Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional ill
Key points:
the paper was obviously fake to a human reader: it starts by saying it's fake and says it multiple times throughout
the paper says it was funded by the Professor Sideshow Bob University of Trickery and thanks contributors from the USS Enterprise and the Fellowship of the Ring
the paper has already been erroneously cited in a real research paper
LLMs give different information depending on the prompt, so sometimes they mention that the fake condition is "perhaps pseudoscience" and sometimes they tell people to see a doctor because they have the fake condition
absolutely no one is taking any responsibility for this shit, except maybe Nature, because they retracted the paper that cited the fake paper
LLMs don't think. They can't analyse. They can only repeat and remix thoughtlessly.
"I was getting good guidance, again in navigating the bureaucracy, when, in the middle of a black-and-white operational question and entirely unprompted, the LLM offered me sympathy. What I was going through, it told me, was “really difficult.”
My first reaction was repulsion.
This machine has never had contact with the reality of a body, of physical or emotional suffering, or the love between a father and a son. These words of empathy were in the literal sense “unreal.” And unreal words, spoken within the syntax of care, are worse than silence. They are a simulation of something sacred.
This distinction between real and unreal has become one of my first principles in assessing AI.
I am a philosophical realist in the tradition of Aquinas and Augustine; I believe the world is intelligible. Human beings can come into contact with what is real. Evil, in the Augustinian formulation, has no being of its own. It is parasitic on the good; it is a privation of the good that ought to exist. AI-generated empathy operates in the same register. It carries the form of care without the substance."
Okay, community manager hat on. I'm ticked off because I keep watching this hurt people I care about and it's made me a Very Angy Indeed.
Ya'll gotta stop with the AI accusation bullshit. In every fandom. Full stop.
Is it important that we do not feed the stupid machines tech bros are dumping all their money into? Yes.
Is it an effective use of your time to harass fandom content creators about it? Absolutely not.
You aren't fighting against AI - you're instead targeting harassment at someone that you cannot prove nor have the authority to prove is using AI.
I have more to say under the cut if you want to dig into it, but I'm just so tired, ya'll. Be kind to one another—fandom is one of the few healing things we have in this world. Don't be a part of what's burning it down.
All of the "proof" I've seen tossed around comes down to:
How fast someone can write. That means people with flexible job hours or who are unemployed or who just happen to be very fast writers are AI? This is so incredibly arbitrary. People can't build a backlog and publish on a regular cadence? People can't re-upload works that they've taken down and edited, but you had no idea they weren't previously posted? There are so many holes in this argument I could use it for several golf courses.
Usage of specific words. I really don't know how ya'll are picking these; it might as well be a dart board taped to a dictionary. LLMs are trained on the whole-ass internet. Of course they're using terms they associate with your fandom, they learned from your fandom in the first place.
An AI-detecting tool told you so, even though they don't fucking work. Even ChatGPT shut down their own AI detector because it was so bad at detecting what was or wasn't AI. Even the best ones shouldn't be trusted wholesale; at best, it's a flag for suspicion, but it can't be a full condemnation of a work.
Repetition. I hate to tell ya'll, but I suffer from repetition in my own writing. As a result, I'm actually quite good at spotting it as an editor because I've had to train myself out of it. Some phrases just sound pleasant. And sometimes there's only so many ways to describe fellatio. Whatever the reason, repetition will happen because it's how many of our brains function.
LLMs were trained on us. Of course we, as humans, going to sound like them; we're basically their unwilling parents. But even more importantly than that, you are doing nothing but causing harm in your fandom by throwing around accusations.
You aren't:
"Sticking it to the man." Even if the person you're accusing uses AI, what did you accomplish by harassing them? If one person stops using it, it isn't going to stop the AI movement. If this is something you're actually passionate about fighting against, support a union fighting for anti-AI provisions. Try out a fun AI poisoning tool! Support an actual human creator by commissioning a piece or commenting on your favorite fic! The more people are rewarded for being fucking human, the harsher the blow we deliver to the AI movement.
"Keeping the AI bros out of our community." Most creatives hate AI. It's been extremely damaging to writers, artists, musicians, voice actors and other content creators who rely on their skills to survive. It's hard enough to survive as an artist! Most are underpaid and, at least for those of us in the US, don't have or get benefits. We're actively incentivized not to use AI collectively because it's how we're going to save our careers. "Made by a real human" is going to be the selling point for a lot of these areas in the future - I already see it at craft fairs and artists alleys I visit, posted in big, bold letters and bright signs as visibly as possible. And every single time, that sign will get me to come browse their stuff.
"Saving your fandom." A lot of creatives create for fun even if they do it for work. Outside of the extremely slim chance your accusation is correct, in the much more likely event that you are wrong, you are chasing out talented, passionate people from your community. You are making your fandom smaller because you're doing what we all know you should not be doing in a fandom: gatekeeping. And if they are using AI? There's a really good chance they're not going to stop anyway because the barrier for usage is so low. You will wind up with a higher population of AI generated content in your fandom because people being falsely accused will give up and leave and people who don't care... well they already don't care and are likely going to keep doing what they're doing.
The world is on fire enough. Stop dumping your precious energy into tearing each other down. We only have so long in this life; if you want your efforts to be for good, then use your time and energy to create, uplift, and support each other.
