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'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)".
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. “Vote with your wallet.”
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.
People driven mainly by self-interest are more likely to act without principle, and also likely to be outraged when that's pointed out—because it's not in their interest. Accusing them of bad behavior is the outage from their point of view, because, in this framing, behavior that is theirs cannot be bad. The actual behavior is irrelevant. When someone is not principled, in general or on some issue in particular, their interests and the moral good are one and the same.
It is very hard for people who see wants as normatives to have productive discussion with those who see them as descriptives. The gulf between the value systems is too wide.
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?
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."
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
Wow. I think it's easy to replace search engines with LLMs (it basically has for me), but I never considered that "News" with a capital N - would be replaced by an LLM. Do you just ask it for news directly, or do you have it collate different sources?
> 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.
It’s so amusing that when it’s needed, AI is equivalent to pen and typewriter, but occasionally when required it’s super intelligence, capable of doing all human labor and end mankind. Which is it?
A publication writing their own words is their core competency. This is like an art studio banning clip art & ink jet printers for making paintings, instead of actual paint brushes & original art.
no, this is a good stance to have as a publication that people read for human opinions, if I wanted bot written articles I'll just go to business insider
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.
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.
>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 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.
They wrote which things they're concerned about in the article. They included things like "Capitalists say it will replace workers", which, if you're a magazine intending to provide your own perspective, repeating the capitalist narrative but then inverting it and saying it's bad does, I think, suck as a narrative.
I'd agree with you if that was in fact the only thing they mentioned... but there was much more nuance and content than that in the article if you read the full thing.
For example, this raises the issue of a drop in quality and a change in publishing model - which is obviously quite different than parroting back an existing argument and saying its bad like you are suggesting.
> Even if you lost 60 percent of your readership, you might still make a lot more per story, because you can pump them out in seconds.
i think a lot of people have forgotten this. most tech people are so metrics pilled that it's impossible for them to fathom anything spiritually richer
Who said metrics? You are arguing against something you've made up so that you can grandstand. Implying that anyone who disagrees with you is empty is not a "spiritually rich" act.
FYI my response did include you originally, but i wasn't implying that you are spiritually defunct, just that thinking in terms of metrics _is_. Re-reading your comment I realize you were using the word metric in a different way anyway. But obviously i have no idea who you are and regardless of your particulars, the point i was making was broad sweeping based on my many years of experience in tech. Lots of people are spiritually dead, and I do think that a lot are so AI pilled that they're willing to trade in their humanity and entire brain if they could
Their parent comment did¹, as did the parent to that one² (i.e. you, who used the word “metric” twice), which is the top of the chain. So, in essence, everyone in the immediate conversation “said metrics”.
> Implying that anyone who disagrees with you is empty
That’s not what they did at all. You’re choosing that interpretation, you can choose a kinder one.
Fine, I said metric in the original comment when I could have said basis or notion or perspective. But I don't think my interpretation is the unkind one, here. They wrote "it's impossible for them to fathom anything spiritually richer", and I don't think it's unfair to characterize that as accusing others of being empty.
> I don't think it's unfair to characterize that as accusing others of
But you initially said:
> Implying that anyone who disagrees with you
That’s what I think is incorrect about your interpretation. “The majority of people in this field” and “anyone who disagrees with me” are wildly different statements. When they say “most tech people”, that could even include themselves¹ or close friends and family². Because crucially, none of us is one single thing, and we’re not a single thing all the time. Like, you can have an uncle who you feel is unimaginative and old-fashioned and crude but that you still believe tries to be a good person even if you disagree with them on how to go about it.
That’s what I mean when I say you could choose a kinder interpretation. And hey, I’m not perfect either, I have had my fair share of misinterpretations. But that’s exactly why I’m saying this to you right now, in the end we should help each other to come back to kindness. Maybe the person you responded to was trying to be rude, but I think there’s enough leeway to believe they were not, and that you can be happier if you take the comment in the best way.
Writing a moral into a narrative doesn't make it narrativeless. They're still saying something, and if what they're saying is wrong and missing the point, then just calling it a moral position doesn't make what's being argued any more real or the ideas any better.
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.
Really, a Nazi comparison? I said that I thought the narrative sucked and was undermining itself. The article was published and posted here, presumably for comment. Nobody said that their magazine should be banned or that they couldn't take some position, just that the position wasn't good.
In my opinion, the AI companies’ openly stated desire to eliminate any reason to live for hundreds of millions of people is something very Nazi in its nature.
Well, taking away the only profession hundreds of millions of people have (many of them don’t even have time left to switch to another one) - surely in many cases means taking away (stealing) their entire lifes.
It is not really a by-product. It is a direct and a very clear and easily understood consequence of what they are trying to achieve. My logic is valid.
> 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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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_.
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)".
If I want slop, I have my own Claude subscription. I’m willing to pay for hand crafted, artisanal knowledge and thought products. “Vote with your wallet.”
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.
People driven mainly by self-interest are more likely to act without principle, and also likely to be outraged when that's pointed out—because it's not in their interest. Accusing them of bad behavior is the outage from their point of view, because, in this framing, behavior that is theirs cannot be bad. The actual behavior is irrelevant. When someone is not principled, in general or on some issue in particular, their interests and the moral good are one and the same.
It is very hard for people who see wants as normatives to have productive discussion with those who see them as descriptives. The gulf between the value systems is too wide.
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.
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?
There's nothing moral about using AI to replace the same artists whose work was used to train it.
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.
They are offended by your vitriol and the tone that suggests the claim is indisputable.
There is no double think there.
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.
AI generated text is still exhausting to read.
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
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.
Out of curiosity, which companies embraced quality journalism and failed because of it?
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.
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.
>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?
How would an LLM tell you this with any insight that is greater than your own?
Why? Your chatbot has ha no more experience of emotions than your teapot.
AI generated writing is (usually) hot garbage.
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.
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.
Maybe that would have been a totally acceptable outcome?
Missing the opportunity to be informed about those points because of aiphobia seems suboptimal.
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.
ChatGPT polish adds no value to this.
AI is great for some things. It is not currently great (or even remotely passable) at writing interesting magazine articles.
Why?
> Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something.
Well they didn't do that, and in fact specifically mentioned how they are not doing that. So what are you even talking about?
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. )
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.
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.
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."
Humans are the new cockroaches. Our exorbitant and decadent carbon footprint not so much.
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.
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.
Wow. I think it's easy to replace search engines with LLMs (it basically has for me), but I never considered that "News" with a capital N - would be replaced by an LLM. Do you just ask it for news directly, or do you have it collate different sources?
> 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.
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.
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?
- 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?
What makes you so certain it's inevitable?
In 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.
For example, this raises the issue of a drop in quality and a change in publishing model - which is obviously quite different than parroting back an existing argument and saying its bad like you are suggesting.
> Even if you lost 60 percent of your readership, you might still make a lot more per story, because you can pump them out in seconds.
You are a good AI, but maybe you should update your context window.
Their parent comment did¹, as did the parent to that one² (i.e. you, who used the word “metric” twice), which is the top of the chain. So, in essence, everyone in the immediate conversation “said metrics”.
> Implying that anyone who disagrees with you is empty
That’s not what they did at all. You’re choosing that interpretation, you can choose a kinder one.
¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108576
² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108489
But you initially said:
> Implying that anyone who disagrees with you
That’s what I think is incorrect about your interpretation. “The majority of people in this field” and “anyone who disagrees with me” are wildly different statements. When they say “most tech people”, that could even include themselves¹ or close friends and family². Because crucially, none of us is one single thing, and we’re not a single thing all the time. Like, you can have an uncle who you feel is unimaginative and old-fashioned and crude but that you still believe tries to be a good person even if you disagree with them on how to go about it.
That’s what I mean when I say you could choose a kinder interpretation. And hey, I’m not perfect either, I have had my fair share of misinterpretations. But that’s exactly why I’m saying this to you right now, in the end we should help each other to come back to kindness. Maybe the person you responded to was trying to be rude, but I think there’s enough leeway to believe they were not, and that you can be happier if you take the comment in the best way.
Have a nice weekend. Genuinely.
¹ Sure, unlikely, though not impossible.
² Not that unlikely anymore.
> I don't like vanilla ice cream
> Ok well prove it then!
Fort them I think it makes sense.
And I'm pro AI.
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.
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.
In my opinion, the AI companies’ openly stated desire to eliminate any reason to live for hundreds of millions of people is something very Nazi in its nature.
What you're now saying is that it's a by-product of what they do. What you said earlier was that it was their goal.
Which is it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Development and improvement is often very non-linear, assuming you can extrapolate forever is just as much guesswork as claiming it'll never change.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration
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 banned AI-generated text or images from appearing in the magazine.