@Yam Something like “Using LLMs/AI for any contributions to the game, including but not limited to backgrounds, descriptions, wiki images, poses, etc, is a bannable offence. Being a dick if you suspect someone of using LLMs/AI is also a bannable offence.”

Regardless of whether I agree (morally, ethically, whatever) with the use of AI, out in the real world I can understand it: You want to make a buck, get a grade, or otherwise achieve something that’s difficult with as little effort as possible. I get that.

But… creativity and writing are the entire goddamn point(s) of the kind of RP we do. If you want to use Grammarly or something like that to catch typos and comma placement, that’s totally fine, but to use an LLM to do the creative bit is so alien an idea to me that I’d probably never even suspect a person of doing it. I’d probably just think they’re boring, or ESL, or ESL and boring.

IIRC @Tez did have some issue with player(s) using AI for stuff over on that there Demon (and others) game they ran. Their input might be warranted here too, if we’re having a sensible conversation about it.

@Trashcan said in AI Megathread:

No one is advocating for completely disconnecting your brain while making any judgment

I know that. You know that. But people are idiots and will entirely defer to an authority. Education is always ten years behind technology, and laws are fifteen years behind that.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

IMHO we need structural change.

Agreed. It’s fundamentally not even really an “AI” problem at its core, but a sort of “humans relying on authorities instead of thinking” problem.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

Until some article points out that semicolons also occur more often in AI-generated work than in the average (non-professional) writing, and you’re right back where you’ve started.

I don’t like this game anymore.

@Trashcan said in AI Megathread:

What would you consider an acceptable scale?

Honestly? More mediums. Media. Whichever. Essays, academic papers, hell even clinical notes. The kinds of writing that will really easily look like AI to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

But ultimately, it doesn’t even matter if the tool is very nearly perfect. Many people in many settings, even professional ones, won’t run text through a detector, they’ll look at some shitty guide on the internet and declare something to be AI or not. It’s ultimately a human problem, not a detector problem – they’re going to believe what they want to believe and the detection software will be evidence for them either way: “The detector works perfectly without flaws or errors,” when it agrees with them, and “the detector is easily fooled and full of problems and my brain is better” when it disagrees.

Because we’ve still got stupid old people making stupid old people decisions based on metrics from stupid old people times, like the 70s.

@somasatori said in AI Megathread:

People have recently assumed that I was using AI (not great for clinical writing) and thus everything is over-parenthized. Over-parenthesesed?

I’ve started using semicolons more in my notes:

Client reported improved sleep this week — though still experiencing early-morning waking when stressed.
vs
Client reported improved sleep this week; still experiencing early-morning waking when stressed.

@MisterBoring Either @Roz or @Aria explained… somewhere up in the higher reaches of this thread. I got a cramp trying to scroll that far.

@Trashcan said in AI Megathread:

This is not true; people who are very familiar with AI-generated text can identify it accurately 90% of the time without any access to ‘comparative’ sources.

“Person very familiar with Vermeer easily spots forgery” is not a surprise. I was speaking about the general population, who are not very familiar with AI-generated text.

Those studies you quoted, while potentially promising, are very small in scale. Another study has indicated that if English isn’t your first language, there’s a higher chance of your work being pulled up as having been written by AI.

@Trashcan said in AI Megathread:

the odds of someone familiar with AI output identifying a piece of writing as suspect and putting it through two different commercial AI detectors

This part, though, is the most bemusing though. The odds of someone familiar with AI output putting it through two different commercial AI detectors in the real world are almost laughably small, in my experience. Academic institutions and non-tech companies aren’t going to fork out for two bits of software that do roughly the same thing, they’re going to go with whomever has the shiniest advertising budget.

@Roz Having two kinds of dashes is dumb.

And this is the part where I leave so Roz can’t em dash my brains against the rocks.

It’s markdown: dashdash is en, dashdasdash is em.

Test–test
Test—test

Test – test
Test — test

@Trashcan That footnote is giving me flashbacks to a stand-up argument I had with one of my educators when I was a wee lad (of around 19?) where I held the view that the Oxford comma is never optional. Academic arguments are weird, man. I was/am right, though.

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

You should be–if you know how to use them properly–leaving no spaces between the dash and the word

That is a style guide difference.

ETA: At least it used to be, I haven’t checked recently. But when I was first coming up in the Professional Writing Arena we used some bastardised variant of AP style that required a space between. It also did weird shit with ellipses that I didn’t approve of.

@Ashkuri This topic isn’t exclusively about this community. That’s why it’s in the real life category, not the MUing related ones. I don’t give a damn if people here think my writing is AI, these folks don’t impact my life.

However, various institutions are using flawed heuristics – be they AI-driven or meatbrain – to judge whether something is written by an LLM which do include em dashes and other common signs of professional/academic writing, and using those flawed judgements to punish students, workers, etc in ways that can dramatically impact their professional lives.

Scribo ergo LLM sum.

ETA: We’re (or at least I am) using em dashes as a shorthand for “professional writing stuff.”

@Ashkuri said in AI Megathread:

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

People have targeted it so much

In this community? People love em-dashes in this community.

People love nitpicking others and witch hunts in this community.

Agreed with all @Faraday said above.

The only way you can truly tell if writing is LLM generated and not simply a style you’ve come to associate with LLM is to be comparative. It’s sort of like differentiating a student’s work from something their parent wrote, to use a reference from back in our day.

If you want to test someone that you can’t physically be with to monitor, the best way – which is not a foolproof way – is to get them to write something reflective, about a mutual experience if possible. You’ll more easily see the main flaw in LLM writing: When it makes shit up. An essay written by ChatGPT is going to look like any of the thousands of good essays written in the last hundred years. Because it’s copying them. It’ll probably even get most of the facts right. But a personal, reflective piece? Sure, the LLM can get the structure right, but it’ll just make shit up because there’s no googling for facts of someone personal experience.

I’m naming my next character Ogrin P. Vandagyre

@hellfrog That’s a hard lesson to learn, especially for us nerds with wonky brains. “If not friend, why friend shaped” might be a meme but it definitely resonates in some of my previous interactions on MUs (and in RL as well, let’s be real).

I have thankfully had the privilege of building some OOC bonds, but 99.999999% of people are like… colleagues. We work at the same RP mine, we might have a group project together, but we’re not going to the pub after the RP is done and I’m not going to write you a Christmas card.

It’s a really hard distinction to draw, especially when young.

@hellfrog said in Warma-Sheen:

I just wanted to know what the mindset is that makes someone sock puppet on a new game instead of, idk, trying to rp.

While I obviously can’t speak to anyone’s inner world without having many a chat with them, I can speak to mine back when I did this kind of thing in my very, very, very younger days: I wanted to Be The Best. Probably from a lack of validation at home, I sought reinforcement and attention elsewhere, to that end I wanted to be the richest character, or the combattiest character, or the bestest starfighter pilot or whatever. (ETA: This also included MUCH… ‘creative storytelling’ in my real life. Nothing majorly harmful, but very “I have a girlfriend in Canada” kind of vibe.)

Admittedly, these were all on code-heavy, RP-required-but-lite MUDs… but I imagine the same holds true in many other circumstances. Lack of validation and an inability to intrinsically motivate.

I’d absolutely follow the advice lain herein, but I would add: The game is your space. You can certainly consider it a shared space, but nobody else is entitled to be there. So don’t hesitate to pull the trigger, even if you’re tempted to offer chances. You have a right to peace of mind, they have the privilege of joining you.

ETA: Double-agree with @Pyrephox’s suggestion to avoid crowdsourcing. Not only would you be likely getting woefully outdated information, but you’d be at the mercy of our collective memory and our collective grudges. If they’re still a problem, they’ll reveal that in due time, if they’re not, then bully for all involved.