: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.

This anecdote might help my case: At another department of the university where I work, the department heads in their efforts to "keep up with the times" are now allowing Master's students to use AI to directly write up to 40% of their theses. The arguments are similar to what I see here. "AI is inevitable and therefore" etc. Some teachers---the good ones---are appalled. Students who want to write their own theses will now be punished by being out-competed by AI-using peers. There will be an incentive to do less, think less, research less, and develop less.

Worst of all, it's to the point of being almost unenforceable. How does one know a student has only written 40% using AI? Some students are likely to get away with writing the majority of their theses using it, and at that point it becomes almost a hopeless task to prevent a downward spiral.

The department thinks it's very clever, "keeping up with the times", "acknowledging the new reality" etc etc. I don't. I think they are tying a noose for themselves and academic progress as a human quality. The proposal here is not so obviously dramatic but it will at least in my opinion push us in the wrong direction. And I see no pressing need for it.

I've mentioned this in the mod forum, so I'll mention it here too. I disagree with diluting the guidelines. I think we have an opportunity to be exceptional on the web in keeping this place as clean of AI-written content as possible. And given that the culture is veering more and more towards letting AI do everything, we are likely over time to be drowned in this stuff unless we assertively and straightforwardly set enforceable limitations. That is, I don't see any reward from being less strict that balances the risk of throwing away what makes up special and what, in the future, will be even rarer than it is now, i.e. a purely human online community.

The idea that we should keep up with the times to keep up with the times isn't convincing. Technocapitalism is definitive of the times we're in now, and it's a system that is not particularly friendly to human creativity and freedom. But you don't even have to agree with that to agree with me, only recognize that if we don't draw a clear line, there will effectively be no line.

I've added the note: NO AI-WRITTEN CONTENT ALLOWED to the guidelines and I intend to start deleting AI written threads and posts and banning users who are clearly breaking the guidelines. If you want to stay here, stay human.

Here's another way of looking at it: Suppose we subtract ourselves from existence to project back this lack into it and we realize that nothing really substantial happens. Life goes on much as before, just without us in it. It's basically the same movie without the demand for any sequel. So, here, by fully assuming the gap between ourselves and nothing we get a new nothing, but rather than an empty one, a live one at the core of our being that threatens to consume it because its very emptiness consists in the potentialities unfulfilled that form the true substance of the lack behind the lack projected. That is, our authentic grounding is grounding in the searing emptiness of a substance that should have been. Hence, the almost necessary giddiness in approaching the question.

Do you think that after producing his evolutionary account of the origin of species, Darwin persisted in perceiving animals in his daily surroundings as having arose out of independently founded lineages? — Joshs

I think he continued to feed his dog Pedigree Chum.

I mean, this is on my profile as a favourite quote:

"Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?"

Cioran

Need I say more? Who is the Nietzschean here? Who is pirouetting and who is stamping around in clogs? Who is the fresh daisy and who, the rotten egg?

Burn your friggin' idols.

Thus Spake Badenusthra

What's interesting is trying to imagine ourselves out of existence or from the perspective of our non-existence when the concept of our existence is inevitably enfolded in our subjectivity and all that comes from that. We imagine ourselves out of existence and then project that lack into our actual existence to come up with an alternative reality that would fulfill the requirements of that lack.

In a way, we're adding something rather than taking something away---perhaps a narrative that is essentially personal, the closer we come to which, the further we must withdraw. I think un's answer hints at the impossibility of unironically or unselfconsciously disembedding our essential embeddedness and viewing it from a distance, of breaking orbit to authentically ground ourselves in a "realistic" answer that somehow does justice to who we really think we are. This is partly trivially because, by definition, it requires a distance from ourselves to take a perspective, but also because that minimal distance is like a tense spring which if compressed too much is somehow threatening.

But, yes, I think this is a different threat than being caught in a narcissistic mirror where one hysterically disavows through external projection the impossibility of completeness, and more like knowing all too well one must remain incomplete and that one's self-perspective necessarily contains a kind of self-shielding from completeness that maintains the integrity of self.

Nietzsche could write about fishing and make it interesting.

My view is that the way to deal with people like Kirk is to engage them reasonably. Try to figure out what they are actually angry about etc. I had a Russian student once who hated gays virulently. Puzzled by this, I asked him what he would do if his own son turned out to be gay. His first answer was "kill him". He later rowed back on that a bit, but to call him anti-gay was, let's say, an understatement. Still, he was generally speaking a nice guy and because I knew him and liked him before he revealed himself to be a homophobe, I didn't stop liking him and trying to convince him he was misguided. I met him two years after that incident when I no longer taught him and he had dropped the homophobia. Don't know why. But whatever happened, it was better than someone shooting him in the head.

At the same time, let's not downplay the fact that homophobic, racist etc propaganda, by people who are actually listened to (unlike my student) has real world consequences for those who are the victims of it. Anti-gay rhetoric in Uganda led eventually to a law that punishes homosexuality by life imprisonment and, in some cases, death. So, this is not a hypothetical. We don't have to condone essentially self-defeating acts of violence to realize that hateful rhetoric is dangerous and, over time, can instigate political changes that threaten lives.

Yes, Nietzsche was a philosopher and I am a great admirer of his writings, which have influenced me greatly and contributed no doubt to my own cleverness, wisdom, and inscrutability. If you follow my drift...

Let's give it a try then...

The for-itself is that which makes of itself what it is through its actions----what it is is not pre-given, what is pre-given is only that it exists, i.e. that it is is pre-given, not what it is. The in-itself is something that just is. What it is is pre-given.

That it is: Existence
What it is: Essence

What did he say about black people or "predominately black neighborhoods?" Again, I never heard of the guy until just yesterday, so. Just curious as to what information or knowledge you have that makes that analogy valid in your mind. — Outlander

His Wiki page contains some of the racist, anti-semitic, and Islamaphobic statements he's made. Of course, he was (apparently) a more vocal, rather than a more extreme, version of a significant minority of Americans and his killing will likely radicalise these people further.

i mean surely you can see Nietzsche's own ressentiment searing off the pages of Ecce Homo when he talks about Germans...

Nietzsche was a literary artist whose personal interactions were no more remarkable than other literary artists of his day. His special value lay in his ability to create. He was only an immoralist in terms of a kind of fantastical advocacy he left almost entirely on the page.

I'm a moral nihilist. — frank

Wasn't expecting that...

Anyway, having researched Charlie Kirk, it appears many of his views (anti-semitic statements, racism, homophobia etc) are not all that far off from the bigotry level of early era Nazi party rabble rousers. Regardless, I don't condone the assassination.

I guess you're a deontologist on this, which is fair enough. And I don't even know if I can agree with myself on the topic, so I'm not in the strongest position to argue.

The killing of a human being is a tragedy... but the killing of him as a representation of his political views and hateful viewpoints, is another form of act and another form of context that has philosophical and historical proportions worth discussing. — Christoffer

That's more or less my point. Where do we get consistency?

So how do we deal with the world we find ourselves in, imperfect and callous as it is? — Moliere

By finding an apparently impossible consistency across contexts.

I also think that this forum is exactly the place to discuss something like this, because here we discuss the philosophical ramifications of what is going on in the world... rather than what the rest of the internet is doing at the moment surrounding this event. And because of this, I think that a truly civil discussion like this is extremely important to have surrounding something like an assassination of a public figure of this importance to the current political climate. — Christoffer

Fair point. And I did get involved, so, performatively, I agree.

Another context we ought to problematize is context itself. Folks are very often going to react immediately based on political corner, no? When I first heard about Charlie Kirk, my immediate reaction was cold indifference, partly based of my limited knowledge that he was on the far right. But put me in a different context, e.g. in front of his family and, not being made of stone, I would have a very different attitude. Then, on here, I can take a purely intellectual stance. Same with Gaza, many on the right especially, dismiss, by default, the suffering there, but transport them next to a pile of rubble with Palestinian children suffocating beneath it, and it would most likely be a very different story. Contexts drive us and mislead us about the issues and about ourselves (to an extent deciding for us what is "obvious").

The assassination of political figures becomes retroactively justified and therefore simply justified depending on how history works out. The assassination of a Nazi functionary in 1934 by a Jewish sniper would likely have almost universally been condemned at the time. Now, I, and I suspect most of us, would consider the assassin a hero. This is just to say that what is obvious without problematizing a context or considering a possible future trajectory is not so obvious when you do so. I take @Moliere to be coming from that angle. The fact that this is about a real person who has really just been killed is unfortunate because it becomes understandably almost impossible to divorce oneself from the immediate tragedy of those who cared for that person. Maybe it's just all in bad taste to talk about it now. But I don't think @Moliere's thought process is completely wrong.

(Last point: I'm not trying to provoke anyone here or disrespect Charlie Kirk's family etc. Charlie Kirk is more or less just a name to me. I'm trying to find a route to something rather coldly philosophical.)

Also, I've looked through the thread I haven't found much in the way of ethical arguments one way or the other. The fact that it was a murder is irrelevant in the wider scope of things. E.g. for a Jewish person (or anyone) to have murdered Nazis in 1930s Germany would have been perfectly justified given the context. As I said before, I don't know Charlie Kirk enough to have any strong opinion of him, but I think part of @Moliere's point is to problematize the context and that's not in itself illegitimate, particularly given so much unjustifiable killing is legalized (e.g. the Gaza sniper example Moliere gave earlier).

EDIT: I am not saying America is Nazi Germany etc etc, only that it being a murder is not the end of the argument but the beginning.

But now we live in a time when we're actively supplying weapons to Israel who is committing a genocide.

Yet the media harps on about the shame of what was a talking head and memorializing it. — Moliere

Yes. I don't know much about Kirk, but many unambiguously good people get killed around the world daily, particularly children, sometimes with the complicity of our government's, and the media often expects us not only to not feel bad about that but to support it. One can be against political assassinations while still bemoaning the fact that our media environment is composed merely of propaganda, any relationship of which to morality is purely incidental.