Comment by em-bee
3 years ago
If you were to read some content that's useful to you, does it matter the source?
yes, very much. the source of the content is half of its value.
there is a big difference if i read a physics paper from richard feynman vs one from a high school student or one generated with AI.
i expect the feynman paper to be thoroughly researched. i expect the high schoolers paper to be a collection of interesting facts that the student learned and is excited about and i expect the AI paper to be a random collection of stuff found on the internet.
the problem is that it has already been proven that it is possible to write good sounding nonsense and have that published as scientific research. therefore the only thing that makes me trust any text is the reputation of the author.
an AI generated text can't possibly be useful because it is inherently untrustworthy. at best it can function as entertainment, but i believe we already have enough mediocre entertainment, we don't need AI to generate any more and drown out the less common better quality work out there.
> the problem is that it has already been proven that it is possible to write good sounding nonsense and have that published as scientific research.
This seems to be an issue with how science publishing works, how things are 'peer reviewed', etc. If things were _truly_ peer reviewed, would the peers not catch nonsense in papers? And if it was not caught by a true review, then maybe it's not nonsense after all.
> an AI generated text can't possibly be useful because it is inherently untrustworthy
Probably 25% of the code I 'write' these days has been written by AI, through Copilot. Copilot isn't perfect but it can create a basis to start from that saves me lots of time. This is how I view these content writing tools, something to get the ball rolling, but not something you would use to generate all the content on your site without editing.