse and certainly without any soul. The entire point of art is that it's an expression of another human. AI can never create art by definition.
What will happen when you cannot trust your instinct to see if something was handmade or made by a machine? Will you give up your bias or will you go full bias just in case?
>his mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.
Just like they've forgotten about tulip bulbs?
Even if LLMs deliver a fraction of what their advocates promise, their impact entry into society will be relevant for centuries, much as with piracy, industrialization, and abolition.
The value of moving dirt is that someone paid for a hole. They don't care how it was made.
The value of written communication is in whether people decide to read it. There is nothing controversial about readers rejecting content they perceive is low-effort.
It's pretty obvious to me when someone just copy pastes claude spew onto a website and calls it a day. If they put in enough effort that I can no longer tell then sure, I will read that.
Personal perception will never be a reliable way to detect text written by LLMs, especially when people guide those LLMs with specific rules and instructions. It's virtually impossible. What you'll experience instead is your bias growing to the point where nothing will seem human-written anymore. You'll start assuming all text was generated by AI. It's pure AI paranoia.
Yeah it's pretty obvious now. But look at the improvements Anthropic made to Opus 5.5. It went from physically painful to read, to kind of annoying but tolerable. I wouldn't bet on it taking a long time to reach high quality prose.
Btw it is kind of weird how it still can't write prose normally but it can write impressively high quality code now. Must be something to do with their training. Or maybe it's easier to quantify good code.
Humans can tell if something is written by an AI. LLMs, so far, have yet to pass the uncanny valley, which is probably part of why we all react with such disgust when LLM-generated content is posted to HN.
> Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.
Do you have a crystal ball that tells you this, or is it just your gut feeling? Last I checked, AI and AI-generated content continues to be deeply unpopular outside of insular tech circles.
> Good luck trying to figure out whether something was written by AI or a human.
It’s a magazine, not a social media website. They control who writes for them and they know who they can trust. If any of those people break that trust, they are banned and replaced with someone else.
> Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human.
Of course they will. To this day people still care about (for example) colonialist actions from hundreds of years ago or buying print books. It’s disconnected from reality to believe everybody will simply not care who wrote what they read.
"It's a magazine" is not a bulletproof solution to avoid AI contributions. I worked for many magazines in my younger years, back when people worked and wrote in the same place. Now everything is digital, and writers are spread all around the globe. They share information digitally, not through typewriters. These people who are suddenly concerned about AI have no reliable way to prevent or detect AI-generated text anymore.
> "It's a magazine" is not a bulletproof solution to avoid AI contributions.
Nor have I claimed such a thing. I recommend you read the rest of the paragraph instead of stopping at the first sentence and making a bad faith argument. If you don’t read a point to the end, you can’t understand it enough to argue against it.
> all of the AI models that are being used to replace artists were trained through the mass theft of those very same artists’ work
This seems to be the underlying moral justification for creatives' opposition of AI. Job destruction is the obvious self-interested justification.
My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).
A quick hypothetical:
Let's say instead of hoovering up billions of images from data dumps, the AI researchers took a still camera to all the art galleries on the planet and snapped photos of art, then trained the neural network on those photos. Is this still "theft" of the artists' work? What about if an embodied AI in a robot chassis did the same, then painted new art with oil & canvas? Is this still theft?
Perhaps this example fails because it's not enough data? But is it a difference in degree or a difference in kind?
> which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists?
The premise that rules should equally apply here is absurd. It’s completely natural that certain rules don’t apply to humans but not AI and vice versa. Similar to humans vs animals or humans vs inanimate objects. Even among humans, rules don’t apply equally always.
If we are going to go technical I would argue that artists generate a highly derivative work, i.e. they input the "training data" via their eyes, experience of the world, ruminating (is that the word?) about art... and then output motions of their hands, words, and so on which create new artistic work.
Diffusion models tune a series of numbers via a complicated but essentially straightforward and "pipeline-like" process from the training data, so their work is significantly less derivative, even if visually it looks different. I guess we all agree that say, a encrypted zip file of a song is not a derivative, it's the song after some data processing.
Maybe we should improve the definition of derivative work to express how many layers of indirection lie between training material and output? If I trace over a painting I guess most would agree I've barely done any art, and I think that the process is more or less "pipeline-like" (even if complicated): input data is immediately converted to "art" by my brain following the lines. An artist that studies Goya for years and slowly improves his Goya-like portraits is another kind of level of indirection between training material and output!
Many of the great artists also produced art that fit right in with the zeitgeist. Impressionists, realists, surrealists, etc. Classic rock songs as variations on a theme. There were very few pioneers of each new style and hundreds of inspired (copycat) artists. Do we discount their art as well? Certainly not!
Just go look at $_SECTION in your local bookstore. Most of the books have covers that fit right in with all the other covers on the shelf.
So my question is whether a computer doing the same thing is a difference in degree only, or in kind? But I think most people with strong opinions (and itchy downvote fingers) are coming at this from a moral outrage perspective (massive theft of IP / disregard for humans).
> My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).
Those successful artists accessed their training data through legitimate means (please hold your 'well actually' replies about some artist using bittorrent here and there). They didn't all pirate, on a historic, industrial scale, every scrap of creative work that they saw in their lives. That's the key distinction.
Absolutely. It was a straight-up smash and grab operation, and everyone knows it.
It's important to frame these discussions in human terms. "Intellectual property" is a human invention and the rights associated with it are the results of negotiations between concerned parties. There was no negotiation with the training of the models, though. So no transaction happened, one group is profiting handsomely and whole classes of society which involuntarily had their labor taken are now being harmed.
There's no need to get it twisted, it's frankly quite black and white. The only question is how we'll ensure that the economics are corrected going forward to prevent further harm.
You're focusing too much on semantic nitpicking and less on the part where people "wield it as a tool to fuck over artists."
Nobody cares if hobbyists make a "Star Wars but make it Monet" art piece with AI and put it on their wall. It's the part where bosses fire John Smith and then ask the LLM, "please write 100 articles in the style of John Smith." It's the part where an actor is hired once, their face scanned, and then their likeness is used (unpaid) in a hundred films.
It might have been the Exponent podcast years ago that was talking about how a set of contracts, practices, and (maybe) laws should be drawn up to cover that exact face-scan-the-actor use case, but enable royalties to go back to the actor. So then Shaq could appear in so many more commercials (lol)
> No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine.
What about other artifacts that you produce, such as images (that are not illustrations), videos, sound effects for your podcast, or the code that runs your website?
Is your brain so fried you can't even read 3 consecutive sentences?
> am proud to say that as part of our new union contract, Current Affairs recently adopted one of the strictest anti-AI policies in the publishing industry. No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine. No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration.
Yeah, I see this happen an awful lot here with entities that are expressing pro-LLM opinions. Maybe it's "engagement farming", old-fashioned low-effort trolling, antisocial attempts to make those expressing pro-LLM opinions look bad, or just crappy bots doing what crappy bots do. Whatever the reason for doing it, I wish the humans responsible for the behavior would fuckin quit it... it sucks.
I find this to be incredibly short-sighted. However, it does say it was a part of a union contract, so that explains some of it (the part where it seems to come entirely from a fear of job security).
Even if you want to keep AI out of the content-writing part, or the image generation part of your product, there are still areas where a newsroom can do much more ambitious work with the same people:
- AI can do research to assist in fact checking of articles
- AI can help suggest story ideas based on patterns it found in your own articles over time (an editor would still curate them)
- AI can help the newsroom pore over more first-hand sources/raw sources. Think of how many times you've had to process a stack of hard to OCR PDFs that come out of a FOIA, for example, or poring over government datasets when trying to make sense of something. Or a person's historical tweets, etc.
So it's clear that whoever won in this debate (hopefully there was at least a proper debate) wasn't interested in talking about all these additional areas where AI can help the existing people do more _without risking their jobs_.
I don’t know why some are offended so much by this. There’s an endless stream of AI generated stuff on the internet already. You can also generate your own stuff and don’t need every single outlet to mass produce and publish LLM output. It’s ok that some remain human centric.
Because people want to normalize their own backhanded use of AI-generated content. It gives you an edge over human content creators, simply because you can produce more with less effort, but that edge disappears if the content is shunned.
I see this sentiment a lot more recently and I don't understand it. Why is it "backhanded" if someone uses AI to create something. I don't see the connection with ease of creation either.
I'm not offended or anything similar, but such open statements look to me as cheap virtue signalling.
If you are convinced that AI content is inferior and less engaging to human-generated one (and I fully agree with that) then simply enforcing that rule without advertising it should already be effective.
Eh, if they have something to tell their users that's worth telling, what's wrong with telling it?
If you have a discount on socks for your customers, you say "we've got a discount on socks". If your customers don't have to wade through AI slop, you say "we don't do AI (so you don't have to wade through slop)".
> cheap virtue signalling
This doesn’t make sense, because they are putting their money where their mouth is. They could instead grift, generate much more content and click bait, raise good money with “currentafair agents” or something, all with AI!
> simply enforcing that rule without advertising
From dusk till dawn we are drowning in AI news and advertisements praising AI as if it’s the second coming of Jesus. Why does it bother if someone doesn’t want to join the bandwagon? Why shouldn’t they be transparent about their stance?
I buy products that explicitly mention their quality differentiation, this is no different than “100% Made in USA” or "100% Grass Fed Beef." That’s literally how a free market and value discovery is supposed to work with available information. Provide price, contents, value proposition, the consumer evaluates value received.
If I want slop, I have my own Claude subscription. I’m willing to pay for hand crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought products, not someone else's margin spread between their token costs and their prices. “Vote with your wallet.”
The difference is "100% Made in the USA" does not usually offend most people (it may do if you find it written on a twisted piece of metal where your village used to be)
On the other hand "All USA , no foreigners made this" might offend some.
"No Belgians were involved in making this product" might be found to be more offensive. Yet consistent with "100% Made in the USA".
The distinction is in what they are broadcasting with their message.
I would say the vast majority of people outside a tech bubble will not be offended by "we didn't use AI to write any of this" (the converse might be true though!)
As other people have said, if I wanted AI slop I'd just ask Claude.
Can you share why it would be offensive to not want to pay for LLM produced content in this context? Who might this offend? And why would it offend them?
I'm not "anti clanker" per se but I also don't have strong feelings about when and where this appliance is used. It is an appliance and tool, not a person, not a consciousness. For those who prefer machine generated content, that is a preference one can have.
I don't think I ever suggested that it would be offensive to not want to pay for LLM produced content. I certainly don't think that it should be offensive.
I have only been noting that declarations of position that come across as moral judgements of others can offend people.
So you're arguing an imaginary position for the fun of the debate and not to actually inform or contribute a material position?
> I have my own Claude subscription. I’m willing to pay for hand crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought products. “Vote with your wallet.”
Soon you'll be able to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived prompts for your Claude subscription just like you used to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived code for your computer.
Are prompts covered by copyright? Will we see "Prompt copying is killing the prompt industry - and it's illegal" on the prompt delivery service site?
> Soon you'll be able to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived prompts for your Claude subscription just like you used to buy hand-crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought-derived code for your computer.
I'm unsure Claude will be out there observing and reporting in meat space. "Three months maybe, six months definitely." LLMs and inference only sees what it can access digitally. It doesn't see or experience outside of the aquarium. How much does a goldfish in a bowl know about the world? Only about as far as it can see.
Human content when I want a human perspective, search engine results when I want a search engine for a lossy jpeg of the internet (or a sausage machine pushing tokens through a formal proof based or test driven system).
> LLMs and inference only sees what it can access digitally. It doesn't see or experience outside of the aquarium. How much does a goldfish in a bowl know about the world? Only about as far as it can see.
Most of the (Western?) world is covered in cameras, and I bet the video feeds will soon be feed into the training pipelines. And then as soon as AI is put in control of things like traffic lights, self-driving cars, logistics (e.g., delivery scheduling), then the AI will have a complete loop from which to learn: try something in the real world ("shorten this traffic light by 15s"), observe result ("traffic backs up Wednesdays at 8am"), repeat.
Surely this will teach the machine to love, feel, understand, and self reflect|actualize. The subthread context was human generated content, not machine learning for logistics and meat space Factorio (which good 'ol machine learning already did fine at).
Who wants auto tune for the soul?
I'm not bothered when people choose to avoid using AI.
Making a declaration that you are rejecting AI can come across as implying use of AI is a moral failing. There are certainly people who overtly claim it is a moral failing.
I think the people who are offended are perceiving this as as statement impugning their character.
Sounds like a them problem.
The reasoning you describe seems somewhat self centered.
I'm not sure I want to worry too much about people who go through life assuming everyone else's statements are a direct commentary about themselves.
To try and analogy.
Would you think it reasonable for a mens health magazine to choose to not feature obese people on the cover?
But on the other hand,
Would you think it reasonable for people to feel singled out when they choose to make a public declaration that they will never put an obese person on the cover?
I dont get your analogy at all. No it is not reasonable to make such proclamation, because anorexia and eatimg disorders are going up in men. Health magazine should not be the source of further growth of it.
Being obese or saying "thin only" is not the same as "no ai content".
Its sort of like the people whom start gushing about how they are not an alcoholic as soon as you mention you don't drink anymore. Just smile and nod and let them twist themselves into a knot.
Indeed, the linked article goes so far as to explicitly state, "Our magazine is committing itself to remaining handmade. Ensure every publication you support does the same."
> Making a declaration that you are rejecting AI can come across as implying use of AI is a moral failing.
There's nothing moral about using AI to replace the same artists whose work was used to train it.
> use of AI is a moral failing
For producing content... yes. yes it is.
How dare you expect to vomit into the street and expect me to treat it like flowers.
This trend in other areas of life is becoming boring and tiring.
The double think is astounding.
People disagree with you on the claim.
They are offended by your vitriol and the tone that suggests the claim is indisputable.
There is no double think there.
Human-written text doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically better. Humans can create slop too. They can publish articles written by a marketing department or a lobbyist. What kind of text was an article written by a human 20 years ago for a free newspaper at a train station?
Sure, AI can generate slop at a very high rate, but it can also help writers reformulate a text or act as a proofreader. The editor's choices matter, as do the result and the audience's taste.
However, lately, there has been growing AI fatigue, and people are probably becoming willing to pay more if they can be sure that there's "No AI inside" (something like "No palm oil inside"). If people are willing to pay for it, we'll see.
Personally, on my blog, which I moved away from Blogger and which has been deindexed by Google, I have the same statement: 100% handwritten (with a disclaimer that I am not responsable for crawler hallucination). Why? First, because writing is really the fun part. I make better editorial choices when I write the text directly. Second, there's the audience. On my blog, over 90% of the audience consists of bots and crawlers. They need handwritten stuff, and if this audience grows, it probably means they like those posts.
In the end, the funny part is analyzing my text with LLMs after a post is published. The result is surprises and more ideas. If I ever ask what I need to change to make the text sound more human, the response is usually that I have to add more slop. That's the part I leave out.
> Human-written text doesn't necessarily mean that it's automatically better.
It’s not about being better or worse.
A lot of people have AI psychosis and are so deeply obsessed they can't imagine anyone would be against AI.
These folks will need some serious deprogramming in a few years.
Because some people want to push the use of AI for everything and are deeply offended and shocked that not all of us humans want that.
Plus for all good that llms can bring to mankind, they will probably bring 10x or 100x more negative, bordering on evil with no solution in sight.
Unemployment in hundreds of millions globally? Loss of part that makes us humans in many creative aspects? People getting visibly and measurably dumber and lazier, including top performers?
Absolutely 0 solutions, nobody cares. People here on HN often just think its not their problem, they can cash those bonuses and rest of mankind can go fuck themselves and serve them for near nothing, being on top /near top of the pile is the ultimate goal. At least this seems to be unspoken part of many llm discussions here. Pathetic. It seems this is way more typical mindset in US compared to say in Europe and tells a few things about current US society, but nothing nice.
We are losing a significant part of our humanity if llms really deliver on their promise and not just crash global economy big time which on its own is huge problem. People steering this are mostly typical high functioning sociopaths like altman focused on money and power, so dont expect those to care.
So yeah, there are concerns to say the least, not everybody operates on autistic narrow tube view of the world as themselves and thats it. Some of us have kids too.
Our workplace are heavy users of AI for nearly everything, but we still hold to the rule that if the audience of text is a human, it should be written by a human.
AI generated text is still exhausting to read.
I know of one CEO who said "If you copy/paste an AI response and send it to someone else, they didn't need you in the loop and you don't need to work here anymore".
Does your workplace generate a lot of text for non-human audiences? Other than code, I'm not sure what this might be.
Maybe better phrased as "another human". If you're prompting AI for your own purposes that's totally fine, just absorb the information and summarize it for people instead of just dumping AI output directly on them.
Any time you want to glue two systems together, an LLM will default to some kind of markdown or script to facilitate the work
presumably if you are generating text for yourself to read prior to you writing something for a human.
documentation?
Is it a gentlemens agreement, or do you actually enforce this somehow? What stops anyone from prompting "copy my writing style, use less words, make some small typos and gramma inefficiences
It's expected to call out people (usually in DMs) when they post AI generated stuff. Occasionally people will link to a claude doc as like an "additional details here" type note, but that's the extent of it.
It's entirely possible that people have just finely tuned AI to perfectly mimic them, but if it passes the Turing test, I guess I have nothing to complain about. Our rules are less about some fundamental opposition to AI and more that it's just annoying to read unedited AI slop.
That’s what I am doing. My writing is horrible and i produce much better results when i take AI output as starting point. But I do much more than adding typos (never) and grammar inefficiencies.
Try flipping it, that's what I do. I usually prompt AI for research, absorb thta, write my own thing, and then ask AI to proofread it and I'll let it fix small grammatical errors and typos, while larger structural suggestions I'll still implement myself. It doesn't take much more time in my experience and I'm infinitely more satisfied with my output.
Doesn’t work for me. I am reasonably ok editing an existing document but I have total writer’s block when I have to write from scratch.
I kind of respect that. Ok using AI for researching and whatnot, and for their core thing which is writing and illustrations using human work.
Bravo. I’ve never read anything by AI that’s worth reading. I would only subscribe to a magazine or publication that makes a similar pledge.
Like computer graphics, you can only tell the obvious or bad ones.
The way I look at it is that if you can't be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?
In the creative arts and writing space, many the arguments against generative AI keep circling around the issue of jobs being replaced.
I think the far bigger and more important issue is that through generative AI hallucinations and lies become more and more part of our written media.
Albertatech told a humorous, light-hearted story[1] about how this affected her personally, but the results could be far more devastating:
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a0k8J0-KluY
Agreed. We replaced horse carriage drivers with taxi drivers/just driving your own car. You can't put the technology back after it's created. Jobs will be lost unfortunately, but technology will move on and people will adapt.
The false AI generated content getting a lot of milage indeed is the big problem. So many fake AI slop shorts on YouTube for example.
I think one thing to keep in mind as to why all of the other media empires are so quick to roll over and embrace AI - all of these companies are survivors of the massive media purge of the late 2000s, when blogs and cheap online news just completely gutted the traditional news and publishing world.
Outside of a few standouts, the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting.
Now the bloggers and upstart publishers that killed traditional media are the incumbents.
> the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting
Out of curiosity, which companies embraced quality journalism and failed because of it?
Washington Post, LA Times, Grantland, New Republic, most of the traditional Conde Nast publications.
More importantly, you can add in all of the local independent newspaper, tv, and radio channels that were either shut down or gobbled up by large corporations and gutted (Sinclair, Clear Channel, etc). Over 3000 newspapers were closed down, as well as nearly every foreign or government bureau.
This is when the largest drop ever of professional reporters in the US happened - we entered the 2020s with less than half of the number of employed reporters as we had in 2000.
The slopification of news started before AI.
The parent asked whether embracing quality journalism led to failure:
"Out of curiosity, which companies embraced quality journalism and failed because of it?"
Advertising revenue stolen by so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries (middlemen) had nothing to do with staff reductions, i.e., "failure"
Is that what this reply is suggesting
What if the success or failure of news organisations isn't necessarily a result of the quality of the journalism they produce
What if there is some other factor
For example, control over distribution (losing it to middlemen)
The article explicitly says "no text that is generated by AI" but is a bit more ambiguous on whether AI can be used as an aide to writing. There's this section:
>This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.
As someone trying to pickup writing fiction after years of doing technical writing, I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...). Since Current Affairs is a commentary magazine and not just straight facts reporting, I could imagine authors wanting similar feedback. Would this kind of usage be permitted? Seems... yes? But I'm not completely sure.
> I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...)
You trust LLMs to play tastemaker?
Tone analysis is one of the things they’re actually and consistently good at, so, yes.
I'm too early in the process to worry about taste. Most of what I produce still has the voice of something like... a test report or design doc. Because that's the kind of writing I produced for decades.
To be frank, sentiment analysis is one of the things language models excel at.
Likely no. Editors and writers at Current Affairs are career professionals and their expertise is not as reproducible as the expertise of software engineers. "Does this code compile?" and "How does the review history describe this change?" are quite answerable to an LLM in a way that "Does this paragraph have the intended effect?" are not.
> are they inducing emotions?
How would an LLM tell you this with any insight that is greater than your own?
> I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions?
Why? Your chatbot has ha no more experience of emotions than your teapot.
You ask an AI if words induce emotions? Why?
They want validation.
Which makes it a very reasonable take. AI as a research and ideation tool is invaluable (provided due diligence is done on sources, etc.)
AI generated writing is (usually) hot garbage.
The only way I see creators can continue earning money is by a new market in which the products they create can not be paid in money but in a new coin. I propose that the coin stays strictly internal and not convertible, that fiat enters only from the outside, and that exit is communal, not automatic. The viable solution is a federated network of small, closed credit loops. Inside each loop, creators use a non convertible token for work and tools. Cash enters through dues or grants, and cash out exit grants are decided by community vote based on need.
Small loops keep social trust high. When loops need to trade, they establish simple bilateral treaties with each other. This preserves value, protects human labor, and keeps decisions in local hands.
I'm kinda ambivalent on the Druckenmiller WSJ case. He's admittedly a poor writer, and probably wouldn't have published anything had it not been for AI.
Obviously the WSJ staff shouldn't be using it in the final output, but if it's a prominent guest's opinion filtered through ChatGPT, I'm mostly fine with it.
"He's admittedly a poor writer, and probably wouldn't have published anything.."
Maybe that would have been a totally acceptable outcome?
No, because he had important points to make
Missing the opportunity to be informed about those points because of aiphobia seems suboptimal.
If he had points to make and was not a good writer, he could have worked with a ghost writer. This was quite common for celebrities.
> Obviously the WSJ staff shouldn't be using it in the final output
It was an op-ed, it's inappropriate to edit those heavily. So they either had to accept it more or less as submitted (with the usual basic editing around grammar, clarity, and typos), or not accept it. If they'd rewritten it, it would not have been an op-ed by Druckenmiller anymore, but someone else's interpretation of his submission.
If Druckenmiller had published his badly-written, poorly articulated opinions, it would have been more valuable. It'd be what he believes, written in the way he can manage to articulate. Maybe we could form an entirely appropriate bad opinion of him and his ideas and writing.
ChatGPT polish adds no value to this.
Whether you're pro-AI or anti-AI, everyone benefits from non-AI-written content. The anti-AI crowd benefits from avoiding content they dislike and the pro-AI crowd gets more quality training data.
I would way rather read handwritten articles. I think everyone should celebrate the human craft of writing. I really hope this doesn't slowly become the "no-VFX" posturing from the film industry, however.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a single issue of Current Affairs.
This was so well-written and convincing that I just subscribed. I believe they are doing this the right way, and more power to them!
I think we will be stuck relitigating this issue every time AI disrupts an industry, producing a ton of newsworthy proclamations from each organization or project about their AI policy. But they all boil down to the same debate which is getting quite old.
"Made without AI" is the new "Artisanal" for digital artifacts.
I'd argue that it's more akin to ingredient labeling for food so you can at least have some confidence that you're not reading mindless generated slop. It's not perfect, and the writing can still be bad, but at least it's you're trying to avoid subjecting yourself to LLM generated garbage.
Good.
AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.
If machines are writing articles, why am I reading all their prose. Might as well have my machine summarize them into something more digestible.
Isn't a machine still writing them if you do that?
Nobody's saying it should take care of the entire process, but the idea of banning it from all parts of your process is an emotionally charged, short-sighted decision.
> but the idea of banning it from all parts of your process is an emotionally charged, short-sighted decision.
Why?
Did you actually read the article?
> Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something.
> Nobody's saying it should take care of the entire process, but the idea of banning it from all parts of your process is an emotionally charged, short-sighted decision.
Well they didn't do that, and in fact specifically mentioned how they are not doing that. So what are you even talking about?
Excellent.
I'm more concerned with the bizarre choices made by AI recommenders to deliver me human content that is worse than entertaining slop like the LGTM song or anything by Skyebrows on youtube. Unpopular flex I'm sure, but don't enrage me, I just report it as abuse/harassment. Engage me and tame my ADHD-addled hindbrain.
Humans aren't long for this world
Oh, you're one of those. Sad.
Humans are the new cockroaches. Our exorbitant and decadent carbon footprint not so much.
There's definitely something cockroach-like going on in this thread, not sure we'd agree about it.
Who cares?
The people reading their magazine do. When "journalists" use LLM to write articles it's painfully obvious, there's a huge dip in quality, and it's an immediate turn off for anyone actually invested in the content.
Thank god. I hugely disdain anyone feeding me AI content as communication.
In what is undoubtedly a fantasy world worth working towards, I envision this happening across various industries, where tiny businesses rise up against the continuing worsening of quality and rising prices, and seek to produce quality goods and services that may be more expensive than their competition, but are worth the cost.
We are witnessing the natural outcome of pursuing higher profits at the expense of everything else; at some point it becomes “as crappy as the market will bear”, and we all lose out. For some of us it may manifest as having to get our car serviced every few thousand miles because the parts are of poor quality (but cheap!). For some of us it may manifest as no longer desiring sweets because they’re now poorly made with substandard ingredients created in a lab somewhere.
It can also manifest in ways that are a threat to public safety; like rollercoaster rides that weren’t properly designed or tested because schools now pursue profits above learning; or because manufacturers somehow rely on regulators to do their job for them.
However it manifests, it’s hard to point to higher prices and lower quality goods and services and say this is the best that capitalism has to offer. If this is it, if this is the capitalist system working as intended, it’s no wonder movements like the Democratic Socialists of America are taking hold.
Every industry will be divided along these lines. But there isn’t an independent auditor or regulator like UL or OU (kosher food) to help instill trust with consumers. So enforcement is impossible.
AI used to be obvious, but the quality has improved — in 6 months it will be impossible to detect.
Eventually you will have to control the entire supply chain, like Dune. You will have to have an entire org policed with anti-AI software, attestation and spot checks to attest that AI was never used in the workflow.
The auditors will have to spot-check every employee randomly the way USADA / IADA (anti doping agencies) do – on-call within 2 hours notice for an anti-AI attestation review.
1 drop of AI taints the entire institution.
(I’m not anti AI, I’m explaining the implications. And I think the principle is good for their journal, though I don’t think they’ve thought through how to manage it yet. )
> Nothing in our rules ... artist from using a tool
So "AI" tool OK?
> to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.
So "AI" OK for elements of some value of "smaller"?
This ban sounds somewhat ... flexible.
>So our rule is simple: No AI generated articles or illustrations in the magazine!
This is, I think, as close to ideal as an AI policy for media can possibly be. For certain things - visual art, music, storywriting, game design, and public communications - I think consumers will continue to value the human element and demand it. The optimistic take is that this will line up with the capitalist incentive as well, no matter how much AI reduces the cost of production to nearly zero. People just won't want to engage with slop.
>Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element. But we need, first, to ensure that technologies are a tool used by workers to help them, rather than a tool used to replace workers. And, second, we need to make sure that readers aren’t being fed things that look like people’s genuine thoughts and creative expression but are in fact the product of disembodied mathematical formulas.
This is another W as far as their AI policy goes. While skeptical of "slop" and other kinds of lazily-generated, low-quality output, I also remain highly critical of anti-AI absolutism. Generally these are the types of arguments you see bandied about on places like Bluesky which lean hard on the environmental impact/third-worldist perspectives, argue for AI-driven skills loss, make tenuous and contrived connections of AI with their hot-button cultural issue, or only seem to view AI through the lens of their own job security. None of these issues are inherent to AI or are insurmountable, and hardliners make an incorrect assumption that the technology can simply be banned or boycotted away. Many of them are feverishly waiting for "the bubble pop", which is barked with the same optimism as evangelical predictions of the Rapture. Some of these people are so obsessive about being anti-AI that they wield whatever diminutive influence they may have to ban your IP address from their website if their server ever catches Claude doing a web search on it.
Now 'not using AI' is being framed as the plucky resistance movement - not a great sign for said movement.
Aiphobes
> I’ll admit, I used to be excited by generative AI. I made goofy little images in DALL-E. I liked the dumb novelty songs. I thought it could be a cool tool for creative professionals to play around with. I forgot for a moment that we live under capitalism, where every new technology will be used by the ruling class to fuck over workers.
I think this is key. If AI wasn't force-fed into every industry in a rapacious grasp for more profits, our society might have been able to grow into a healthier equilibrium where AI is a useful tool for creative professionals.
Even the insiders I talk to at big AI labs express the opinion, "nobody likes where we're going, but the pressures are too strong."
good for them, looks like a very smart move based on who I'd perceive the customers of this publication to be.
if OTOH Fox News came out with this announcement, nobody would care except some of their viewers/readers would be annoyed by it.
point is it's hard to ever identify if a magazine would be doing this purely out of principle since it's also good marketing.
> Two neighbors stop in front of a construction site and look through the fence. Inside, five workers are using two enormous machines to finish digging a massive hole. One neighbor shakes his head. “Fifty people could have dug that with shovels. Everyone would have had a job.” The other looks at him and says, “Why stop at fifty? A thousand people could have dug it with their bare hands.”
Good luck trying to figure out whether something was written by AI or a human. This mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.
Downvoting me or others will not change this fact.
I don't think I've ever encountered something written by an LLM that was better than barely passable prose. It's just about suitable for documentation and mundane news regurgitation, but a piece of creative writing? Please show me your favourite examples where it's better than "passable", I'm open to changing my mind.
Figuring out whether something is written by AI or a human is fairly easy with Pangram, and soon all major models will embed fingerprinting and it will be basically 100% detectable.
A personal account doesn't change the fact that AI will become so ubiquitous that most people won't be able to tell for sure whether something was written by a model, let alone a model following specific instructions like "Write like Mark Twain."
That's a consequence of not using enough compute. The correct way to have an LLM write creatively is to have it try hundreds of permutations and then judge those hundreds. This is basically what humans do anyway. Some models are better than others but you can absolutely write well with it. I generally find that when people say it doesn't work for them they aren't actually trying very hard or they simply do not know what they are doing.
The second I realize that any kind of art was made by AI, I lose all interest in it, because "made by AI" is the same thing as made by no one. Some of us will always care.
Yep, same. AI interesting only in the same way that a forklift is interesting. It's technically remarkable, it can do more work faster than a person, but without much finesse and certainly without any soul. The entire point of art is that it's an expression of another human. AI can never create art by definition.
What will happen when you cannot trust your instinct to see if something was handmade or made by a machine? Will you give up your bias or will you go full bias just in case?
>his mass hysteria around AI will soon be forgotten. Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.
Just like they've forgotten about tulip bulbs?
Even if LLMs deliver a fraction of what their advocates promise, their impact entry into society will be relevant for centuries, much as with piracy, industrialization, and abolition.
The value of moving dirt is that someone paid for a hole. They don't care how it was made.
The value of written communication is in whether people decide to read it. There is nothing controversial about readers rejecting content they perceive is low-effort.
It's pretty obvious to me when someone just copy pastes claude spew onto a website and calls it a day. If they put in enough effort that I can no longer tell then sure, I will read that.
Personal perception will never be a reliable way to detect text written by LLMs, especially when people guide those LLMs with specific rules and instructions. It's virtually impossible. What you'll experience instead is your bias growing to the point where nothing will seem human-written anymore. You'll start assuming all text was generated by AI. It's pure AI paranoia.
Yeah it's pretty obvious now. But look at the improvements Anthropic made to Opus 5.5. It went from physically painful to read, to kind of annoying but tolerable. I wouldn't bet on it taking a long time to reach high quality prose.
Btw it is kind of weird how it still can't write prose normally but it can write impressively high quality code now. Must be something to do with their training. Or maybe it's easier to quantify good code.
And this time next year I'll have 365 wives, and my CPU will run at 2 terrahertz.
Development and improvement is often very non-linear, assuming you can extrapolate forever is just as much guesswork as claiming it'll never change.
Just a few more hundred billion and it’ll be good, trust me bro.
Humans can tell if something is written by an AI. LLMs, so far, have yet to pass the uncanny valley, which is probably part of why we all react with such disgust when LLM-generated content is posted to HN.
> Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human. People will just move on to other topics.
Do you have a crystal ball that tells you this, or is it just your gut feeling? Last I checked, AI and AI-generated content continues to be deeply unpopular outside of insular tech circles.
> Good luck trying to figure out whether something was written by AI or a human.
It’s a magazine, not a social media website. They control who writes for them and they know who they can trust. If any of those people break that trust, they are banned and replaced with someone else.
> Nobody will care whether something was written by an LLM or a human.
Of course they will. To this day people still care about (for example) colonialist actions from hundreds of years ago or buying print books. It’s disconnected from reality to believe everybody will simply not care who wrote what they read.
"It's a magazine" is not a bulletproof solution to avoid AI contributions. I worked for many magazines in my younger years, back when people worked and wrote in the same place. Now everything is digital, and writers are spread all around the globe. They share information digitally, not through typewriters. These people who are suddenly concerned about AI have no reliable way to prevent or detect AI-generated text anymore.
> "It's a magazine" is not a bulletproof solution to avoid AI contributions.
Nor have I claimed such a thing. I recommend you read the rest of the paragraph instead of stopping at the first sentence and making a bad faith argument. If you don’t read a point to the end, you can’t understand it enough to argue against it.
> all of the AI models that are being used to replace artists were trained through the mass theft of those very same artists’ work
This seems to be the underlying moral justification for creatives' opposition of AI. Job destruction is the obvious self-interested justification.
My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).
A quick hypothetical:
Let's say instead of hoovering up billions of images from data dumps, the AI researchers took a still camera to all the art galleries on the planet and snapped photos of art, then trained the neural network on those photos. Is this still "theft" of the artists' work? What about if an embodied AI in a robot chassis did the same, then painted new art with oil & canvas? Is this still theft?
Perhaps this example fails because it's not enough data? But is it a difference in degree or a difference in kind?
> which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists?
The premise that rules should equally apply here is absurd. It’s completely natural that certain rules don’t apply to humans but not AI and vice versa. Similar to humans vs animals or humans vs inanimate objects. Even among humans, rules don’t apply equally always.
If we are going to go technical I would argue that artists generate a highly derivative work, i.e. they input the "training data" via their eyes, experience of the world, ruminating (is that the word?) about art... and then output motions of their hands, words, and so on which create new artistic work.
Diffusion models tune a series of numbers via a complicated but essentially straightforward and "pipeline-like" process from the training data, so their work is significantly less derivative, even if visually it looks different. I guess we all agree that say, a encrypted zip file of a song is not a derivative, it's the song after some data processing.
Maybe we should improve the definition of derivative work to express how many layers of indirection lie between training material and output? If I trace over a painting I guess most would agree I've barely done any art, and I think that the process is more or less "pipeline-like" (even if complicated): input data is immediately converted to "art" by my brain following the lines. An artist that studies Goya for years and slowly improves his Goya-like portraits is another kind of level of indirection between training material and output!
Many of the great artists also produced art that fit right in with the zeitgeist. Impressionists, realists, surrealists, etc. Classic rock songs as variations on a theme. There were very few pioneers of each new style and hundreds of inspired (copycat) artists. Do we discount their art as well? Certainly not!
Just go look at $_SECTION in your local bookstore. Most of the books have covers that fit right in with all the other covers on the shelf.
So my question is whether a computer doing the same thing is a difference in degree only, or in kind? But I think most people with strong opinions (and itchy downvote fingers) are coming at this from a moral outrage perspective (massive theft of IP / disregard for humans).
> My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).
Those successful artists accessed their training data through legitimate means (please hold your 'well actually' replies about some artist using bittorrent here and there). They didn't all pirate, on a historic, industrial scale, every scrap of creative work that they saw in their lives. That's the key distinction.
So you agree with the quoted line from the article, that LLM training is predicated on large-scale theft?
Absolutely. It was a straight-up smash and grab operation, and everyone knows it.
It's important to frame these discussions in human terms. "Intellectual property" is a human invention and the rights associated with it are the results of negotiations between concerned parties. There was no negotiation with the training of the models, though. So no transaction happened, one group is profiting handsomely and whole classes of society which involuntarily had their labor taken are now being harmed.
There's no need to get it twisted, it's frankly quite black and white. The only question is how we'll ensure that the economics are corrected going forward to prevent further harm.
You're focusing too much on semantic nitpicking and less on the part where people "wield it as a tool to fuck over artists."
Nobody cares if hobbyists make a "Star Wars but make it Monet" art piece with AI and put it on their wall. It's the part where bosses fire John Smith and then ask the LLM, "please write 100 articles in the style of John Smith." It's the part where an actor is hired once, their face scanned, and then their likeness is used (unpaid) in a hundred films.
It might have been the Exponent podcast years ago that was talking about how a set of contracts, practices, and (maybe) laws should be drawn up to cover that exact face-scan-the-actor use case, but enable royalties to go back to the actor. So then Shaq could appear in so many more commercials (lol)
> No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine.
What about other artifacts that you produce, such as images (that are not illustrations), videos, sound effects for your podcast, or the code that runs your website?
Is your brain so fried you can't even read 3 consecutive sentences?
> am proud to say that as part of our new union contract, Current Affairs recently adopted one of the strictest anti-AI policies in the publishing industry. No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine. No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration.
Its literally the next sentence.
> No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration
It's literally the next sentence. Wow.
Yeah, I see this happen an awful lot here with entities that are expressing pro-LLM opinions. Maybe it's "engagement farming", old-fashioned low-effort trolling, antisocial attempts to make those expressing pro-LLM opinions look bad, or just crappy bots doing what crappy bots do. Whatever the reason for doing it, I wish the humans responsible for the behavior would fuckin quit it... it sucks.
I find this to be incredibly short-sighted. However, it does say it was a part of a union contract, so that explains some of it (the part where it seems to come entirely from a fear of job security).
Even if you want to keep AI out of the content-writing part, or the image generation part of your product, there are still areas where a newsroom can do much more ambitious work with the same people:
- AI can do research to assist in fact checking of articles
- AI can help suggest story ideas based on patterns it found in your own articles over time (an editor would still curate them)
- AI can help the newsroom pore over more first-hand sources/raw sources. Think of how many times you've had to process a stack of hard to OCR PDFs that come out of a FOIA, for example, or poring over government datasets when trying to make sense of something. Or a person's historical tweets, etc.
So it's clear that whoever won in this debate (hopefully there was at least a proper debate) wasn't interested in talking about all these additional areas where AI can help the existing people do more _without risking their jobs_.
They didn't ban the use of AI.
They banned AI-generated text or images from appearing in the magazine.
Maybe AI can help you read the article first