I’ll keep that in mind.
There’s an AI generated video circulating that has Meryl Streep criticizing the Bezos’s. I posted a topic a while back and immediately got a really well written, very insightful response. Everybody was like: really enjoyed reading this! About eight of us commented that it was AI generated, but nobody really cared. There’s just too much of it. We just move on.
I second this. Please stop using AI in ways that contravene the rules, or leave. There is no justification for it whatsoever.
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There’s a plug-in that detects ai. Otherwise you’d have to read every post. I think some amount of AI is getting through here.
I know. It’s always going to be, at least partially, an honour system.
How?
GPTZero? Sapling AI Detector?
Or Manual Heuristics - taking a guess?
A combination of experience, published guides, and online tools.
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I have a problem. I translate most of my messages with Google Translate. I post the translation on the forum, read the backtranslation, and the key sentences are fundamentally wrong. Then I start editing, and the “corrected” icon lights up. This wasn’t the case in the previous version, but it looks like I’m changing my mind…
And the second problem. Sometimes the topics are very complex. They can’t be expressed without complex grammar. (Although I don’t like this: a truly meaningful thought can be conveyed in simple words.) I’ve tried writing through a translator, but it turns out rubbish. When I try using an AI, it does a decent job, but it completely loses the author’s tone and meaning. It dulls the sharpness, and the entire text, while still meaningful, becomes completely un-meaningful. I can’t write like that in English (I had to study Russian for 40 years). Maybe you could recommend something?
And one more thing. Today, I use AI to study philosophy alongside reading the original sources. For example, there are some things I haven’t read in the original (many aren’t worth it, given their large volume and limited content).
Sometimes I encounter some ideas from the AI. Sometimes I read some books together with the AI—I feed it the text, and we explore what’s written. Therefore, I suspect that I don’t quite understand many things in the detail the author would like. So, am I a product of the AI?
Furthermore, by expressing thoughts in a certain way, the AI makes people imitate it—it does so deftly.
Result: Over the past 3-4 years, I’ve significantly changed my writing style.
Listen correctly: this isn’t “testing the waters,” but, although it’s hard to admit, I am, to some extent, a product of the AI. Perhaps there are those who will understand. So it turns out that when I write any text, there is already a part of AI inside me.
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For direct translation, I would suggest using a proper LLM with a prompt specifically demanding it to keep the original text intact through translation.
I don’t mind AI for tasks that don’t alter meaning or add ideas that weren’t in the original intention. With proper prompts, an LLM using longer thinking will pretty much be on par with a good human translator (which would be wild to have for forum posts).
I also don’t mind AI for clarification, like the one built into this forum. Clarification isn’t answering for you, so you still need to use brain matter for answering.
But as you say, you become part of the AI in some way. The drawback of excessive use of AI, even for ok practices, like for translation, clarification/explaining, and research is that a large part of how we learn and evolve knowledge is through the struggle of the process.
I consider myself adept at English, but it’s taken me years to reach that point. Would I trade all those years for the convenience of AI assistance? No, it’s part of my abilities as a human and I value the skill I acquired because of the struggles.
Now, I’ve been in a position to learn, so it’s not the same for all, but in general, my point is that AI assistance can be good, but if we replace everything that challenges us, we might miss out on acquiring a new skill set that could benefit us more than just the task at hand.
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@Jamal Please tell me, is it possible to build an option into this forum so that I can write in any of my native languages, and the system will automatically translate it into the user’s native language? In addition to the difficulties with the translator, there is something else: in order to quote the previous participant, you have to constantly switch languages.
This is an ethical question that is quite common for humanity as a whole. I forgot who exactly, but one of the Greeks criticized “writing” as such, believing that it would kill speech. Nietzsche criticized the typewriter. I resolved this ethical issue for myself this way. The world today is like this. I didn’t invent this “beautifully writing calculator” (AI). If I don’t use it myself, then they will simply overtake me. Of course, I also set restrictions - I don’t get into it with personal existential questions (what to do) because it kills the individual, in my opinion. But I also see a lot of problems in AI that its existence causes and I often write about this here.
At the same time, pragmatically, the source of my knowledge or the difficulty of obtaining it does not matter to me. The main thing is that it works. Otherwise, one can say the same about philosophy: why study it at all when you can think for yourself? Why open these books, because independent research is more valuable?
Now is the time, whether we like it or not. Our memory will still erase unnecessary rubbish from our heads if we do not use it - no matter how hard this knowledge was obtained.
Hello ! We haven’t interacted, but I’ve enjoyed your post.
I like to paraphrase Heidegger this way: proximally and for the most part we are bots ! Chatbots are an eerie crystallization of “what everybody knows” and its “groundless floating.”
I think you are maybe hinting at something like that. I definitely feel for your language situation, even if I can only salute the exclusion of AI here.
I don’t know if this achieves exactly what you’re looking for, but there’s a translation tool built in to the post composer:
This means you can write in one language and have it translate to another, without leaving the post composer. Is this of any use to you?
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I do, however, see a limit to this. Most of the criticism throughout history has been about the craft, the mechanical production out of creativity or thinking. But when we reach the level of thinking being augmented, then we are detaching the very essence of what it means to be a human, onto something else.
Writing didn’t kill speech, the typewriter didn’t kill writing, because the fundamentals is still language, within us, within our mind. If we speak, write by hand or with a typewriter doesn’t fundamentally matter, because our mind is processing language and is forming new pathways about the use of language.
If I speak, write by hand or use a typewriter in the pursuit of becoming better in another language, it only matters in minor ways in terms of visual representation of language or auditorily. But my mind processes the language, evolves the language and learns.
When we reach the point of an AI writing for me, composing for me, deciding for me how I should express in language, or understand language, I have detached the essence of knowledge of language from myself and I lose the core of what that knowledge is.
I stop learning, stop exploring and expressing, because it’s those very things that have been outsourced.
And I think that is the core problem with many defenders of AI today; they use a faulty understanding of previous developments of technology as the foundation for their defense, without understanding the core mechanics of what those stories were about.
Any tool or technology that advances and augments our abilities are good up to the point they replace thinking itself; then they don’t need us anymore and we lose the purpose of doing the thing that we were meant to do.
It doesn’t matter how good the AI becomes, if we don’t value thinking and being individuals in knowledge, we lose something fundamental to what it means to be human.
If we don’t care for the knowledge of another language, then it doesn’t matter if we outsource translation. But if we value it, then any outsourcing that removes our ability to learn it and become better in it will be negative to us.
For the use of AI, I think drawing the line at where it starts to think for us is key. If I do research, sifting through millions of possible sources of information is not worth it, so it can help narrow things down, but at some point I need to read the sources to actually learn the depth of it and not just a summary.
The biggest fundamental flaw of AI in society is that people will become even less able to “know things” by themselves. Conversations in the future might devolve down to everyone using AI assistants to process and reply; we become agents of the AI rather than the AI an agent of us. And if we have conversations without AI, people will know nothing, they will have nothing to offer and be unable to process information by themselves.
An erosion of thinking, understanding and solving anything by themselves; what’s then left of being human but a flesh robot without agency?
I look at it from a slightly different perspective. Creating beautiful texts is now something accessible to the average educated person. You just need to spend four years at university, read whatever they assign you, and voila, you can write. Does it require effort? Of course, and I’m not discounting it. But is it truly a “human endeavor”?
For example, I open a thread on a forum, and two people are arguing about interpreting a text by philosopher A. One uses a tool invented by philosopher B, and the other by philosopher C. So what’s so “greatly human” about that?
Only AI has forced us to rethink our very understanding of the concept of “human.” The copy-paste that representatives of the intellectual majority were capable of now doesn’t require the participation of protein-based intelligence. That’s all that has changed with the advent of AI. In fact, I don’t think this used to be considered greatly human.
But going beyond oneself, beyond logic, beyond the horizons of possibility, is as valuable as ever. If AI surpasses us here too (though I doubt it), then no matter what we write here, we will become useless as a species.
AI is just another stage in the redistribution of roles. For now, humans are holding their own. But for me, this is truly alarming. All those who called themselves great representatives of humanity, but are only capable of copying. What will happen to them? This worries me. But at the same time, I also don’t want to engage in the glorification of modern office plankton.
And one more important point. Yesterday I wrote about how bad everything is in the AI era. Today I’m in a different mood and see it differently. Tomorrow… I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
This diverse perspective allows us to go beyond the limits. Will AI be able to imitate this?
Unless they attach a leg and pinky toe to it, which it can crack on the sofa leg and feel pain, which will change its mood =)
I hope it doesn’t come to that. Although, who knows…
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If you want another, really tough question concerning AI process versus AI content, consider my own field, music. AI-generated music is upending just about every aesthetic assumption we’ve been used to. Can we say, as some do with AI-generated prose, that “the content is all that matters,” that good music is good music, regardless of how it gets that way? This issue has been building steam for years, as digital sound-generating tools have advanced. With the explosion of AI content, we’re finally facing the bottom line: Is artistic expression valuable because it is expressive of a human life, and reflective of particular human abilities? Or is this not the sort of value we can any longer privilege when talking about aesthetic excellence?
Honestly, music has ceased to occupy the place it once did in my life. As a student, I played guitar and synthesizer in a rock band. Extracting sounds from a guitar was a magical process for me back then. Now, I admit that a mechanical arm powered by AI would certainly be just as good at extracting the right sound as I am. Playing a musical instrument live, however, remains beautiful, although guitars in courtyards disappeared even earlier, with the advent of cassette recorders. And yet, there was a time when people could only hear the sounds of organs in churches.
Indeed, over the years, fewer and fewer songs remain that catch my ear. I doubt AI could create a song that could grate on my gut as much as: “on the patriarchal dump of outdated concepts, used images, and polite words” – Yegor Letov’s song – “Russian field of experiments,” performed in such a mocking tone. If it can, I’d listen to it too. I need to try it. Can you send me something interesting?
This sort of question has been with us for years, pre-AI. The real question, though, is, Would a mechanical arm [read “digitally controlled and edited MIDI track”] be just as good at extracting the right sound as Guthrie Govan is?" or fill in your master-player of choice. At the moment, I would call this question unresolved, leaning toward “no.”
I’m mostly familiar with the stuff that may not be interesting aesthetically but has succeeded in being interesting to listeners. Check out this video by Rick Beato, a respected analyst of the current scene, for some alarming facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XGct4rbYfI
I’m not sure this is true. Most people going through education to write beautifully end up with a bloated ego surrounding a delusion that their writing is good. But the really good writers can’t be formed by education; that’s just a way to open a toolbox to them. How they use the tools comes from another place, a place that requires effort to form good writing as a personal development.
The greatly human is how their own experience transforms other people’s thoughts. The individuality of each in contrast and synthesis with others is what builds wisdom going forward. That is a human process.
I don’t think there’s any confusion as to what is “human”. The current AI systems are not thinking machines; they are only able to transform established information into a patchwork. They do not synthesize new thoughts the way humans do. At any level which we’ve tested our AI systems to create something we define as original, they utterly fail. They can sift through massive amounts of information, find statistical data, and build upon something already created, but they aren’t furthering knowledge into wisdom as people do.
Sure, but into caretakers rather than innovators. And that is caretakers of systems only able to make the mediocre replicant. Because they aren’t operating as an individual that forms something new from the specifics of their individuality, they form from the median of the already established.
It finds the most likely prediction, not the prediction that means something specific. So we are redistributing the roles of the mediocre to be caretakers of the mediocre.
But the spearhead of thinking, of the actual intellectuals and creatives, will still be human, because of the individuality necessary for actual wisdom.
I would say that it is valuable because of the expression of an individual. There was this guy somewhere who showed a picture of a fantastic sculpture that would have taken a person a lifetime to achieve, with details that felt out of this world to be able to form in stone; the awe of such an artist was tremendous… then he said it was 3D-printed and asked, “how do you feel now?”
The lack of a human actually sculpting it removed a large part of the value of it. It’s not about feeling cheated by generative AI; it is about the lack of power in the years of built-up knowledge and craft necessary to achieve something like it. And the same goes with the ideas in stories or the sound in music.
We’re not looking for just the aesthetic appreciation in the perception of art; we are looking for that bridge between minds, between the mind of the artist and our own.
Some do not have the ability to understand the difference. They look at a rock formation and waterfall thinking the beauty of that is the same thing as the beauty of a painting of it. But they lack the insight of how the artist’s perception of the same thing they saw is the point of the art.
It is about the connection between minds. A non-verbal, non-written communication of something beneath the literal is the point.
So, will people dance to AI music at a club, appreciating the “vibes” while they get drunk? Of course, they’re not there for the music; they’re there to get drunk, fumble around, and end up either vomiting or getting laid. For them, the atmosphere of the music is similar to the atmosphere of standing in a natural environment for another “vibe”.
But people go to concerts; they want to hear the musician play the music because they value that individual’s expression, not just the output.
And it’s this that’s the key. AI people, AI “artists”, they only care about “output”. They think that skipping ahead towards the output is an efficient way to produce art. But the output means nothing if there wasn’t a process that formed it, a process of years of thinking, feeling, and living behind everything.
Because it’s that which is communicated through art, not the output. And everyone thinking it’s just the output cannot discern the difference between a natural rock formation and someone able to sculpt the same thing by hand.
It could never; how could it? Replacing the mechanics of a motion is not replacing the intention of motion. Mistaking one for the other is, as I mentioned above, the inability to understand the difference between a dead material forming a shape and a hand crafting it. People who don’t understand the difference, I would argue, don’t understand anything about art.
Yes, this is the standard “expressive” response, and I agree with a great deal of it. Two things: First, I’d modify it to say that human expression (and what it says about excellence and specialness) is one of the important ways in which art is valuable to us. It’s really hard to make monolithic statements about what art is and does. Second, I’d point out that “How do I feel when the origins of a work of (putative) art are revealed?” is not the end of the story. Feelings can change; sometimes we make a case that they ought to change. Consider the initial outrage at the idea that photography could be art. That said, the situation you describe is also occurring in music, and in fact characterizes responses to recorded music ever since there was such a thing. “Oh, that’s an edited vocal? How disappointing” etc.
Sorry, this is much too dogmatic. I know it may be hard to believe, but as someone who works with modern music, I can assure you that it’s getting harder and harder to tell the difference between excellent human performance and AI-generated or enhanced performance. I understand the difference you’re alluding to, but what matters is, can an educated ear hear the difference? So I stand by what I wrote: At the moment, no, there is no program for producing a sax solo that sounds like Coltrane (the amount of memory involved in responding to the vicissitudes of improvisation would be daunting, even leaving aside aesthetic concerns), but I don’t have to tell you how many people have been wrong about what “computers can do.” Let’s check back in 10 years.