Un•AI•ify

Two counterarguments are used to parry the "calling out" of AI writing online: "Who cares if it's AI writing, if it's good?" -OR- "Argue with the arguments! Or maybe you can't!" BONUS: "AI detectors don't work!" Worth sharing how to address:

Have edited plenty of AI-generated business writing. It's straightforward, mostly an exercise in elimination and pushing for more details and facts. LLMs are best understood as sophisticated BS engines. Much of the answers they provide will be accurate, some will be bullsh*t, and all of it is expressed with confidence. Editing is about culling the rhetoric, grounding the hand waving with examples. Relatively straightforward. The problem I see is people who lack critical thinking being too susceptible to the BS, getting duped into thinking the AI writing is good, when it's merely rhetorically effective (on them, the editor). (See also the work I've done with @UnAIify)

@tomfgoodwin Have seen tech CMOs in different SaaS verticals post the same "thought leadership" written in the same way, down to voice and rhetoric. Both are using AI to write the slop, and they're too clueless to realize everyone using AI sings from the same, averaging songbook.

It's amazing how much stuff in trends deck is the same as each other, and wrong. It's getting worse every year, People lazily drawing upon the same nonsense, which then gets put into the training data for more of the same Agentic commerce is a good example, or AI influencers

There will come a time when live, in-person conversations are required for trust to exist.

@RhysSullivan @rorysutherland A very, very convincing compulsive liar, making it so hard to tell what's true. Not surprisingly, this is a poorly appreciated problem. x.com/i/status/20463…

Everything you need to know about AI follows from these two principles: AI is a bullsh*tter.¹ AI lacks skin in the game. — ¹ Even if mostly right, AI is still mostly right bullsh*t² ² AI BS is convincing about that which you know least.

@justinowings i.e. x.com/i/status/20463…

The Standard Bullsh*t Take - content on 𝕏, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, etc., that invokes "It's not X. It's Y" phrasing and/or other rhetoric suggesting AI provenance. "SBST" content, whatever its merit, is tainted by its intent to persuade. Proceed accordingly.

Here Chris Voss describes liars. Understand what he says as a description for AI answers. AI is a bullsh*tting machine that lacks any skin in the game. AI overstates its case, explaining to try and convince us (the ones with skin in the game) to believe. AI lies.

@atmoio AI is a bullsh*tter. The most dangerous bullsh*t convincingly mixes truth with lies. Use with extreme caution! Also, AI lacks skin in the game. Thus, reliance on AI puts the user's skin at risk.

Ingraining in people’s minds that AI is sophisticated autocomplete would cure 95% of all AI psychosis cases. Normal people have no idea what AI actually is and it’s leading to all sorts of delusions.

.@rorysutherland: "In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality." 👆 "Does it work?" vs. "Does it persuade?" "Does it work?" vs. "Is this bullsh*t?" Most of all: "What's the fallout if it doesn't work?" and "How do we know if it works?" (@nntaleb's skin in the game) The AI hype is driven most by its use for code. The code is written and tested. The code works, or it doesn't. This is not the case with so many other things that AI creates. Can you "test" the answer it spits out, the copy or the email draft it writes, the document it reviews and summarizes, the brief, and on and on. Do you have the experience to even know where it might be wrong? Non-code, non-mathematical AI creations are hard to test for all sorts of reasons. Communication is messy and nuanced like the people doing the communicating. Communication is also aimed at persuading the audience, to "win arguments" rather than "solve problems" as Rory Sutherland so wonderfully puts it. As people use AI to create difficult to test things, how might they be fooled into thinking the creations are good? Prompters, as revealed by their deference to the LLM to assist them, may not know enough about the subject matter they're getting help with. They very well don't know enough to identify where an AI-generated creation is wrong or incomplete. Nevermind how persuasive AI is with its knack for mirroring, pacing and leading, and sycophancy. AI is the palm-reader, the P.T. Barnum, the bullsh*tting con-man we want to believe. "Prompter's blindness" hits squarely on these two fronts: 1. On the subjects they know less about and 2. on the subjects of which they are readily influenced (i.e. that of which they're already convinced). Thus, outside of testable coding, AI creations have no first-line-of-defense, relatively low-cost means for filtering the bullsh*t from "what works," what's true or valid. Thus, AI creations get published, emailed along, go viral. The control against this is people who know better, and know more about the subjects in the prompter's blindspots. But almost necessarily, the know-how is limited to a smaller number of people, nevermind the impossible to fix asymmetry that comes with a combination of zero-cost scale on the Internet and instant-creation of AI. The amount of [stuff] being created that is half-baked, performative slop grows daily. Are we set on a path to drown in unvetted bullsh*t? "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." cc @UnAIify

Now consider how "corporate bullsh*t" is a narrower frame for "AI bullshit," ie the rhetorical patterns and words used by every LLM when they draft content. AI fakes meaning as the supreme bullsh*tter, having no skin in the game. It's on us to separate the truth from the BS.

"Isn't merely..." is a "creative" way for AI to avoid the word, "just."

@TuckerGoodrich AI expands off a small amount of info and uses reductionist phrasing (It's not X. It's Y, cliches, shallow reasoning). This compounds over time. Like using a JPEG compression and decompression over and over again.

@markgadala Stop with the AI slop.

800,000 human brain cells, floating in a dish, have never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything. And they just learned to play a video game. That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened. These neurons are alive. They fire. They adapt. They get better at DOOM over time, which means something inside that petri dish is changing in response to failure. Scientists call it "goal-directed learning." There is no cleaner definition of that phrase than "it kept trying until it got better." The cells have no survival instinct, no reward system, no reason to improve. They just do. The part nobody's talking about: researchers have to convert the game's visuals into electrical pulses the neurons can interpret. Which means those cells are perceiving something. Not seeing it the way you do. But processing a version of a world that doesn't exist, inside a container that was never meant to think. The Turing Test was about machines fooling humans. Nobody wrote the test for this.

@emollick Playing the detection game is stupid. Playing detective is smart. The difference is in having a set of heuristics that help you suss out what's worth attending to and what's worth dismissing. Get better at abductive reasoning. /s/ Builder of a detective tool: @UnAIify

AI helps with the easy, but lacks the know-how to tackle the emergent hard work. Everyone feels the ephemeral nature of AI creations. Cheap trinkets and toys get thrown away. How we do one thing is how we do everything.

Two recent articles about AI resulted in a massive flurry of activity in the market (the Schumer piece and the Citrini piece). Would either have been written without the help of AI? Would either have been spread without the help of algorithms hitched to attention?

Would you [do whatever] if there was no AI to help making it easy to [do whatever]? AI makes [doing whatever] easier right now. This frontloading can distract, support procrastination, and lead to confusion about what's worth doing at all.

We're at a point in history—not nearing it, but here—where you have to decide if you're content to ruin your brain with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop or if you're going to fight for your humanity, touch grass, challenge yourself, create, contribute, and love.