An account that has only existed for 4 months, whose only source for whenever something is plagiarised is a single company whose bread and butter is telling everybody what they want to hear, where most of the tweets barely gets a hundred likes should not be getting the level of coverage it has right now.
I guess you can pick between that and the propaganda provided by the AI peddlers, they surely have nothing to gain telling everybody what they want to hear
This isn't the first high profile case of a black person being reported with accusations of using AI this year[^1][^2]. Once or twice, sure, whatever. But a third time now? It's hard to think this isn't anything but targeted, especially given this particular case the group making the "claims" are entirely anonymous.
Is it that, or is it because marketing "content" by a minority author with an "interesting life story" is an industry not an art, and they're less likely to care how the "content" was produced?
How many non black people have been accused though?
Why would they target these specific 3 black authors? I assume there are hundreds/thousands of successful black authors, 3 "this year" seems very small to call it a targeted attack
Pangram is making the "claims", not some group. It is known to have a very low false positive rate, especially on long texts.
And there is now also evidence of plagiarism, rather than just AI writing, in his other work (see down thread).
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
I’m aware of how it works. This is from naive scraped collection of TikTok without an account or durable device fingerprints, not from my personal browsing.
It's often quite easy, because most people who author articles with LLMs do not bother doing any kind of post editing. Meaning you can see/build a mental map of common tropes[^1] for what to look for. Once you read perhaps two or three articles authored with LLMs you will not be able to unsee it.
For fun, I pasted a few Matt Levine's newsletters into the AI Vetter on the above page. Since it can't fetch the Bloomberg's paged directly, I had to copy the content into Github gists.
4 out of 5 were marked as suspicious, mostly citing short punching sentences, negative parallelism, and content duplication.
Yes but it's still like wading through shit to find the occasional gem. It's not hard to pick out when you work with LLM's a lot. But it's still a bad experience. Social media was already hard at work at killing the internet (or at least what the internet used to be). LLM's made it worse.
I'm interested in why you feel like this. Do you take this action because you can't trust traditional channels (blogs, established tradpub authors, Goodreads et al) to self-curate LLM writing out of the pool of available literature you would normally be aware of?
Yeah I think it boils down to trust issues. I can't know how the text was created. Anything created before 2023 I know that at least a human had to invest a significant amount of time to produce the story.
Maybe I'm a bit too reactionary though. Thinking about it some more I would absolutely read something if it was recommended by a trusted source (which in my case is almost always a human I know in the physical world).
I get the sentiment completely. I am actually doing what you're thinking: if it didn't come from my List Of People Who Know Of What They Speak I want nothing to do with it.
We really have gone full circle! It's quite upsetting.
Sure, but there is a marked difference between a therapist and an LLM Chatbot: you can't talk to your therapist for +4h a day, at any time convenient to yourself. It's also not a guarantee you're going to hit upon a therapist that is like that, versus a product that is very literally intended to maximise your usage of it.
a therapist should, if they follow their training, not be a sycophant whatsoever. CBT, for eg, is a multi-step process including Socratic self-dialogue, reframing practices, etc to guide the person towards the development of insight and healthier coping mechanisms
Any good therapist should train you in the methods of coping with and eventually overcoming your problem. This boils down to private grad+postgrad psychology/psychiatry course, because to cope+overcome you have to understand what's going on and there is no one who can do shit but you yourself.
But that is only ~half of job. The other half consists of gently reminding one that not all is lost yet.
There is no LLM that can do this and I think there never will be.
The article is exactly what you think it's going to be: "China is moving ahead, but at what cost?" and the usual breathless Sinophobia that comes with it. At the very least when this happened in the early 80s with Japan's "oh shit they're going to outdo us technologically!!!" we got really cool fiction out of it for the next two decades.
The mass media loves to talk about ANYTHING besides the ongoing decay of the west, largely facilitated by it's own ineptitude at the game it designed. We're losing because we outsourced everything for short term gains and have let supercorps run completely without oversight, buying each other left and right, until every "American" product left is owned by one of four conglomorates, and none of them know what they actually do anymore and the only way they can keep "growing" is by cutting costs to the bone.
*with the implied framing being that China has somehow done this and is responsible, letting those actually responsible, largely the same people who own corpo rags like the New Yorker, off the hook entirely.
No, it's clear that you haven't actually read the article. You appear to be laboring under a sort of delusion, which I advise you to do your best to remedy.
We had this exact drama about 3 weeks ago in the SFF community, when a bunch of editors admitted to accepting and paying for submissions from very clearly AI author[^1], which led to some more interesting revelations: there are many Editors in this space that care _more for the premise of the idea shown to them_ than the actual quality of writing.
I have a suspicion this is what happened here too. Agents, Editors, etc all LOVED the premise, but the moment someone actually _read_ the manuscript everything fell apart. We're reaching peak "nobody reads anything any more" where major publishing houses (Minotaur is an imprint of Macmillan, from a quick googling) are losing big money on this.
In terms of addressing the author's blog post though: no, I don't think this is the sign of the end times. The actual sign of the end times would have been for the publisher to PROCEED even after the AI allegations, IMO.
You don't need to look to AI slop for the end times. It's much closer than that: 20 years ago barely 1% of couples needed medical assistance to have a child. Now, that number is ~17%? Sperm counts falling to an average of zero by 2045?
I am skeptical of those numbers. Like, decades ago 1% needed IVF? I assume that's what you are referring to. Is that not partly a result of it being fairly new technology, quite expensive and not readily available to most people? And the 17% number, while it does seem to be about right, how much of that is just that the average age of parenthood keeps going up and up? It does not seem surprising that the older you get the more problems you have with fertility.
I would be interested to know what the actual rate of sperm count decline is, controlling for age and such.
Rates are down quite a bit in the last 50 years, about half. But extrapolating to zero in 50 more years is a stretch. Average is something like 40-50 million/mL, which is above the 15 million threshold considered normal, but does mean an increasing number of people are falling below that threshold. So yes there is going to be an impact, extinction seems highly unlikely however.
https://x.com/Pangramed
reply