Good luck with that. AI is becoming the standard in alot of industries. Plus I don't know many people now that actually read an article any more. I get all my news now from Gemini.
This narrative sucks. The idea that they're sticking it to the man by banning AI from their magazine is just petty and silly. There are plenty of open efforts or ones that don't come from larger corporations, and just because someone else evaluates something on a metric you don't like doesn't mean you have to evaluate that thing on that metric, too. It's basically handing over the whole framing to the people they claim to be fighting.
I predict this is going to change soon similar to how "look at how bad AI is at coding" changed. I understand that we all feel like something with a soul should be doing this stuff and it feels wrong to read something that "no thought" was put into. But if it's able to write better and more informed (because it can research and integrate ideas many orders of magnitude faster) than some of the better writers I don't see why you would ever read the less informed, worse written version. We definitely aren't there yet but I don't see any reason why we won't get there. It's not like excellent writing is such an onerous task it can never be solved.
I’m actually pretty bullish on AI, especially open-weight models, but I don't think the narrative is necessarily framed poorly.
All they’re saying is that they want to make sure the finalized articles are handwritten and aren't chockful of LLM slophistry. They even mention in this very article that they’re not against writers using AI-space adjacent tools to do preliminary research.
>they want to make sure the finalized articles are handwritten and aren't chockful of LLM slophistry
This seems like a pretty reasonable perspective for a magazine. Use AI for ideation and research but not to create the final version of articles for publication.
I think if that were the issue, they can say "We will maintain the same high quality standards which we expect throughout for all pieces". But that isn't what the article talks about, the article frames it as "standing up to the machine" and talks about how corporations talk about it. It ends on a John Henry comparison. Which seems not in line with the "We'll interact with it, but not have anything written directly by it" notion that this is describing.
the argument of "we should be using AI to make sure it's being properly evaluated when we have no other reason to" isn't a good one. it's a nonprofit whose sole purpose is to provide commentary on culture/politics. I don't need AI shoved in there. I want to read human written stuff and i'm more than happy to see publications/literary agents decide they don't want to use it. I'm tired of reading lazy slop, full stop. I hope this actually encourages the rest of society.
FYI this is written by someone who's fairly bullish on AI and uses it pretty frequently on a daily basis.
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.
My point was that LLM written articles tend to long and verbose. Might as well have my LLM condense it into bullet points to consume the information faster.
I can appreciate clever writing by humans because another human did it. Maybe I'd still critique it for being convoluted. But there'd be some kind of interaction with me and another person, even though I might leave with a negative opinion/feeling.
If an LLM tries clever writing, it's just the result of a statistical model using its dataset. There's no joy in reading the extra fluff because I know there's no-one that spent the time on doing it. In fact, I know that the person on the other side didn't want to spent the time doing it. And it leaves me wondering why I should even read all of that in the first place. If we're using AI to be more efficient, why not have it just generate boring, efficient, articles that just give you the information without pretending to present any opinions or jokes.
TL;DR if you want to be efficient, be efficient; don't generate fluff
It's already writing interesting magazine articles. You just don't recognize them as being written by LLMs.
Correct me if I misunderstand your implication, but it seems to be "I have seen poorly-written articles with obvious LLM tells and factual mistakes, therefore LLMs are incapable of writing good articles". It's the same logic people use to say things like "criminals are so stupid, just look at these prisoners", not realizing that their sample selects for incompetence.
There's no incentive whatsoever for any institution to credit an LLM for an excellent article, and in fact there are many incentives to avoid disclosure of any AI use. Typing "write me an article about $TOPIC, make no mistakes" into ChatGPT yields quite different results than the LLM-driven content generation pipelines major institutions have already been using for well over a year now.
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.
Fine but I'm also not complaining if a director comes out and says "I'm making this movie without CGI" and i may in fact appreciate the result a bit more for knowing it. It's impressive when someone can do all their effects and lighting in-camera.
I've never seen AI writing be totally undetectable or on its own particularly good, but if it someday gets good enough that AI writing is indistinguishable, I'd still appreciate when someone goes out of their way not to use it.
> 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.
> 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.
I mean, you could 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 end, you cannot understand it or argue against it.
My friend, you used this as an argument: "It’s a magazine, not a social media website. They control who writes for them and they know who they can trust."
That is not a bulletproof system. Human trust is not deterministic, it's not precise, and it's based on biases. That's the point.
Damn, and you’re still not reading to the end. I’ll help. Here’s the rest of the paragraph:
> If any of those people break that trust, they are banned and replaced with someone else.
Do you understand what that means? I’ll help again. I means that I never claimed it was a “bulletproof system”, as you keep insisting. In fact, that makes it pretty explicit that I know it’s not bulletproof, because I exposed a failure case!
Here’s the thing, though: It doesn’t have to be bulletproof, and it is absurd to believe it does. It just has to be good enough, and you can get good enough by trusting people and evaluating on a case-by-case basis. Because you know what? Not everyone is an asshole who wants to fool others. The only people who believe everyone else is untrustworthy are the people who are untrustworthy themselves.
But you cannot enforce a deterministic way to know whether someone has broken that trust, in fact, if it is about feelings, that can fail or hit the truth. It will be transparent to everyone, but impossible to know if someone has broken the rules. That's the main point. Of course, most people are trustworthy, but who knows? Maybe one day someone wakes up and decides to break those rules, and no one will ever know.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
- 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_.
Nothing like a literary publication talking about banning things. Shall we go back to typewriters? Dip pens? or shall we fashion our own quills? Forsooth! and tut tut!
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
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...)
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.
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.
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?
Cheap virtue signaling? They are literally signing up to pay more for content. Spending money to promote a value you care about is the opposite of "cheap virtue signalling."
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 really offended by it, but it does seem to presume the conclusion: the only way to produce something high quality is to do it all by hand.
I'm curious about other possibilities, like how we can incorporate AI to produce higher quality content, more quickly. Or more accurately. Bosses at work seem to assume that the way AI would benefit us to speed things up by some integer factor, and I kept explaining that tools like AI can provide benefits that don't appear in the "speed" dimension, per se.
One example is we can now vibe-out multiple potential ways for a feature to work, and actually play with them all over the course of an afternoon to help decide which one works best, and then actually code that particular approach for production.
I think the piece would be stronger if it explicitly explored ways to use AI in the authoring process that brought other benefits. As they note near the end of the article:
> It’s not going to be easy, because competitor publications are going to be able to produce immense quantities of writing in the time we are painstakingly correcting and adjusting a single article.
Right, it's fairly easy to generate a bunch of crap with AI. But what about having the AI critique your first drafts, or find flaws in the logic presented in an argument. I hope that writers work with AI in a sort of "rubber duck"/"sounding board" fashion, but it's hard to tell how they are actually working. The current front seems to be a hot debate about whether text was AI generated, but there's a lot to AI methodology beyond just that.
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.
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.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 16.3 ms ] threadIn fact it probably only solves a minority of them.
I don't think it's fair to say the narrative sucks unless you know exactly which problems they were concerned about.
I recall a classic photo of a meeting in Nazi Germany where one single man didn’t stand up to applaud Hitler.
It doesn’t matter if you win right now. It matters not to betray yourself.
Fort them I think it makes sense.
And I'm pro AI.
I just don't want to read AI articles/books/etc, it is a waste of my time on earth.
That doesn't mean I won't use AI, when I specifically ask, like finding answers.
If yes: why? If no: why?
What makes you so certain it's inevitable?
would you like to chat with an AI?
would you like to have sex with an AI bot?
would you like to read an AI generated story?
What do you find meaningful about your time on earth? If your experience is more AI-generated, is it still meaningful?
All they’re saying is that they want to make sure the finalized articles are handwritten and aren't chockful of LLM slophistry. They even mention in this very article that they’re not against writers using AI-space adjacent tools to do preliminary research.
This seems like a pretty reasonable perspective for a magazine. Use AI for ideation and research but not to create the final version of articles for publication.
FYI this is written by someone who's fairly bullish on AI and uses it pretty frequently on a daily basis.
If that's what you took from the article, perhaps AI writing is just the thing for you.
AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.
I can appreciate clever writing by humans because another human did it. Maybe I'd still critique it for being convoluted. But there'd be some kind of interaction with me and another person, even though I might leave with a negative opinion/feeling.
If an LLM tries clever writing, it's just the result of a statistical model using its dataset. There's no joy in reading the extra fluff because I know there's no-one that spent the time on doing it. In fact, I know that the person on the other side didn't want to spent the time doing it. And it leaves me wondering why I should even read all of that in the first place. If we're using AI to be more efficient, why not have it just generate boring, efficient, articles that just give you the information without pretending to present any opinions or jokes.
TL;DR if you want to be efficient, be efficient; don't generate fluff
Correct me if I misunderstand your implication, but it seems to be "I have seen poorly-written articles with obvious LLM tells and factual mistakes, therefore LLMs are incapable of writing good articles". It's the same logic people use to say things like "criminals are so stupid, just look at these prisoners", not realizing that their sample selects for incompetence.
There's no incentive whatsoever for any institution to credit an LLM for an excellent article, and in fact there are many incentives to avoid disclosure of any AI use. Typing "write me an article about $TOPIC, make no mistakes" into ChatGPT yields quite different results than the LLM-driven content generation pipelines major institutions have already been using for well over a year now.
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.
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.
Maybe that would have been a totally acceptable outcome?
Missing the opportunity to be informed about those points because of aiphobia seems suboptimal.
ChatGPT polish adds no value to this.
I've never seen AI writing be totally undetectable or on its own particularly good, but if it someday gets good enough that AI writing is indistinguishable, I'd still appreciate when someone goes out of their way not to use it.
What do you think is a more artful way of living, spitting into food undetected, or respecting the choices and boundaries of other people?
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.
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.
I mean, you could 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 end, you cannot understand it or argue against it.
That is not a bulletproof system. Human trust is not deterministic, it's not precise, and it's based on biases. That's the point.
> If any of those people break that trust, they are banned and replaced with someone else.
Do you understand what that means? I’ll help again. I means that I never claimed it was a “bulletproof system”, as you keep insisting. In fact, that makes it pretty explicit that I know it’s not bulletproof, because I exposed a failure case!
Here’s the thing, though: It doesn’t have to be bulletproof, and it is absurd to believe it does. It just has to be good enough, and you can get good enough by trusting people and evaluating on a case-by-case basis. Because you know what? Not everyone is an asshole who wants to fool others. The only people who believe everyone else is untrustworthy are the people who are untrustworthy themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 - 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 banned AI-generated text or images from appearing in the magazine.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
> Saw cover image
> Closed page
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
What about other artifacts that you produce, such as images, videos, sound effects for your podcast, or the code that runs your website?
>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.
You trust LLMs to play tastemaker?
AI generated writing is (usually) hot garbage.
How would an LLM tell you this with any insight that is greater than your own?
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.
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.
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?
These folks will need some serious deprogramming in a few years.
It’s not about being better or worse.
Anyone can sling LLM generated text around, it’s boring and uninteresting.
I'm curious about other possibilities, like how we can incorporate AI to produce higher quality content, more quickly. Or more accurately. Bosses at work seem to assume that the way AI would benefit us to speed things up by some integer factor, and I kept explaining that tools like AI can provide benefits that don't appear in the "speed" dimension, per se.
One example is we can now vibe-out multiple potential ways for a feature to work, and actually play with them all over the course of an afternoon to help decide which one works best, and then actually code that particular approach for production.
I think the piece would be stronger if it explicitly explored ways to use AI in the authoring process that brought other benefits. As they note near the end of the article:
> It’s not going to be easy, because competitor publications are going to be able to produce immense quantities of writing in the time we are painstakingly correcting and adjusting a single article.
Right, it's fairly easy to generate a bunch of crap with AI. But what about having the AI critique your first drafts, or find flaws in the logic presented in an argument. I hope that writers work with AI in a sort of "rubber duck"/"sounding board" fashion, but it's hard to tell how they are actually working. The current front seems to be a hot debate about whether text was AI generated, but there's a lot to AI methodology beyond just that.
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.