At the top put a very short, concise TLDR with NO IMAGES.
More data. It sounds like you did a pretty rigorous deep-dive into this stuff. Instead of making assertions like “These projects usually take one of a few forms …” or “There appears to be almost nothing in this general pattern before January 2025″ show the raw data! I get that you need to protect the privacy of the posters, but you could at least have a scrubbed table with date, anonymized user IDs, name of subreddit, and maybe tags corresponding to various features you described in your piece. Or at least show the summary statistics and the code you used to calculate them. Social media can very much be analyzed in a replicable manner.
Fewer anecdotes. The images you embed disrupt the flow of your writing. Since you’re anonymizing them anyway, why not go ahead and quote them as text? It’s not like an image is somehow more authentic than quoted text. Also, as per above, maybe move them to an appendix at the bottom. The focus should be on the scope and the scale of this phenomenon. Then, if a reader is interested enough to pursue further they can choose to read the semi incomprehensible AI co-authored stuff in the appendix.
Without independently verifiable evidence, I expect there to be a low probability of this being a widespread trend at this time. However, it does point to something we should probably prepare for—mystically inclined people who don’t understand AI building cults around it and possibly creating a counter-movement to the AI-alignment movement as if that work wasn’t already hard enough.
Here is what you can do to make your post better:
At the top put a very short, concise TLDR with NO IMAGES.
More data. It sounds like you did a pretty rigorous deep-dive into this stuff. Instead of making assertions like “These projects usually take one of a few forms …” or “There appears to be almost nothing in this general pattern before January 2025″ show the raw data! I get that you need to protect the privacy of the posters, but you could at least have a scrubbed table with date, anonymized user IDs, name of subreddit, and maybe tags corresponding to various features you described in your piece. Or at least show the summary statistics and the code you used to calculate them. Social media can very much be analyzed in a replicable manner.
Fewer anecdotes. The images you embed disrupt the flow of your writing. Since you’re anonymizing them anyway, why not go ahead and quote them as text? It’s not like an image is somehow more authentic than quoted text. Also, as per above, maybe move them to an appendix at the bottom. The focus should be on the scope and the scale of this phenomenon. Then, if a reader is interested enough to pursue further they can choose to read the semi incomprehensible AI co-authored stuff in the appendix.
Without independently verifiable evidence, I expect there to be a low probability of this being a widespread trend at this time. However, it does point to something we should probably prepare for—mystically inclined people who don’t understand AI building cults around it and possibly creating a counter-movement to the AI-alignment movement as if that work wasn’t already hard enough.
So how do we nip this shit in the bud, people?