I found the reasons that you gave in the case of BB, bizarrely mundane.
It is in fact a mundane topic, because you are surrounded by AI slop and people relying heavily on ChatGPT writing, making it a mundane every day observation infiltrating even the heights of wordcel culture (I’ve now started seeing blatant ChatGPTisms in the New Yorker and New York Times), which is why you are wrong to bend over backwards to require extraordinary evidence for what have become ordinary claims (and also why your tangents and evasions are so striking).
So, I am again going to ignore those, and will ask you again—you were sure that BB was not using ChatGPT, despite the linguistic tells and commonness of it:
These political asides are of a piece with the philosophical jabs and brags he makes in his philosophical essays.
That doesn’t actually rebut my observation, unless you are claiming to have seen jibes and sneering as dumb and cliche as those in his writings from before ChatGPT (Nov 2022).
Let me first try to convey how this conversation appears from my perspective. I don’t think I’ve ever debated directly with you about anything, but I have an impression of you as doing solid work in the areas of your interest.
Then, I run across you alleging that BB is using AI to write some of his articles. This catches my attention because I do keep an eye on BB’s work. Furthermore, your reason for supposing that he is using AI seems bizarre to me—you think his (very occasional) “sneering” is too “dumb and cliche” to be the work of human hands. Let’s look at an example:
bees seem to matter a surprising amount. They are far more cognitively sophisticated than most other insects, having about a million neurons—far more than our current president.
If that strikes you as something that a human being would never spontaneously write, I don’t know what to say. Surely human comedians say similar things hundreds of times every month? It’s also exactly the kind of thing that a smart-aleck “science communicator” with a progressive audience might say, don’t you think? BB may be neither of those things, but he’s a popular Gen-Z philosophy blogger who was a high-school debater, so he’s not a thousand light-years from either of those universes of discourse.
I had a look at your other alleged example of AI writing, and I also found other callouts from your recent reddit posts. Generally I think your judgments were reasonable, but not in this case.
It is in fact a mundane topic, because you are surrounded by AI slop and people relying heavily on ChatGPT writing, making it a mundane every day observation infiltrating even the heights of wordcel culture (I’ve now started seeing blatant ChatGPTisms in the New Yorker and New York Times), which is why you are wrong to bend over backwards to require extraordinary evidence for what have become ordinary claims (and also why your tangents and evasions are so striking).
So, I am again going to ignore those, and will ask you again—you were sure that BB was not using ChatGPT, despite the linguistic tells and commonness of it:
I am still waiting for an answer here.
Let me first try to convey how this conversation appears from my perspective. I don’t think I’ve ever debated directly with you about anything, but I have an impression of you as doing solid work in the areas of your interest.
Then, I run across you alleging that BB is using AI to write some of his articles. This catches my attention because I do keep an eye on BB’s work. Furthermore, your reason for supposing that he is using AI seems bizarre to me—you think his (very occasional) “sneering” is too “dumb and cliche” to be the work of human hands. Let’s look at an example:
If that strikes you as something that a human being would never spontaneously write, I don’t know what to say. Surely human comedians say similar things hundreds of times every month? It’s also exactly the kind of thing that a smart-aleck “science communicator” with a progressive audience might say, don’t you think? BB may be neither of those things, but he’s a popular Gen-Z philosophy blogger who was a high-school debater, so he’s not a thousand light-years from either of those universes of discourse.
I had a look at your other alleged example of AI writing, and I also found other callouts from your recent reddit posts. Generally I think your judgments were reasonable, but not in this case.