I can't wait for AI watermark checks to be widely available to stop such guessworks and the resulting ridicule. I'm not saying you're wrong, your guess could be.
Yeah, especially since we're exposed to so much AI-generated text these days, we may inadvertently pick up some verbal habits from it, the same way people tend to imitate each other. And needless to say false positives can be quite damaging here.
Pangram seems to be very accurate. I don't think that's a good thing though. Right now there is a lot of prejudice against AI users, and detection will only encourage that.
> Right now there is a lot of prejudice against AI users, and detection will only encourage that.
That’s exactly how it should be. If you serve me up AI-generated rubbish that I’m then supposed to sift through, you’ve earned the ridicule of the whole world.
Implies you'd accept it if it wasn't rubbish. Seriously doubt your filter is based on quality.
> you’ve earned the ridicule of the whole world
As if human writing immunizes you from that. Published an article about garbage collection and had people complain about my human voice. One went so far as to suggest I had mental issues. I received praise too but some things you just never forget.
Best part is Claude warned me repeteadly that I should tone it down, and I deliberarely ignored it in order to preserve my voice and keep it pure. I'm much more inclined to listen now.
If its substantially AI generated then it's definitionally rubbish, even if it was a good answer to the prompt. I can send a prompt myself, don't waste my time republishing AI answers.
Please define "substantially". Exactly how many words must come from my hands and brain in order for a work to qualify as human?
Imagine that I write an article manually and keep it to myself. Then I prompt my favorite AI model and it somehow generates the exact same article, against all odds, despite having never seen it before. Then I publish the AI's article, which is equal to mine. Is the article rubbish?
> I can send a prompt myself, don't waste my time republished AI amswers.
I can do it too. I consider it rude to reply to people with AI answers during conversation. Not because I hate AI, but because it made the social interaction pointless.
That doesn't somehow invalidate the value of an AI generated article though. Not everyone thinks to prompt it with that exact idea. Not everyone has an AI they can prompt. Not everyone wants to waste their limited tokens on the idea.
I realize that reading Claudish can be aggravating but that doesn't somehow eliminate the ideas contained in the article. Those can still be very valuable, which is why I advocate for quality filters.
That's a little metaphysical for my taste. If its the same bytes of text, provenance is destroyed anyways, so who knows if the tree fell in the forest.
"Substantially" to me would mean not your ideas and not your writing. I'm sure there are borderline cases that are hard to decide but a rule of thumb for me would be if it takes more time to read than it took the "author" to write.
It's about effort into thinking. If no effort went into either thinking or writing, then I'll plead guilty to sweat of the brow doctrine. Again, just send me the prompt and I'll feed it to AI myself.
Reading is about learning interesting new ideas, enjoying a narrative. The suffering of the author is beside the point.
I can sympathize with the notion that AI writing currently sucks, but not that it's automatically invalid or deserving of mockery. Maybe one day we'll have far better models. Maybe they'll do a good job without inserting any load-bearing vocabulary.
Asking for the prompts is fine, but might not be sufficient. The process iterative, and may incorporate data that won't be published. For example, I recently published a Sol/Fable benchmark article. It would be trivial for anyone to prompt a new version of the article if they had the raw benchmark data, but this data will never be published.
It's not about how good or bad the AI writing is. It's about the human interaction, if someone outsourced their thinking to AI then they are bullshitting me and I will rate their thoughts appropriately at the human level.
If someone's already burned the trees down to generate it once, why would you want to burn more trees, just so you can do it yourself? Do you hate the Earth or something?
I’ve never said that you don’t deserve to be ridiculed when you write human rubbish, but I haven’t claimed the opposite either. However, I do believe that you definitely and without exception deserve to be ridiculed when you produce AI-generated rubbish.
Analyze the game theory of what you just proposed. Have AI effortlessly generate an article for your idea, get ridiculed. Put a lot of time and effort into it instead, maybe get ridiculed anyway.
This is frustrating. Just to beat the competition and make a few extra bucks, they’re willing to destroy a century’s worth of human knowledge (good or bad).
Sure but are we going to do anything sensible about it or is it just a convenient culture war vector?
This is happening because copyright means you can't scan these without destroying them as a format conversion.
No one's felt compelled to try and fix that so we can do this sort of digital archival and preservation, and copyright allows works to be frozen and undistributable because a claim might exist for decades without any actual use (I.e. the number of games which get stuck in legal limbo).
If the only desire is to sling mud at AI companies but not try and improve the legal situation, then it's worse then useless because there's no intent to stop it - in fact stopping it would remove a useful outrage tool.
The idea in the title here is point 1 of the blind leading the blind: it's illegal to scan and store these books without destroying them in many jurisdictions.
One naive concern, though: this seems to make it very easy to spread malware. Someone could add malicious code to a compressed app, share the slide with others, and have it propagate. What are your thoughts on this?
I guess this will happen soon. There are two catalysts needed for this to happen:
1. Evals that can quickly tell you how much downside there is to switching
2. Something like OpenRouter that can help you run those evals quickly
Now #2 is starting to become popular, and I think we'll soon see more people adopting a model-agnostic approach. Of course, there will still be high-intelligence use cases where nothing comes close to Claude or GPT.
Exactly. I'm very happy the discourse has moved on from "but X model is the best" to "you can use open models".
Whether you're using SDK or harness based agents, having evals means you're able to modify any part of your agent and still know what satisfies your "good enough".
It's great for designing products that are easy to change as well.
Here's an anecdotal thought: AML laws surprisingly work well to discourage offline transactions by tax-paying citizens, helping maximize tax reporting and improve tax collection. As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
It used to be super common for many small businesses to be cash only or a 10% discount for cash. Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance. I haven't seen a cash only business since covid.
With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users, any business that is pulling in huge sums of cash well beyond the average is going to look increasingly suspicious.
> Likely the main driver for this was tax avoidance.
It's not just that, though. It's common here in France for credit card operators to have fees in the 5-10% range (or 0.30€ per operation + 2% of the amount). That's why you often see signs « card accepted above 10€ », and that's why your local shop will probably not mind if you're missing 10 cents when paying cash.
> It's common here in France for credit card operators to have fees in the 5-10% range (or 0.30€ per operation + 2% of the amount)
Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards. Typical costs for processing are much lower than 5-10%.
For example, Adyen charges the 0.4% interchange + their fee of 0.6% and a flat 0.11€. On a 10€ transaction, that's 2.1%.
In most cases this is cheaper than handling cash. When you accept cash, you have to pay somebody to close and reconcile the drawer, take the cash to the bank (or have a security company do it for you), account for shrinkage / mistakes...it's a bit of a myth that cash is cheaper for businesses to handle, especially in places like the EU where card interchange rates are highly regulated.
Now of course, if your cash is not going the usual routes and isn't getting accounted for in the books...that equation can change.
Had a conversation with the landlord of my local pub a few years back, he said he'd go "Card Only" if it wasn't for the handful of patrons that refuse to use card, couple of which are the "Cash is King" Facebook types.
And he was paying his staff under the table in cash anyway! But would still rather just withdraw from the business account, rather than having to deal with handling of customer cash every day.
> Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards
Still clients pay much more. To be fair, the prices i remember are from 15 years ago, and now there seems to be better offers for small businesses. For example, SumUp proposes 1.75% flat (no per-transaction fee). But yes, i'm quite sure that's not the kind of fees Carrefour or FNAC are paying.
Collectibles (e.g. trading cards) are still a "cash is king" market. Some dealer only take cash, virtually all of them prefer it, and offer steep "discounts" (lack of markup) for cash.
Still lots of builders/tradies in the UK who do "for cash".
Also lots of takeaways, they'll be on JustEat/Uber Eats and cash-only in store which is a PITA. My local chippy is cash only and no-delivery. I can't find a single record for a recorded business, or health rating either!
I've seen barbers before Covid not accepting cash, after Covid happy to accept cash. The Covid rules for subsidies were very strict, sometimes having to repay all as they didn't fully comply. Cash gives protection against bankruptcy due to unfortunate rules.
It varies on the country. In Mexico, it’s not uncommon for landlords to want rent paid in cash (which can be a challenge in that one has to safely transfer tens of thousands of pesos from the bank to the landlord on a regular basis in a country with high crime rates), although the numbers of cash-only businesses in Mexico has been declining. On the other hand, the main thing I use cash for in the US is to get quarters for the laundry machines in my apartment basement.
> the main thing I use cash for in the US is to get quarters for the laundry machines in my apartment basement.
In Finland I was paying for apartment-building laundry machines with my phone in 2005. Mind-boggling that in the US, those still require quarters over two decades later.
I've mainly seen it in small businesses - e.g. food vendors - but instead they charge extra for using electronic payment methods. Also to offset the costs they're making on offering it I suspect, but it does encourage people to pay with cash.
>> and card company rules are not quite as threatening as actual laws
Well, they are plenty threatening in the sense that if you don't follow them, they will refuse doing business with you, which suddenly means you can't accept cards at all, which can kill a business entirely.
If you sell items for $5 and the card charges e.g. 2.9% + $0.30, that's >11%.
On top of that, merchants carry the risk of chargeback fraud or stolen cards, and in some industries that can be another double digit percentage by itself.
> With a dwindling number of legitimate cash users
Services for laundering cash are going to see a huge uptick in turnover.
You put the cash in the local slot machine, the slot machine owner then purchases legitimate services from your wife / cousin / other family member’s business.
Or you rent a hole in the wall location massage business that that maybe legitimately employs one or two people but on the books they manage to see back to back clients for 20 hours a day.
Another good one is hair dresser / barber, they often take cash.
My barber loves talking about “creative tax tricks” he does as an all cash joint. More interesting was how he managed to purchase a home despite having very little reported income. It involved friends in the “legitimate” cannabis industry in California, but he got it done.
I’m not sure the stress is worth (presumably) 20% or so savings for his income.
its not just his income. everybody in the cash economy wins. if I take cash and pay my employees in cash, that's a few transactions the tax man misses out on.
quite a bit of labor runs on cash. you can usually get a deal for a lot of services by paying in cash. sometimes the floor manager will take cash and never even report the transaction to the business much less the tax man (I rent forklifts and get plating work done this way).
> As a result, governments continue to strengthen and expand laws in that direction.
Which creates national security and sovereignty issues. Cash is robust and decentralised. There is a good reason Sweden went from pushing cashless to advising people to keep cash at home for emergencies, and were at least considering an obligation to accept cash for small transactions.
That's just a disaster planning POV. If you've ever been in a shop where the EPOS goes down, you'll know how chaotic it is. And that's just a macro scale.
> Which creates national security and sovereignty issues
Are you talking about people who don't pay tax? They create very large national security and sovereignty issues. Countries that don't collect much tax have real problems with both of these.
> There is a good reason Sweden went from pushing cashless to advising people to keep cash at home for emergencies
> Countries that don't collect much tax have real problems with both of these.
Nothing like as bad as the potential problem of your economy grinding to a halt.
There are other ways to deal with tax evasion. Those countries usually do not have good systems. If you investigate properly, design tax laws properly, chuck a few people in jail, etc. the problem can be solved.
Not using does not close loopholes, or prevent corruption, or stop people sending money offshore.....
> The key phrase being "for emergencies".
If you go cashless you will not have the infrastructure to use cash in an emergency.
As a consumer, I like paying with cash. It's more convenient for me to think about the amount I have on me than to maintain a mental inventory of bank/card balances all the time. That's my business, not anyone else's.
I don't think any company is cutting headcount because of AI. I think that's just what they say. The reality is that they're facing a cash crunch due to a bad economy. And if you state a cash crunch as the reason, your stock will fall or VCs will run away. But surprisingly, if you state AI as the reason for layoffs, your stock will rise or VCs will get excited. Same thing, just different clothes, and it works.
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