Flutterby™! : The written word and social construct

From It's rude to show AI output to people came this lobste.rs comment by Internet_Janitor:

The written word rests on a social contract: it was composed by a human with intent, and is therefore often worth the effort to decode. As readers, we are used to papering over typos and other superficial flaws in text in order to extract its meaning and weigh its veracity, usefulness, or aesthetic properties, often by building our own imperfect model of the author from context.

LLM output harvests the generosity and credulousness of this social contract- inviting readers to fill in its gaps and ignore its flaws. Through consistent exploitation, the social contract is gradually eroded, like so many other tragedies of the commons. This problem is not entirely novel, but LLMs have made Gish-galloping with nonsense orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than ever before, and scale can give old problems new venom.

I would argue that sharing slop is worse than simply rude; it’s profoundly antisocial, and an attack on the idea of written communication.

The thread there also has some other discussion about forwarding on media with and without comment that has me thinking about stuff.