On reflection, the thing that annoys me about this policy is that it lumps in many kinds of LLM assistance, with varying amounts of human investment, into an intrusive format that naively reads to me as “this is LLM slop which you should ignore”.
I really very much actually tried to make the LLM content blocks as non-intrusive as possible. The design and cultural goal is definitely to communicate that it is totally fine to have a lot of LLM-generated content in your post, and that good writing will often include things that LLMs have written. Maybe we failed in the design of that, but I certainly tried very hard to make it non-intrusive.
Maybe the design could be inverted, where authors can label specific sections as human-written instead of labeling (the majority of sections as) AI-written? I think getting asssistance from AI is going to be the default for and more people, and trusting on people to be up to date with LW policies AND the philosophies behind them (including how AI writing doesn’t reflect internal thought processes and such) AND to self-report LLM content (when general social stigma works against that) feels like a lot of dependencies.
(I can see other problems with this inversed design but will share the above anyway to spur creativity).
There’s also something with “this section is human written” that feels nicer to me—more like an opt-in instead of a punishment.
Fair! I was reacting to the concept and didn’t pay much attention to the design. Maybe I would get used to it? I do feel like the concept is what matters here though—I don’t want to read most kinds of slop, and I expect to interpret an LLM block as “high probability of slop”
EDIT: Looking more at the examples in the post, I retract “intrusive”, but the changed font does create a subtle sense of wrongness/a weird vibe, that I could easily see becoming associated in my head with “skip, not worth my time”
Separately commenting on this part:
I really very much actually tried to make the LLM content blocks as non-intrusive as possible. The design and cultural goal is definitely to communicate that it is totally fine to have a lot of LLM-generated content in your post, and that good writing will often include things that LLMs have written. Maybe we failed in the design of that, but I certainly tried very hard to make it non-intrusive.
Maybe the design could be inverted, where authors can label specific sections as human-written instead of labeling (the majority of sections as) AI-written? I think getting asssistance from AI is going to be the default for and more people, and trusting on people to be up to date with LW policies AND the philosophies behind them (including how AI writing doesn’t reflect internal thought processes and such) AND to self-report LLM content (when general social stigma works against that) feels like a lot of dependencies.
(I can see other problems with this inversed design but will share the above anyway to spur creativity).
There’s also something with “this section is human written” that feels nicer to me—more like an opt-in instead of a punishment.
Fair! I was reacting to the concept and didn’t pay much attention to the design. Maybe I would get used to it? I do feel like the concept is what matters here though—I don’t want to read most kinds of slop, and I expect to interpret an LLM block as “high probability of slop”
EDIT: Looking more at the examples in the post, I retract “intrusive”, but the changed font does create a subtle sense of wrongness/a weird vibe, that I could easily see becoming associated in my head with “skip, not worth my time”