After giving my son most of my cherished record albums, some dating back to 1965, I have asked for them back and begin to build a new collection of used records. The warps, scratches, crackles and pops are what make listening a perfect experience these days.
Great post and hold the line. If enough enterprises like your own keep these priorities it'll set a baseline for the new literary world (shall it grow) to follow.
I like the hard line drawn here, at the very least, because this type of thing doesn't actually go without saying. I've got a front row seat to the creep of LLMs at my day job and while I'm less interested/concerned about it in that setting, it feels important to not let the adoption of this new way of computing desensitize or normalize the possible corruption of what is, for a lot of us, a purely human endeavour. We eventually won't be able to tell the difference between text generated by a human or LLM—and this is going to sound like some kind of sick joke—so we'll have to take each other at our word.
I’m glad you are taking a fairly hard line because AI con artists are destroying Substack, but in your policy are you confusing proofreading (which I take to mean simple correctness errors like spelling and grammar and capitalization) and copy editing, which is rewriting to make the text more effective? I agree AI copy editing is a very slippery slope toward inauthenticity. It should not be permitted. But scanning for correctness errors — not really an issue is it?
the trouble with AI “proofreading” is it’s only as good as the humans who were used as input, whether that’s non-english-major programmers or reddit jabberers (the real “million monkeys with typewriters”). there can never be a robot who appreciates the evolution of literary english even if it could be given the entire corpus as raw material. get a dictionary. learn to spell.
All of my sentences are run-on. I’d like to see AI do that.
a wise and sane position, which makes for a long-term investment in building a committed readership and a culture of excellent human writing
After giving my son most of my cherished record albums, some dating back to 1965, I have asked for them back and begin to build a new collection of used records. The warps, scratches, crackles and pops are what make listening a perfect experience these days.
Great post and hold the line. If enough enterprises like your own keep these priorities it'll set a baseline for the new literary world (shall it grow) to follow.
I like the hard line drawn here, at the very least, because this type of thing doesn't actually go without saying. I've got a front row seat to the creep of LLMs at my day job and while I'm less interested/concerned about it in that setting, it feels important to not let the adoption of this new way of computing desensitize or normalize the possible corruption of what is, for a lot of us, a purely human endeavour. We eventually won't be able to tell the difference between text generated by a human or LLM—and this is going to sound like some kind of sick joke—so we'll have to take each other at our word.
I really like your policies on AI and very clever tactic of writing about Ayahuasca first!
Thank you :)
Policies all sound very sound. But you realize you had to write an entire post about Ayahuasca to get me to read it.
I’m glad you are taking a fairly hard line because AI con artists are destroying Substack, but in your policy are you confusing proofreading (which I take to mean simple correctness errors like spelling and grammar and capitalization) and copy editing, which is rewriting to make the text more effective? I agree AI copy editing is a very slippery slope toward inauthenticity. It should not be permitted. But scanning for correctness errors — not really an issue is it?
"This article was not written by AI bzzz klong ting I promise drrr"
the trouble with AI “proofreading” is it’s only as good as the humans who were used as input, whether that’s non-english-major programmers or reddit jabberers (the real “million monkeys with typewriters”). there can never be a robot who appreciates the evolution of literary english even if it could be given the entire corpus as raw material. get a dictionary. learn to spell.