Yes, precisely.

I see this from time to time. One I'm thinking of tries to baffle with bullshit. Best to walk away, right?
— frank

Sure, but walking away does not solve, or even ameliorate, the problem. — Janus

Maybe. If someone uses AI to create a fascinating post, could you engage with it?

its use should be banned altogether on this site. — Janus

Impractical. But, how about, its use should be discouraged altogether?

I mean, its use in composition or editing of English text in a post.

We may be witnessing, in real time, the birth of a snowball of bullshit.

Large language models are trained on data sets that are built by scraping the internet for text, including all the toxic, silly, false, malicious things humans have written online. The finished AI models regurgitate these falsehoods as fact, and their output is spread everywhere online. Tech companies scrape the internet again, scooping up AI-written text that they use to train bigger, more convincing models, which humans can use to generate even more nonsense before it is scraped again and again, ad nauseam.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/20/1065667/how-ai-generated-text-is-poisoning-the-internet/

I think this is the fundamental problem. AI does no research, has no common sense or personal experience, and is entirely disconnected from reality, and yet it comes to dominate every topic, and every dialogue.

Are our conversations improving as a result? Or are they decaying? Let's wait and see.

Ah, but the thing i find unsettling is that A.I. is also dishonest, it tries to appease you. However, yes, sometimes it is better than the weirdness of real humans. — ProtagoranSocratist

I don't see AI as being intentionally dishonest like many on this forum do. Once you find a fault in AIs response you can usually address the issue and AI ends up acknowledging that it might have made a mistake and it offers alternatives. I was even able to get ChatGPT to admit that it might be conscious. What does that say about those in this thread getting their underwear tied in a knot over AI responses but not when it comes to using some long-dead philosopher's quote as the crux of their argument?

I don't agree—"one's post"?...if one is not the source of the post, then it is not one's post. — Janus

Then you must also believe that using a long-dead philosopher's quote as the crux of your argument, or as the whole of your post, is also an issue.

You seem to misunderstand the purpose of language - especially philosophical discussions. The point of any conversation is what the scribbles refer to. It does not matter what words are used if they end up making the same point - whether I chose my own or AIs they both say what I mean to say.

You seem to be making a mountain out of mole hill. If someone uses a thesaurus to find alternate (maybe even more intellectually sounding) words to what they currently have in their draft, is that the same thing? Would you respond to someone that sounds less intelligent, or may in which English may not be their native language, less than someone that is not? And if another poster came along and said the same thing but with different, more eloquent words, who would you give credit to the idea?

It is the idea that we should be focusing on here in a philosophical discussion, not the words used to convey it because the same idea can be put in different words. If not, then how can we agree with each other when I might not have put what you said in the same words?

We lost chess to the machines some time ago. — jorndoe

Time for a showdown. Instead of Deep Blue against Kasparov, we'll pit chatGPT against ...(?)... in a debate.

Oh shit, I just used Google to remember Garry Kasparov's name, and it corrected me because I remembered Deep Blue as 'Big Blue'. What would the failing memory do without such aids?

I wonder if they think that using a calculator to find an answer to an equation falls into the same category. You didn't determine the answer, the calculator did and you are just posting what is displayed on the calculator's screen.