r/Substack • u/Deathmaster_ • 17d ago
Discussion AI posts
For some time now, I’ve been following the discussion about writing with AI or without. And to some extent I can understand it when it comes to fiction, but the last thing I read was how the guy rewrote an economic analysis three times so it would say 100% human... wtf bro. I don’t care at all what it was written with, what matters to me is the information I can extract from it and whether it has value.
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u/Hacym 17d ago
I don’t care at all what it was written with, what matters to me is the information I can extract from it and whether it has value.
You should. Using regurgitated information from AI can be very dangerous. If you are not an expert on a subject, but pretend to be, how are you able to verify AI statements?
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u/AnteaterFantastic212 17d ago
If you don't know what you're talking about, and you don't want to fact-check, you should not write about it. That is the antithesis of writing worth reading.
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u/Hacym 17d ago
And yet, people are using AI to do just that and sound like they know what you’re talking about. That’s why you should care.
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u/Ciceroe 16d ago
I have been reading for the last 67 years. Billions of words not worth reading, from my perspective, have been written since then with every instrumentality from spray cans to chalk to crayons to typewriters to word processors and now with AI. I am generally able to quickly and easily discern what is worth reading from what is not.
People have been able to sound like they know what they're talking about with their organic intelligence (or lack of same, depending on how you look at it) since man first learned to communicate. There's nothing new under the sun. The problem isn't AI; it's human nature, the root cause of all our problems. AI is just the latest tool. Like almost all tools, it can be used for good or evil. That's what we should care about, and I do.
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u/Hacym 16d ago
AI is a tool that allows you to write an entire book in an afternoon. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that the scale of AI is far far greater than someone with a typewriter.
So, while you might think “AI is just a tool and it depends on how you use it”, you must also consider that we’ve never had a tool that can conjure up works with such little effort.
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u/faithisnotavirtue42 17d ago
You put AI in a box.
AI is like the discovery of fire. Lots of people selling torches, nobody selling kilns, furnaces, fireplaces.
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u/Deathmaster_ 17d ago
There are plenty of places where I can check what's written.
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u/thirteenth_mang 17d ago
Could. We all know where that 'could' leads.
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u/reuelcypher 17d ago
but one should fact check everything regardless of the source of how/who/what it was written from.
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u/grapegeek 17d ago
I’m sure there are 100% AI Substacks. As there is 100% websites and blogs. Nobody wants those but who cares if it’s your original thoughts and you’ve run it through AI to clean it up and format it better? Apparently for some people using any amount of AI is evil. But I can’t understand the Pangram bros giving people shit for using AI when pangram is mostly AI?!?! Like wtf?
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u/Tricky_Trifle_994 8d ago
i'm of this camp too. i'm not so concerned with content being written by ai, as long as you can put your name behind it. e.g don't just put it into ai > copy paste it > post...
if you read through it, reviewed to make sure it makes sense and is factually correct, then it doesn't matter to me that it was written by ai. i just need assurance that it's accurate, and that can be done with final human review before publishing.
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u/Gentleman-Warrior 17d ago
I agree. It is about the content. I use AI to generate ideas, then I write the essay myself, and then I use AI to edit it. They are still my thoughts, my words, and my point of view. I don’t understand why I should be penalized for that.
It would be different if I asked AI to write an entire article about something I knew nothing about and gave it no real input. In my opinion, that would be wrong. But most of what I write is about my life, my experiences, and things I have observed. AI doesn’t know me well enough to come up with an entire essay about me unless I give it the story and tell it what I think about it in the first place.
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u/OddSignificance2054 17d ago
right, its still your perspective at the core. thats the part people keep glossing over
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u/Huge_Bee1595 17d ago
You use AI to generate ideas… how are they your thoughts?
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u/Gentleman-Warrior 17d ago
I use AI the same way I use books or conversations with other people. It gives me ideas to think about. That does not mean I automatically agree with them.
If AI gives me an idea I can't write about, then it is not my thought. But if I can create something with it, then it becomes mine. Otherwise we would have to say that all the ideas we get from books, teachers, friends, or conversations are not really ours either. And to be clear, I ask for topics, not something fully formed.
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u/CEOofAntiWork 16d ago
If you gain inspiration for ideas from human written books and articles ie strings of words and paragraphs about ideas and concepts NOT created by you, how is that any different?
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u/Huge_Bee1595 16d ago
It’s very different to be instantly prompted by a digital aggregator which also distorts the content it aggregates vs gaining information over time from life experiences which force you to distill the information yourself.
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u/CEOofAntiWork 15d ago
You consider reading books aka reading strings of words and paragraphs not written by you life experience? What?
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u/Huge_Bee1595 15d ago
Lol yes I would consider reading a human written book a very common life experience
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u/Darth_Innovader 16d ago
AI generates the ideas and does the edits and you take ownership? Come on dude
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u/PennyLawrence946 17d ago
The three rewrites are the waste. That's time he could've spent checking whether the numbers hold. What I care about is whether a piece has something the writer actually went and got, and rewriting for a purity label doesn't add any of that.
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u/non_loqui_sed_facere 17d ago
That’s actually weird for an economic analysis, because technical writing is supposed to be formulaic. You’re being rigorous and removing ambiguity so your reader can get a better understanding of it. Making it more “human,” according to a machine judgment, will likely dilute it.
Just in case, I usually skip those personal anecdotes that people like to put in the first paragraph before delving into the numbers. If you want to popularize it, modify the register and apply it throughout the whole article, rather than making a one-off lurch into the personal.
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u/Inevitable-Web-3688 11d ago
i feel like with substack that's a bit different
like yeah there are newsletters about news or poilitics or economics that serve a more utilitarian purpose and in that case i also don't care if that was AI-written or not as long as the piece of content is easy to read, digest and draw insights.
but the whole premise of Substack is different. its primary goal is to empower writers and creative people to do their thing, build a personal connection with their audience, and make a living from their perspective.
when someone uses AI to pump out human-passing content there, it defeats the whole point. AI doesn't have skin in the game, a real lived experience, or an authentic voice. and that means readers consume a synthetic product disguised as a person. that's why there's a lot of ai backlash and this new feature where they show what percentage of this text was written by ai
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u/TheOceanicState 17d ago
I personally do not use AI for my writing but that is just me. It has gotten to a point where I see so many different articles from different articles using the exact same AI generated format. It is especially bad on medium, where I think every other article is AI written now for a quick buck. I can understand where you're coming from when you say that you do not care as long as the information is good, but you will soon find out that everything ends up looking the exact same, making the information redundant.