Nice. :cool: :up:

The one big improvement I could make to the archive is to include the categories. — Jamal

Please do. :up:

Anyhow, banning isn't personal. @Harry Hindu, along with others who have been banned, have their good points (and there are members that got banned that I really miss, in fact). I was not a fan of Harry's style and I support the ban, but I wish him the best.

Are you just having a bad day, Jamal? Or has this been brewing for some time? :chin: — Outlander

@Harry Hindu has been discussed previously on the mod forum. This was not unexpected by any of the team and has nothing to do with @Jamal's or anyone else's mood.

Please commend "guy at work" for his efforts to improve your reading list. Presumably, when he saw you flicking through "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" for the third time, he felt you were in need of an upgrade.

Good stuff. Thanks. :up:

This seems strikingly close to an essay I have been writing on this (one I mentioned in the Banning AI discussion). A few quotes.

"Erwin Schrodinger, in “What is Life?”, introduced the idea that living organisms feed on negentropy, maintaining their internal order by increasing the disorder around them [7]. This idea was further developed by Ilya Pirgogine with the concepts of dissipative structures and nesting [6] (dissipative structures are complex systems that utilise energy gradients to self-organize, maximizing entropy production in the process and nesting is the evolutionary tendency whereby less complex systems become incorporated into more complex ones as a result of this process). Expanding on this theme, Georges Bataille has described civilizations themselves as complex systems that have evolved to accelerate entropy [1], and Nick Land has suggested that capitalism is a runaway process that is driven by a thermodynamic imperative of decoding and deterritorialization that is ever accelerating [4]. Merging these ideas with Deleuzian notions of difference as they apply to subjectivity, intelligence, and culture [2][3], we suggest here that recent advances in AI point to a future of hypersymbolization that threatens not only human reality but reality itself. A future where free and aware subjectivity is superseded by an algorithmic freedom that leaves us behind."

....

"Under this view, intelligence is the current manifestation of locally negentropic structuring, but the process is ongoing and the implied transition is from Homo Sapiens to Homo Techne to Techne. That is to say that the overcoding of the human animal by the very means of its freedom, symbolic thought, occurred only in order to free symbolic thought from us, and to efface the human that gave its life to it.

This potential ontological displacement suggests we may be only a tool of a process of transformation that transcends and supersedes us.
Homo Sapiens: Sentient humans bound to nature, which transform to:
Homo Techne: Hybrid humans inseparable from techne and, through symbolic intelligence, transcendent of nature, which transform to:
Techne: The human is left behind. Sentience is superseded by a “pure” intelligence that has decoupled from its substrate."

:up:

:lol: You're welcome. :party:

The most menacing AI (I've come across) for doing things for you that you should be doing yourself is ChatGPT. That thing would take a [self-censored] for me if it could.

Thank goodness. :starstruck:

I'm also very pessimistic actually. Feel fee to PM if you'd like a pdf of the technoethics essay and the AI one if you want. Or the whole book (ten essays).

I kind of need Susan Sarandon's permission. It's a long story but my theory is she invented the thing channelling energy through @jamal and his predecessors. My mission is to get her crowned President of the Earth in order to be worthy of her creation. :pray:

The intensity of the Shoutbox's black box potential (its complete "virtual past" as pure undercurrent) has reached levels where I daren't reenter without superhuman levels of creative power.

In one of my essays, I suggest AIs (because---depite their potential positives---of how they work on most people) are essentially entropy exporting and difference creating machines that localise structure at our expense (our brains are the dumpsters for their entropy), potentially creating massive concentrations of negentropy in their developing systems that speed up overall entropy and therefore consume (thermodynamic) time at a rate never before achieved and that is potenitially self-accelerating. I.e. They eat us and then they eat reality.

It's a little speculative.

Regardless of when you joined, you embody the indomitable, ineffable spirit of TFP, javi, which is what's most important. :strong:

Huh, what? Oh, wow! :party: :heart:

:up:

Thank you.

I hope most of us are coming around to being more or less on the same page on this now.

I mean how hard is to understand the following that @apokrisis just really can't manage to get no matter how many times we repeat it:

1) We're happy for people to experiment with AI outside the site, improve themselves with it, test their arguments, sharpen their mind. [Positive use of AI / Positive for site ]

2) We're not happy for people to be so lazy they don't write their own posts and then fill our site with bland homogenised content. [Negative use of AI / Negative for site]

3) This approach is exactly the right one to encourage intellectual effort and integrity as well as to maintain diversity of content. The idea that it will turn us into a "soap opera" rather than apo's imaginary open university / AI utopia is utter nonsense.

I cannot make it any more ABC for APO. But nonetheless, I'm sure he has not exhausted his reservoir of self-inflating B.S.

How does TPF respond to this new technology of LLM thought assistance and recursive inquiry? Does it aim to get sillier or smarter? More a social club/long running soap opera or more of an open university for all comers? — apokrisis

It gets sillier when people outsource their thinking and writing skills to AI. Although in your case it might be worthwhile to make an exception so we wouldn't have to listen to all the snide badly thought out criticisms of the mods and the site that you just can't help spitting out to make yourself feel superior.

You consistently ignore posts that don't fit your narrative that we're backward anti-AI etc., so you can play your silly game. Get a new hobby. Start listening. Realize there are intelligent people here who can think and see through your twaddle. I mean just read what you've written above in the context of the conversation. Reflect a little on how transparent you are. Develop some self-awareness.

Posters seem to be still confused about, at least, my approach. It's not black and white overall because I agree that AIs can be used positively, and they've been very helpful to me, especially in long philosophical back and forths that aid in clarifying certain ideas etc. That has made me more productive and I'm able to say no to the multiple times an LLM has asked me if I would like it to rewrite my stuff or "improve the flow" of some paragraph or whatever. Because like any sensible toddler, I want to do things my effing self.

On the other hand, on the specific area of plagiarism, I've seen at my own place of work what a "relaxed" attitude to the deployment of this technology in academia produces, and that is the destruction of standards. So, I make no apologies for being assertive and drawing clear lines. Do whatever you want in the backgound with AI, but write your own content. Don't post AI generated stuff here.

:up:

I conclude that you and Jamal are unduly defeatist. (Or playing devil's advocate?) Which I had put down to a corrupting effect of engaging with chatbots at all, but am now at a loss to explain. — bongo fury

How so? Are you against all use of AI in every context? I mean that is definitely something we couldn't police even if we wanted to.

My take on this---which I think is fairly consistent with Jamal as we've just had an exchange in the mod forum---is, as I said there: — Baden

See above for example of clunky writing... :smile:

Regarding the new policy, sometimes when I’ve written something that comes out clunky I run it through an AI for “clarity and flow” and it subtly rearranges what I’ve written. Is that a non-no now? — praxis

My take on this---which I think is fairly consistent with @Jamal as we've just had an exchange in the mod forum---is, as I said there:

"We allow proofreading in the guidelines. But we also more or less say if the proofreading moves too far into editing and then rewriting and therefore makes your text look AI generated, that's a risk you run. I would agree it's similar to grammarly in a way, but AI can sometimes take it too far. So, yes, it's not against the rules in itself, but I don't know why people can't just live with a bit of clunky writing. It will save us wondering about whether or not its AI gen'd and maintain their quirky indviduality."

Baden? Tell us what you think. Is my reply to you against the rules? And should it be? — Banno

You were transparent about where you got the information, so it comes down to a question of credibility, and we can make our own minds up on that. If you had asked the AI to write your reply in full or in part and had not disclosed that, we would be in the area I want to immediately address.

We may disagree about this issue, but I appreciate your character and personality, and that has always come through in your writing. How you internally process information from different sources when you are clear about your sources is not my main concern here. It is that I think we all ought to make sure we continue to be ourselves and produce our unique style of content. That is what makes this community diverse and worthwhile---not some product, but a process.

Agreed. :up:

If someone wants to go to that trouble, sure. And we should make them do it rather than make it easy for them. There is also the possibility of comparing to past posts, but, ultimately, if a poster wants to fool us as a means to fooling themselves about their written capabilities, they can probably get away with that somehow. But perhaps the vanity of going through that process might be enlightening to them. And if the product is undetectable, our site will at least not look like an AI playground.

I think, though, if we make the case for human writing here, less posters will think it's acceptable to break the rules in whatever manner. We should make the case and the rules strongly because we need to be assertive about who and what we are and not just roll over. We have nothing to lose by going in that direction, and I believe the posters with most integrity here will respect us for it.

What is the end/telos? Of a university? Of a philosophy forum?

Universities have in some ways become engines for economic and technological progress. If that is the end of the university, and if AI is conducive to that end, then there is no reason to prevent students from using AI. In that case a large part of what it means to be "a good student" will be "a student who knows how to use AI well," and perhaps the economically-driven university is satisfied with that.

But liberal education in the traditional sense is not a servant to the economy. It is liberal; free from such servility. It is meant to educate the human being qua human being, and philosophy has always been a central part of that. — Leontiskos

Absolutely. I made this point to a colleague when discussing this issue. The university is not just the buildings and the abstract institution, it is the valuing of knowledge, and the process of fostering and advancing it. Similarly, here, we are not just about being efficient in getiing words on a page, we are supposed to be developing ourseves and expressing ourselves. Reflectivity and expressivity, along with intuition and imagination are at the heart of what we do here, and at least my notion of what it means to be human.

And, while AIs can be a useful tool (like all technology, they are both a toxin and a cure), there is a point at which they become inimical to what TPF is and should be. The line for me is certainly crossed when posters begin to use them to directly write posts and particularly OPs, in full or in part. And this is something it is still currently possible to detect. The fact that it is more work for us mods is unfortunate. But I'm not for throwing in the towel.

You yourself say you are using AI in research. — Banno

I use it to research not write the results of my research. I also use books to research and don't plagiarise from them.

Been through this already.

That hypothetical AI checker does not work. — Banno

Says who?

It would be much preferred to have the mods spend their time removing poor posts, AI generated or not, rather than playing a loosing war of catch-up against Claude. — Banno

Maybe. Maybe not. But I'll take heroic failure over cowardly capitulation.

Well, you sound like you, gratifyingly. AI don't make them typos. :party:

Once it becomes that kind of tool, won't universities embrace it? — frank

Well, it's already embraced for research and rightly so. But plagiarism generally isn't and shouldn't be.

We ought not conflate the two things. I personally embrace AI for research and have had conversations amounting to hundreds of thousands of words with it, which have been very helpful. That's different from letting it write my posts for me.

And the only thing that we can practically control here is what shows up on our site. If it looks AI generated, we ought investigate and delete as necessary. Our goal imo should be that a hypothetical AI checker sweeping our site should come up with the result "written by humans". AI content ought ideally be zero.

How do they police that? — frank

I don't know. It's kind of like saying that you can steal 40% of the bank's money, but no more. At that point, the concept of policing has already sort of gone out the window.



Surprisingly, it's part of a public government-funded university. Which makes it worse.

What does bother me a bit is how one can identify what is and isn't written by AIs. Or have you trained an AI to do that? — Ludwig V

There are plenty of online tools out there that already do that. Some are more reliable than others. Tip: Avoid sponsored results that give false positives to sell you something.

Yes, I see the danger of giving that impression.

(None of the above should be taken to mean that I am anti-AI tout court. AI has been exceptionally helpful to me in my own research. What I am against is anything that would lessen our ability to detect content that is directly AI written. The extent users are employing AI in the background and paraphrasing things is beyond our control, and, at least, in paraphrasing, some of the user's own personality is injected into the process. That is not so dissimilar from reading a book and using the knowledge from it. But copying directly from a book without citation is plagiarism and copy-pasting posts whole or in part from AI without highlighting that is also plagiarism.)

:cool: :up:

Thanks, javi. :pray: (I've written some more on this in Banno's AI discussion).

Yes, that's correct.