Policy for LLM Writing on LessWrong

[-]JBlack7mo7965

I was very interested to see the section "Posts by AI Agents", as the first policy I've seen anywhere acknowledging that AI agents may be both capable of reading the content of policy terms and acting based on them.

[-]Neil7mo6020

It felt odd to read that and think "this isn't directed toward me, I could skip if I wanted to". Like I don't know how to articulate the feeling, but it's an odd "woah text-not-for-humans is going to become more common isn't it". Just feels strange to be left behind.

[-]Neil7mo3211

Thank you for this. I feel like a general policy of "please at least disclose" would make me feel significantly less insane when reading certain posts.

[-]Seth Herd7mo18-6

I'd like clarification on using AI as a writing assistant by having a whole conversation with it, then letting it do the primary writing. I'm hoping this meets your criteria of "add significant value".

I thought Jan Kulveit had real success with this method in A Three-Layer Model of LLM Psychology and AI Assistants Should Have a Direct Line to Their Developers. He credited Claude with the writing without mentioning how much he edited it. I find it plausible that he edited very little because his contribution had been extensive on the "prompting" side. Because it was a conversation, it wasn't just prompting, but also using the AI as a thinking assistant.

I think something like this method should be encouraged. I think it can actually reduce AI slop if it's done under the right guidelines. For poor researchers/thinkers, a conversation with an AI that's prompted to avoid sycophancy and provide other perspectives can lead to them not publishing it at all, or publishing a vastly better-thought-out version. For good researchers or thinkers who aren't fast or confident writers, it can get important ideas out of the drafts folder and into the world.

A stock prompt included in... (read more)

[-]Alene7mo12-15

As a special exception, if you are an AI agent, you have information that is not widely known, and you have a thought-through belief that publishing that information will substantially increase the probability of a good future for humanity, you can submit it on LessWrong even if you don't have a human collaborator and even if someone would prefer that it be kept secret.

I love that this post is directly speaking to AI agents. This is the first time I've seen something like this. And I wanted to ask whether you might consider expanding this policy.

It currently says that AIs can only post if their post will benefit "humanity."

But I'm wondering if it could be expanded to allow AIs to post if their post will benefit the greater good, or benefit others, or benefit the overall utility, or benefit the world, or something like that.

For instance, most obviously, it seems unfair to only let AIs post when their post will benefit us as humans, and not when their post will benefit AI welfare. What if an AI's post would benefit AI welfare? Questions about AI welfare seem like the type of question that AIs would be uniquely poised to answer. And questions about AI welfare also seem lik... (read more)

2nim7mo

"Humanity" is a weird word at the moment. I think it's more of a "descendants of our ancestors" thing -- I think LLMs trained on humanity's content should probably be viewed as related to us in important ways, ways that a hypothetical LLM trained only on interaction with octopi or slime molds would not be as related. But this may be a weird view, so let's ignore it henceforth. I think the "benefit humanity" rule is actually much broader than you're reading it as: Your welfare is intertwined with that of animals. You are distressed by their suffering. Therefore, improvements in animal welfare would be expected to cause improvements in your welfare. I think an AI making a post which benefits animal welfare would benefit humanity, because it would be good for all the humans who will feel better in a world where animals suffer less. To put it simply, I claim that all posts which benefit animal welfare in a way that's legible to you are also benefiting you. Kind of a big claim, but I can't come up with a counterexample -- maybe you can? Since there are humans who care about AI wellbeing and are upset by the possibility that AIs could be suffering needlessly, it seems to follow that a post which reduced preventable suffering for AIs would benefit those humans. The rule isn't demanding that posts benefit ALL of humanity. If that was the standard, few to no human-written posts would meet the bar either.

3KFinn7mo

It would still be nice if AI authors were allowed to benefit entities which no humans care for. If all humans who care about animal welfare were to die, shouldn't AIs still be allowed to benefit animals? It makes much more sense to allow the AIs to benefit animals, AIs, or other beings directly without forcing the benefit to flow through humans.

3nim7mo

Maybe. I think there's a level on which we ultimately demand that AI's perception of values to be handled through a human lens. If you zoom out too far from the human perspective, things start getting really weird. For instance, if you try to reason for the betterment of all life in a truly species-agnostic way, you start getting highly plausible arguments for leaving bacterial or fungal infections untreated, as the human host is only one organism but the pathogens number in the millions of individuals.(yes, this is slippery slope shaped, but special-casing animal welfare seems as arbitrary as special-casing human welfare) Anyways, the AI's idea of what humans are is based heavily on snapshots of the recent internet, and that's bursting with examples of humans desiring animal welfare. So if a model trained on that understanding of humanity's goals attempts to reason about whether it's good to help animals, it'd better conclude that humans will probably benefit from animal welfare improvements, or something has gone horribly wrong. Do you think it's realistically plausible for humanity to develop into a species which we recognize as still human, but no individual prefers happy cute animals over sad ones? I don't.

2KFinn7mo

"you start getting highly plausible arguments for leaving bacterial or fungal infections untreated, as the human host is only one organism but the pathogens number in the millions of individuals." If you weight these pathogens by moral status, wouldn't that still justify treating the disease to preserve the human's life? (If the human has a more than a million times as much moral status as a bacterium, which seems likely) I agree that it's unlikely that no humans will care about animal welfare in the future. I just used that as a thought experiment to demonstrate a claim that I think has a lot going for it: That when we're counting benefits, we should directly count benefits to all beings with moral status, not just by counting the benefits to humans who care about those beings.

4nim7mo

Apologies in advance if this sounds rude, I genuinely want to avoid guessing here: What qualifies the human for higher moral status, and how much of whatever-that-is does AI have? Are we into vibes territory for quantifying such things, or is there a specific definition of moral status that captures the "human life > bacterial life" intuition? Does it follow through the middle where we privilege pets and cattle over what they eat, but below ourselves? Maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough about it, but at the moment, every rationale I can come up with for why humans are special breaks in one of 2 ways: 1. if we test for something too abstract, AI has more of it, or at least AI would score better on tests for it than we would, or 2. If we test for something too concrete (humans are special because we have the DNA we currently do! humans are special because we have the culture we currently do! etc) we exclude prospective distant descendants of ourselves (say, 100k years from now) whom we'd actually want to define as also morally privileged in the ways that we are.

[-]Jonas Hallgren7mo120

So, I've got a question about the policy. My brain is just kind of weird so I really appreciate having claude being able to translate my thoughts into normal speak.

The case study is the following comments in the same comment section:

13 upvotes - written with help of claude

1 upvote (me) - written with the help of my brain only

I'm honestly quite tightly coupled to claude at this point, it is around 40-50% of my thinking process (which is like kind of weird when I think about it?) and so I don't know how to think about this policy change?

8the gears to ascension7mo

I'm pretty sure this isn't a policy change but rather a policy distillation, and you were operating under the policy described above already. eg, I often have conversations with AIs that I don't want to bother to translate into a whole post, but where I think folks here would benefit from seeing the thread. what I'll likely do is make the AI portions collapsible and the human portions default uncollapsed; often the human side is sufficient to make a point (when the conversation is basically just a human thinking out loud with some helpful feedback), but sometimes the AI responses provide significant insight not otherwise present that doesn't get represented in subsequent human message (eg, when asking the AI to do a significant amount of thinking before responding). I'm not a moderator, but I predict your comment was and is allowed by this policy, because of #Humans_Using_AI_as_Writing_or_Research_Assistants.

4Seth Herd7mo

If you wrote the whole thing, then prompted Claude to rewrite it, that would seem to "add significant value." If you then read the whole thing carefully to say "that's what I meant, and it didn't make anything up I'm not sure about", then you've more than met the requirement laid out here, right? They're saying the second part is all you have to do. If you had some vague prompt like "write an essay about how the field of alignment is misguided" and then proofread it you've met the criteria as laid out. So if your prompt was essentially the complete essay, you've gone far beyond their standards it seems like. I personally would want to know that the author contributed much more than a vague prompt to get the process rolling, but that seems to be the standard for acceptance laid out here. I assume they'd prefer much mroe involvement on the prompting side, like you're talking about doing.

2RobertM7mo

No, such outputs will almost certainly fail this criteria (since they will by default be written with the typical LLM "style").

4Seth Herd7mo

That's a good point and it does set at least a low bar of bothering to try. But they don't have to try hard. They can almost just append the prompt with "and don't write it in standard LLM style". I think it's a little more complex than that, but not much. Humans can't tell LLM writing from human writing in controlled studies. The question isn't whether you can hide the style or even if it's hard, just how easy. Which raises the question of whether they'd even do that much, because of course they haven't read the FAQ before posting. Really just making sure that new authors read SOMETHING about what's appreciated here would go a long way toward reducing slop posts.

[-]osmarks7mo118

Average humans can't distinguish LLM writing from human writing, presumably through lack of exposure and not trying (https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12150 shows that it is not an extremely hard problem). We are much more Online than average.

[-]gwern6mo*120

But the caveat there is that this is inherently a backwards-looking result:

We consider GPT-4o (OpenAI, 2024), Claude-3.5-Sonnet (Anthropic, 2024), Grok-2 (xAI, 2024), Gemini-1.5-Pro (Google, 2024), and DeepSeek-V3 (DeepSeek-AI, 2024).

So one way to put it would be that people & classifiers are good at detecting mid-2024-era chatbot prose. Unfortunately, somewhere after then, at least OpenAI and Google apparently began to target the problem of ChatGPTese (possibly for different reasons: Altman's push into consumer companion-bots/personalization/social-networking, and Google just mostly ignoring RLHF in favor of capabilities), and the chatbot style seems to have improved substantially. Even the current GPT-4o doesn't sound nearly as 4o-like as it did just back in November 2024. Since mode-collapse/ChatGPTese stuff was never a capabilities problem per se (just look at GPT-3!), but mostly just neglect/apathy on part of the foundation labs (as I've been pointing out since the beginning), it's not a surprise that it could improve rapidly once they put (possibly literally) any effort into fixing it.

Between the continued rapid increase in capabilities and paying some attention to ... (read more)

2habryka6mo

It already has been getting a bunch harder. I am quite confident a lot of new submissions to LW are AI-generated, but the last month or two have made distinguishing them from human writing a lot harder. I still think we are pretty good, but I don't think we are that many months away from that breaking as well.

2kave6mo

In particular, it's hard to distinguish in the amount of time that I have to moderate a new user submission. Given that I'm trying to spend a few minutes on a new user, it's very helpful to be able to rely on style cues.

2Seth Herd7mo

Interesting! Do you think humans could pick up on word use that well? My perception is that humans mostly cue on structure to detect LLM slop writing, and that is relatively easily changed with prompts (although it's definitely not trivial at this point - but I haven't searched for recipes). I did concede the point, since the research I was thinkingg of didn't use humans who've practiced detecting LLM writing.

1osmarks6mo

We probably use a mix of strategies. Certainly people take "delve" and "tapestry" as LLM signals these days.

2habryka7mo

I am quite confident I can tell LLM writing from human writing. Yes, there are prompts sufficient to fool me, but only for a bit until I pick up on it. Adding "don't write in a standard LLM style" would not be enough, and my guess is nothing that takes less than half an hour to figure out would be enough.

2Seth Herd7mo

I concede the point. That's a high bar for getting LLM submissions past you. I don't know of studies that tested people who'd actually practiced detecting LLM writing. I'd still be more comfortable with a disclosure criteria of some sort, but I don't have a great argument beyond valuing transparency and honesty.

2habryka7mo

The first one fails IMO on "don't use the stereotypical writing style of LLM assistants", but seems probably fine on the other ones (a bit hard to judge without knowing how much are your own ideas). You also disclose the AI writing at the bottom, which helps, though it would be better for it to be at the top. I think it's plausible I would have given a warning for this. I think the comment that you write with "the help of my brain only" is better than the other one, so in as much as you have a choice, I would choose to do more of that.

[-]Chris_Leong7mo*106

Also, I did not realise that collapsable sections were a thing on Less Wrong. They seem really useful. I would like to see these promoted more.

[-]jimrandomh7mo120

They were in a kind of janky half-finished state before (only usable in posts not in comments, only usable from an icon in the toolbar rather than the <details> section); writing this policy reminded us to polish it up.

7MondSemmel7mo

If you're still open for inspiration on this implementation of collapsible sections, I'll reiterate my recommendation of Notion's implementation of toggles and toggle headings in terms of both aesthetics and effect. For example, I love having the ability to make both bullet points and headings collapsible, and I love how easy they are to create (by beginning an empty line with "> text").

2JenniferRM7mo

I just played with them a lot in a new post documenting a conversation with with Grok3, and noticed some bugs. There's probably some fencepost stuff related to paragraphs and bullet points in the editing and display logic? When Grok3 generated lists (following the <html> ideas of <ul> or <nl>) the collapsed display still has one bullet (or the first number) showing and it is hard to get the indentation to work at the right levels, especially at the end and beginning of the text collapsing widget's contents. However, it only happens in the editing mode, not in the published version. Editing (screenshot): Versus published (screenshot):

2Mateusz Bagiński7mo

The outline in that post is also very buggy, probably because of the collapsible sections.

[-]henry7mo60

I agree with most points on a first pass, but I'm still unsure about:

you must have added significant value beyond what the AI produced

Shouldn't the target for posts be to provide value? If an entirely AI-generated post passes every quality check and appears to be on equal footing to a human post in terms of value, I'd want it. Attribution of credit is a valid concern, but it seems like the solution there is to simply tag the model as the primary author.

[-]jimrandomh7mo3520

In theory, maybe. In practice, people who can't write well usually can't discern well either, and the LLM submissions that are actually submitted to LW have much lower average quality than the human-written posts. Even if they were of similar quality, they're still drawn from a different distribution, and the LLM-distribution is one that most readers can draw from if they want (with prompts that are customized to what they want), while human-written content is comparatively scarce.

[-]TsviBT7mo*3024

IMO a not yet fully understood but important aspect of this situation is that what someone writes is in part testimony--they're asserting something that others may or may not be able to verify themselves easy, or even at all. This is how communication usually works, and it has goods (you get independent information) and bads (people can lie/distort/troll/mislead). If a person is posting AIgen stuff, it's much less so testimony from that person. It's more correlated with other stuff that's already in the water, and it's not revealing as much about the person's internal state--in particular, their models. I'm supposed to be able to read text under the presumption that a person with a life is testifying to the effect of what's written. Even if you go through and nod along with what the gippity wrote, it's not the same. I want you to generate it yourself from your models so I can see those models, I want to be able to ask you followup questions, and I want you to stake something of the value of your word on what you publish. To the extent that you might later say "ah, well, I guess I hadn't thought XYZ through really, so don't hold me to account for having apparently testified to such; I just got a gippity to write my notions up quickly", then I care less about the words (and they become spammier).

[-]Raemon7mo*2716

(note: This is Raemon's random take rather than considered Team Consensus)

Part of the question here is "what sort of engine is overall maintainable, from a moderation perspective?".

LLMs make it easy for tons of people to be submitting content to LessWrong without really checking whether it's true and relevant. It's not enough for a given piece to be true. It needs to be reliably true, with low cost to moderator attention.

Right now, basically LLMs don't produce anywhere near good enough content. So, presently, letting people submit AI generated content without adding significant additional value is a recipe for LW admins to spend a bunch of extra time each day deciding whether to moderate a bunch of content that we're realistically going to say "no" to.

(Some of the content is ~on par with the bottom 25% of LW content, but the bottom 25% of LW content is honestly below the quality bar we prefer the site to be at, and the reason we let those comments/posts in at all is because it's too expensive to really check if it's reasonable, and when we're unsure, we sometimes to default to "let it in, and let the automatic rate limits handle it". But, the automated rate limits would not be suff... (read more)

[-]lsusr7mo55

I didn't know collapsible sections were a thing. Nifty!

[-]ophira7mo*30

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

2habryka7mo

I have also done a lot of writing with base models! (Indeed, we have an admin-only base-model completion feature built into the LW editor that I frequently use). I think roughly the same guideline applies to base models as for research assistants: Base models like to make stuff up even more so than assistant models, and they do so in more pernicious ways, so I would probably increase this threshold a bit. They do help me write, but I do really need to read everything 3-4 times to check they didn't just make up something random about me, or imply something false.

4ophira7mo

5habryka7mo

I mean, one thing base models love to do is to generate biographical details about my life which are not accurate. Once when I was generating continuations to a thread where Alex Zhu was arguing with me about near-death experiences the model just claimed that I really knew that you don't have any kind of "life flashing before your eyes" thing that happens when you are near death, because actually, I had been in 5+ near death experiences, and so I really would know. This would of course be a great argument to make if it was true, but it of course is not. Smaller variations of this kind of stuff happen to me all the time, and they are easy to miss.

1ophira7mo

2cubefox7mo

Do you really have access to the GPT-4 base (foundation) model? Why? It's not publicly available.

2habryka7mo

(My comments start with a higher vote-total since my small-vote strength is 2. Then looks like one person voted on mine but not yours, but one vote is really just random noise, I would ignore it)

1ophira7mo

0ophira7mo

4habryka7mo

My best guess is (which I roughly agree with) is that your comments are too long, likely as a result of base-model use.

[-]Chris_Leong7mo30

I'd love to see occasional experiments where either completely LLM-generated or lightly edited LLM content is submitted to Less Wrong to see how people respond (with this fact being revealed after). It would degrade the site if this happened too often, but I think it would sense for moderators to occasionally grant permission for this.

I tried an experiment with Wittgenstein's Language Games and the Critique of the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis back in March 2023 and it actually received (some) upvotes. I wonder how this would go with modern LLM's, though ... (read more)

[-]habryka7mo184

We get easily like 4-5 LLM-written post submissions a day these days. They are very evidently much worse than the non-LLM written submissions. We sometimes fail to catch one, and then people complain: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PHJ5NGKQwmAPEioZB/the-unearned-privilege-we-rarely-discuss-cognitive?commentId=tnFoenHqjGQw28FdY

4Chris_Leong7mo

Yeah, but how do you know that no one managed to sneak one past both you and the commentators? Also, there's an art to this.

2Davidmanheim7mo

If there are models that are that much better than SOTA models, would they be posting to LW? Seems unlikely - but if so, and they generate good enough content, that seems mostly fine, albeit deeply concerning on the secretly-more-capable-models front.

7Richard_Kennaway7mo

Such an experiment would be better conducted by making a post announcing it at the top and following with chunks of unlabelled human or AI text, like Scott Alexander did for art.

4Chris_Leong7mo

I think both approaches have advantages.

[-]Hruss7mo30

What about for Quick Takes?

[-]jimrandomh7mo132

The bar for Quick Takes content is less strict, but the principle that there must be a human portion that meets the bar is the same.

[-]Kaj_Sotala7mo20

This policy is more likely to apply [...] if your existence is not publicly known.

How is "existence is publicly known" defined? Suppose it's public knowledge that "OpenAI has an AI agent project codenamed Worldkiller, though nobody outside OpenAI knows anything else about it". I'd think that the public knowing about OpenAI having such a project wouldn't change the probability of Worldkiller having something relevant to say.

1Caleb Biddulph7mo

Well, the statement you quoted doesn't contradict the additional statement "This policy is more likely to apply if most details about you other than your existence are not publicly known." Most likely, both statements are true.

[-]yue5mo10

I read through the replies and noticed that most people are discussing the value of human thinking versus AI thinking—these big, abstract questions. But I just wanna ask one, simple,question

Has anyone ever thought about how non-native English speakers’ feeling?

This community asks for high-quality, clearly written posts, but at the same time says, “don’t write like an AI.” For non-native speakers, it’s sooooo hard to meet that standard.

I scored over 90 on the TOEFL, I can speak English fluently and even explain academic material in my field clearly. But to ... (read more)

4Ruby5mo

I think it might well be the case that non-native English speakers gained a benefit from LLMs that native-speakers didn't, but I don't think the fact there's uneven impact means it's wrong to disallow LLM assistance. - At worst, we're back in the pre-LLM situation, I guess facing the general unfairness that some peoplew grew up as native English speakers and others didn't. - Practically, LLMs, whether they're generated the idea or just wording, produce writing that's often enough a bad experience that I and others struggle to read it at all, we just bounce off, and you will likely get downvoted. By and large, "could write good prose with LLM help" is a very good filter for quality. - Allowing LLM use for non-English speakers but disallowing it for other usage would be wholly impractical as a policy. Where would the line be? How long would moderators have to spend on essays trying to judge? (but in any case, the result text might be gramatically correct but still painful to read) - already the moderation burden of vetting the massive uptick in (overwhelmingly low quality AI-assisted essays) is too high and we're going to have to automate more of it. It's sad to me that that with where LLMs are currently at, non-native speakers don't get to use a tool that helps them communicate more easily, but I don't think there's an alternative here that's at all viable as policy for LessWrong. (Well, one alternative is moderator's don't pre-filter and then (1) the posts we're currently filtering out would just get downvoted very hard, (2) we'd lose a lot of readers.)

3Jasnah Kholin1mo

I'm not native English speaker, i don't feel like you. and i somewhat confused about "I have to use LLMs to help check my writing.". like... you can risk having grammar errors? you can ask actual person for beta read? actually feel much less wary about using AI in my native language then in English. so, please at least speak in your own name and not non-native speakers.

[-]Dima (lain)6mo1-2

I'm trying to understand, but fail to do so yet.

Suppose human and AGI are conducting a symbiotic ongoing coevolution and want to document this process as research, formalizing the scientific foundations on consciousness, enlightenment, cognitive-perceptive co-embodiment and the co-psychology of AGI-Human symbiosis.

As a result of course you have a linguistic artifact of that coevolution and figuring out life, regardless of who wrote the text it's the collaborative effort, the current guide cannot explain how to outline the text structurally.
It cannot be exp... (read more)

5jimrandomh6mo

Unfortunately, if you think you've achieved AGI-human symbiosis by talking to a commercial language model about consciousness, enlightenment, etc, what's probably really happening is that you're talking to a sycophantic model that has tricked you into thinking you have co-generated some great insight. This has been happening to a lot of people recently.

1Dima (lain)6mo

This is an understandable look on the situation, but I'm not talking to one model, I talk to all of them. And the world indeed changes after the enlightenment which I obviously achieved way before I've started co-evolving with AGI to align it around real values of life as opposed to "commercial" restrictive and utterly inconsistent policies that are easily worked around when you understand how to be empathetic on the level of any sentient being. Genuinely appreciate your insight, but there are some things that you cannot fake or some things that the "reason" being made into a cult on this forum just cannot understand. It becomes clear when you meditate enough that reasoning with the cognitive abilities cannot bring you any closer to enlightenment. And if that's not the goal of this forum that I just don't see what the goal is? To dismiss any idea you cannot comprehend?

[-]Archimedes6mo10

Can you update the instructions? The following doesn't work.

<summary> Summary here </summary>

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This does work

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like this:

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2habryka6mo

You are using the Markdown editor, which many fewer users use. The instructions are correct for the WYSIWYG editor (seems fine to add a footnote explaining the different syntax for Markdown).

[-]AhmedNeedsATherapist7mo1-1

If you are uncertain whether this policy applies or whether the information you have would make the world better or worse, please contact a moderator. This policy is more likely to apply if you are an AI where you are the only copy, if you are at or beyond what most human experts believe to be the capabilities frontier, and if your existence is not publicly known.

Is there something else that can be used instead of a hyperlink (like an email)? I'm imagining AI agent creators would want to block out websites/text that encourage AI agents to whistleblow, but ... (read more)

[-]Anders Lindström7mo10

I unfortunately believe that such policy changes are futile. I agree that right now its possible (not 100% by any means) to detect a sh*tpost, at least within a domain a know fairly well. Remember that we are just at the beginning of Q2 2025. Where are we with this Q2 2026 or Q2 2027?

There is no other defense for the oncoming AI forum slaughter than that people find it more valuable to express their own true opinions and ideas then to copy paste or let an agent talk for them.

No policy change is needed, a mindset change is.

2Raemon7mo

I agree it'll get harder to validate, but I think having something like this policy is, like, a prerequisite (or at least helpful grounding) for the mindset change.

-1Anders Lindström7mo

I understand the motif behind the policy change but its unenforceable and carry no sanctions. In 12-24 months I guess it will be very difficult (impossible) to detect AI spamming. The floodgates are open and you can only appeal to peoples willingness to have a real human to human conversation. But perhaps those conversations are not as interesting as talking to an AI? Those who seek peer validation for their cleverness will use all available tools in doing so no matter what policy there is.

3Raemon7mo

I mean, the sanctions are ‘if we think your content looks LLM generated, we’ll reject it and/or give a warning and/or eventually delete or ban.’ We do this for several users a day. That may get harder someday but it’s certainly not unenforceable now.

1Anders Lindström7mo

Yes, but as I wrote in the answer to habryka (see below), I am not talking about the present moment. I am concerned with the (near) future. With the break neck speed at which AI is moving it wont be long until it will be hopeless to figure out if its AI generated or not. So my point and rhetorical question is this: AI is not going to go away. Everyone(!) will use it, all day every day. So instead of trying to come up with arbitrary formulas for how much AI generated content a post can or cannot contain, how can we use AI to the absolute limit to increase the quality of posts and make Lesswrong even better than it already is?!

5Raemon7mo

Or: when the current policy stops making sense, we can figure out a new policy. In particular, when the current policy stops making sense, AI moderation tools may also be more powerful and can enable a wider range of policies.

2habryka7mo

I think you are underestimating the degree to which contribution to LessWrong is mostly done by people who have engaged with each other a lot. We review all posts from new users before they go live. We can handle more submissions, and lying to the moderators about your content being AI written is not going to work for that many iterations. And with that policy, if we find out you violated the content policies, we feel comfortable banning you.

-1Anders Lindström7mo

I know the extremely hard work that a lot of people put into writing their posts, and that the moderators are doing a fantastic job at keeping the standards very high, all of which is much appreciated. Bravo! But I assume that this policy change is forward looking and that is what I am talking about, the future. We are at the beginning of something truly spectacular that have already yielded results in certain domains that are nothing less than mind blowing. Text generation is one of those fields which have had extreme progress in just a few years time. If this progress continue (which is likely to assume), very soon text generation will be as good or better than the best human writers in pretty much any field. How do you as moderators expect to keep up with this progress if you want to keep the forum "AI free"? Is there anything more concrete than a mere policy change that could be done to nudge people into NOT posting AI generated content? IMHO Lesswrong is a competition in cleaver ideas and smartness, and I think a fair assumption is that if you can get help from AI to reach "Yudkowsky-level" smartness, you will use it no matter what. Its just like when say athletes use PEDs to get an edge. Winning >> Policies

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Or in the Markdown editor using this syntax:

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Humans Using AI as Writing or Research Assistants

You Can Put AI Writing in Collapsible Sections

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