Posts written by Chat GPT and other AI

[CruCru]

I keep seeing posts written by Chat GPT on various threads. Sometimes the poster says something along the lines of “I got AI to summarise what I wanted to say and here it is” and sometimes they post with no reference to AI (but it is fairly obvious).

Please can this stop? This site will become unusable if the posts get written by robots. MN is populated by articulate, well educated women; we don’t need to use AI to communicate with each other. It isn’t allowed in school.

I suggest that obvious AI posts should be reported for deletion.

AI doesn't know things; it just predicts the next likely word based on a huge database. It’s essentially a advanced version of your phone’s autocorrect.

AI isn't a new brain it's just a power-steering system for the human brain.

Luckily for you, you have the brains to articulate your thoughts. Some posters need help, nothing wrong with that.

Overuse of AI can be annoying but "It isn’t allowed in school" is hardly a convincing argument, and sounds like a whiny child complaining to their parents, tbh. Thankfully, MN isn't school!

i would not be as sure on that, theres no clear usage allowance for ai and it seems its at the whims of different people beacuse many people are omg if you have spellling and grammer errors and also omg because you choose to use ai, so damned either way but heaven forbid you try to help answer different questions or give advice,

What I like about MN is that, by its nature, it requires people to be able to write well enough to put their point across. There has to be somewhere on the internet where that is the case.

Pupils use AI for their homework as a shortcut. After a while it becomes very easy to spot. The pupils I know are pretty dismissive of AI - the point of being there is to use your brain and organise your thoughts yourself.

If you want to use a shortcut on MN, why post? Particularly if the shortcut results in the sort of long, bullet-pointy post that people skim over because they want to read stuff written by actual people, using their actual voices.

careful, you're edging very close to "people whose first language isn't English shouldn't be allowed to post on MN" or "people with dyslexia shouldn't be allowed to post...." etc.

Depending on how it's used, AI could be no different from an online translator, or spelling/grammar editor or similar - something that would actually support what you purport to want - better written and more comprehensible posts for people to whom 'good writing' doesn't come naturally.

It's when people outsource their thinking to AI it contradicts the point of a social networking forum, and I do agree those posts, the "I asked Chat GPT and it said..." are annoying (and have criticised posters doing that when I've seen it).

What if you turn it around and people use AI to read and summarise posts and reply based on the summary? Or go a step further and use AI to reply? Would you support that? At what point would it make the entire forum useless?

FWIW I don’t want « well-written » posts if that means bland, smoothed out walls of text like the ones on Facebook or MN. I didn’t write the post you’re replying to but I don’t see anything that implies people with dyslexia etc. shouldn’t be posting on MN.

"What if you turn it around and people use AI to read and summarise posts and reply based on the summary?"

On threads with around eg 800 posts and the extra information from the op etc it could save time vs reading all 800 posts.

If people want quality and creativity for natural writing then overall many peoples creativity and writing is at basic levels on many threads.

If you can't explain why, or reference anything that agrees, then you don't really have a strong argument.

'Because it's how I feel' isn't helpful.

But what would be the point in doing that? Reading forum posts isn’t mandatory, if you don’t want to for whatever reason then don’t. Why would you want to summarise a thread instead of just not reading it? That’s a genuine question btw, I find it mind blowing that anyone would do that and I’d like to understand.

Uh no, that’s not how it works. I can feel however I want and don’t have to justify it to anyone!

If you want an explanation, here goes: previous tools made work easier/better, whatever. AI also does this and in some fields it’s a good thing because humans couldn’t do it alone, e.g data analysis in medicine. In some other fields humans were managing fine, e.g creative industries, customer services and it seems AI is being deployed for profit-making purposes without any thought for anything else.

That’s without even considering the environmental impact of AI. Almost everything has its benefits and drawbacks, look at cars for a start. Who (in a policymaking capacity) is weighing up the pros and cons of AI?

Reading threads and posting on them isn’t a job, it’s a leisure activity (unless you are a MN moderator). Is there a reason that you would need to summarise a thread using AI if you don’t feel like reading it?

Have only just seen this thread. Hadn't realised there were so many snobs on MN!

Also, some people dont seem to understand how AI works and cant be used.

This isn't a creative writing competition.

On some threads were the discussion is around facts AI is now essential because search engines have been monetised. ie they no longer give you facts, they give you the most popular or most liked answer.

So if you use AI properly you can much more quickly and accurately compile references to say an act of Parliament, an article written by a particular person etc..

In the instance of dealing with reality I would far prefer to know something was fact checked.

Is anyone saying that having got AI to hone down facts, dates etc., we should sit at our key boards and re-type using different words.

Altough (ironically) I dislike the idea of MN's AI generated titles as I think all too often AI doesn't get the intent of an OP or goes for some bland heading that doesn't really reflect the OP reason for posting. So AI trying to "think" is different from using AI to be your research assistant.

But accept that some who are maybe not as confident as others may find having an AI generated title useful, and in fact may even make them think that isn't what I meant and look again at what they have written.

Just as I would find it helpful if MN had an automatic spell checker.

And after more than a few decades I am no longer upset by all too often showing not only can I not spell, but all to often have committed some Malapropism.

In the instance of dealing with reality I would far prefer to know something was fact checked.

You do know AI is notorious for getting its facts wrong?

usually the thread does interest me and when ive tried before to fully study a thread and reply to it ive spent and 1 and 30 mins roughly. so to save time its sometimes alot faster to get a full summary of all the main points

Yes but you can question it.

Search engines are far more clumsy and more likely than not never to show you results from older sources that may in fact be more accurate.

This is because, as I said, google particularly but also other search engines do NOT give you the most accurate result they now give you the popular result. And if you dont know this and just accept the first result from Google then you are not quoting the right results.

There are whole academic papers on the impact of research of google not longer being a search engine as it used to be but an indicator of popular thought. A bit like watching Talk TV and thinking you are getting the news. Or even wikipedia, which is more likely for instance to give you an incel view of the world than a feminist one.

You can interogate AI. You cant google.

so why then dont we hold posters to account because how many times on threads are people correcting each other and thats without them using ai

i want to read it its just the time it takes previously a philosophy debate threead had around 6-900 posts and i was very intrested but only half way through and it was already 2hrs for one thread, so time vs threads i prefer summaries

I did that once and posted the result on the thread, and everyone was very cross.

I think there is a huge difference between users. Some spend hours just on one thread so it takes on an identity of its own as it shifts and sometimes diverts in a completely different direction.

But for those who have gone on "the journey" hate that to others it doesn't have that interest and you just want to get an idea of what is being said.

And in fact if there are some who think being on mumsnet is an exercise in literature they could have a thread that is about writing and expressing or crafting words. Why not?

its when i look at active threads usually on average theres around 5-10 i want to read so i know rather than skimming depending on the debates it takes time to analyisi them. and like you say with reposting a summary people are how dare you but yet a person can waffle and write randomness and somehow thats ok even if what they write has no relation to the original op,. yet someone uses ai and to quote the joker from batman everyone is up in arms, so to speak

I'm not sure that posts by AI are always obvious, so it could be difficult to automatically delete them.

If you need more help in deciding what may, or may not be, created by AI then I can help you.

Who are you offering to help? The people on this thread or MN itself?

I hoping that was a humorous post.