(This essay was written entirely by a human)

I was banned from Reddit recently. This after being a constructive member of the community for almost a decade. If that’s not an oxymoron.

I was quite baffled. Let me explain.

My stint as a bard

About a decade ago, I began work on a satirical song. At the time, I had practically none of the skills needed to produce music. What I had was an idea: I was inspired by the infamous 1960s LSD experiment with Tusko the Elephant. It’s a deranged, tragic, and true story, and I felt it deserved to be enshrined, or rather lampooned, in music.

I wrote most of the lyrics. I was learning the guitar. But I didn’t know about arranging, couldn’t sing very well, and didn’t have access to a studio. So ultimately, the notes got buried, and I moved on to other projects, like my PhD.

Then, recently, I dug them up again. I finished the lyrics and the chords. The strength of this piece was in the rhyme and story. The musical part was just to make it palatable. In my opinion, I’m a better lyricist than ChatGPT, so the text was man-made. A thesaurus and rhyming dictionary (all pre-2000 tech) were my stack.

Why revisit it? Because I was better at singing and accompanying myself on guitar by now? No. The reason was obvious: AI happened.

To take ideas from paper to audible, I’ve been using Suno. I recorded myself in a podcast studio, singer-songwriter style. Uploaded that as context, and iterated for days until I had the right vibe. (I was going for something like Carolina Drama by the Raconteurs, a side project of Jack White.) At first, the model wouldn’t sing the story with the right intonation and pauses. Those were crucial for the comedy to land. So I separated the backing track, sang over that for another 2 iterations, and did a lot of local edits and incisions. After more than a week, it was just right. I also put together a perfunctory video clip: another couple evenings. I used AI image generation for that too, editing video using Claude and Openshot. 

I would never have been able to produce something of this level before. I had some, but still far from all, of the skills required to produce music video. That was no longer a show-stopper.

Proudly, I went to share my creation with the internet. At this point, I had put a lot of effort into this. Still only, say, 10% of the effort it used to take, but at least two weeks full-time.

The reactions were abysmal. No one cared for my clever lyrics. On the surface, it looked and sounded like slop. So, to the internet at large, it was slop. I only posted in two subreddits, but found myself banned from five. When I tried to plead my case, emphatically defending it was handwritten, but conceding AI assistance, I was banished from the site altogether. 2 / 5 stars, do not recommend.

Honestly, the song is quite cute. And it was demonstrably better as an AI product than it would have been with me singing into my phone like a scrub. Ironically, I suspect the latter would have been more successful.

Now, I’ll admit I am salty over being rejected, even by a notoriously vitriolic band of anonymous keyboard warriors. Moreover, Reddit specifically has a major problem with AI bots overrunning their platform and drowning out human creators. They are not taking half measures. So perhaps I just didn’t read the room.

But it got me thinking about a bigger question: Why do people HATE AI content SO much?

John Henry

There is a 19th century US folklore tale about a heroic freedman named John Henry. This steel-drivin’ man went head to head with a steam-powered rock drill, digging a railroad tunnel. He valiantly beat the machine, and promptly died. This heralded the age of industry.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here many times. I understand that people are worried. AI is making creatives and researchers, lawyers and copywriters obsolete, increasing inequality. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but I think the writing is on the wall. Change is coming, and we have to adapt. The cries of luddites won’t help: at best this is another moat that technology is backfilling, at worst these cries are gatekeeping. Good to note, I’ve been developing code for a living for the past 4 years. 

Other people voice real concerns I share: AI’s power and water consumption. Or the existential threat that ASI poses to the order of humanity as we know it. These are good reasons to be skeptical of the wanton development of new models and the sprawl of datacenters.

But all of these seem misplaced, to me, as a critique of the content itself. That is either high or low quality. Useful or not. I have always believed more in the value of the message over the messenger. It’s why I gravitated to objective and falsifiable subjects like CS, math and physics. I understand not everyone feels that way. Still, I think there’s more to this: The soul.

Artists and Effort

I’ve been puzzled by a version of this question for a long time, long before ChatGPT. I actually started making digital art 8 years ago. Completely ‘white-box’, as they say, generative according to algorithms I wrote, and therefore instant. Though people agreed that the art was pretty, and liked that I could make a unique print for them on demand, most declined to pay for it. Because, ostensibly, no human effort had gone into making that individual piece.

I also paint. I have the dexterity of a child and use simple techniques, but worked for months on some pieces. A friend, the kind who speaks before she thinks (I’m actually grateful for such candor), saw one. Her house is full of art made by radical avant-garde nudists and shamanic sculptures. She told me, “It’s impressive. And if you hadn’t made it, I might buy it.”

It wasn’t for sale. And also, ouch! But then I embraced the truth. People want to tell a story to their dinner guests when they’re sipping wine and studying their home gallery. It has to mean something. People buy art, not firstly for its quality, but for the message of the artist. My message is kind of boring. I’m just a tech nerd who moonlights in neat patterns. I’m not a martyr and I don’t live my art.

I distilled two very important insights:

1. The artist is as important as the art.
2. We conflate effort with value.

Before you disagree, just think about it. Industrial automation has slashed the prices of household products, while boosting quality. A printed photograph is a much higher-fidelity representation of any subject than an oil painting. But exactly those imperfections, the irregular strokes and dollops, are what tell us “someone slaved over this”. It’s priceless.

There’s a striking experiment by Banksy, who offered his ‘spray art’ incognito on the streets of NYC, for 60 USD per canvas. He sold 7. Later people kicked themselves, if they had known someone so famous had made it with his own hands, they would have realized it was worth a thousand times that. Why couldn’t they detect the value based on the art itself? 

The breakdown cuts two ways. If I try to sell you a rock, you might pass, “it’s just a rock”. I counter, “But THIS rock was flipped over 10,000 times by pagan monks, once every full moon, for the last 808 years.” Do the scratches make the rock more valuable? Isn’t it still just a rock?

I hope this is not just my personal soapbox, trying to vindicate myself from my failed artist endeavors. Maybe my art sucks. But my point stands. Let me tie this into the larger story about GenAI. 

You down with O.P.P? (Other People’s Prompts)

First off, I think my question needs a little clarification. Because we clearly don’t hate all AI content. We prompt and consume AI content all the time. We just really hate being served other people’s AI content. One internet pundit made the analogy that we also don’t mind our own humming or the smell of our own farts. There's actually a beautiful metaphor here. When we prompt the content, we know exactly where it comes from, and what it’s made of.

We don’t want to be made to guess where the stink comes from.

Before, if you wanted to publish an academic paper, you had to have:

1. An idea
2. The lay of the land
3. Technical (mathematical) skills
4. Writing skills
5. Time

Now, you can submit a paper while missing any number of these. Even if you don’t have a single one: “Chat, give me 10 novel ideas for math breakthroughs.”

So instead of being throttled to the population of authors that happened to be blessed with all 5, any subset will do. Before, polished research came with two implicit signals:

• Someone else spent a lot of time on it, indicating they thought it was worth that time.
• That someone had moreover spent countless hours earning the right to have an opinion.

Now, things that look polished may not carry that seal of approval at all. And the number of papers submitted to journals has skyrocketed. Much is slop. But some is not. While it’s little consolation to the poor editors, I think the total amount of good research has gone up, while the proportion has gone down. Because, of course, not all good ideas happen to be born inside famous or prolific writers. Good ideas may not discriminate. Low effort does not prove low quality.

The same mechanism applied to my song. (I hope.)

The Burden Shifts

So what’s the problem? There is a huge influx of bad content. Also good content. Nowadays, both are polished. It’s getting harder and harder to tell what all that polish actually means. It’s the age of photography, and the value of lifelike portraits is plummeting hard.

As creation is becoming cheaper and cheaper, a larger proportion of our job is curation. Quality control. Trust in our sources is becoming more important. We need to cut out more and more noise, and AI content is giving us more of that job to do.

We had good methods for discerning real paint from photographs, real wood from laminate, real plants from plastic. We desperately want a way to tell GenAI from human-authored content. Because we don’t want to be the dunce who spends time reading something that the purported author didn’t even take the time to write. We want a guarantee: “trust me, this is worth your time”. We can’t trust anymore. The burden has shifted from creator to consumer. And we hate it.

I think we will gravitate towards a new culture. Anthropic is watermarking its text. It’s tricky for a human eye but easy to algorithmically detect GenAI video and imagery. Part of this is a legislative issue. And part is being solved organically. I actually kind of dig the trend of companies and figureheads in the AI community having barebones white HTML websites with no CSS. They are counter-signalling: “I didn’t use Claude for this. It’s artisanal”.

But I also think we can be more open-minded. ChatGPT is solving math problems. Those theorems are no less true. I personally listen to some GenAI music. It’s good. A lot of value is being created. Yes, it was produced by mindless automatons who cannot morally or in good conscience vouch for its meaning or profundity. But those automatons were created by humans with vision and unimaginable resources.

Going forward, most good content will be a collaboration between humans and agents. It’s a massive enabler and productivity booster. We need to institute new systems for filtering. Sources that consistently serve their audience worthwhile ideas, regardless of the mode of creation, should be rewarded with trust. So then, let’s take a moment to appreciate the wealth of new tools, art, and science that can benefit us all.

Coda

Actually, I told one lie at the beginning.

This essay was one-shot by Claude.

How do you feel about the opinions espoused within? Are they less valid?

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Nah, just kidding. I've learned my lesson, it's all Daniel.