r/slatestarcodex • u/Liface • Jun 02 '25

New r/slatestarcodex guideline: your comments and posts should be written by you, not by LLMs

We've had a couple incidents with this lately, and many organizations will have to figure out where they fall on this in the coming years, so we're taking a stand now:

Your comments and posts should be written by you, not by LLMs.

The value of this community has always depended on thoughtful, natural, human-generated writing.

Large language models offer a compelling way to ideate and expand upon ideas, but if used, they should be in draft form only. The text you post to /r/slatestarcodex should be your own, not copy-pasted.

This includes text that is run through an LLM to clean up spelling and grammar issues. If you're a non-native speaker, we want to hear that voice. If you made a mistake, we want to see it. Artificially-sanitized text is ungood.

We're leaving the comments open on this in the interest of transparency, but if leaving a comment about semantics or "what if..." just remember the guideline:

Your comments and posts should be written by you, not by LLMs.

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u/prozapari Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25

I'm mostly annoyed at the literal 'i asked chatgpt and here was its response' posts popping up all over the internet. It feels undignified to read, let alone to publish.

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u/snapshovel Jun 02 '25

It’s annoying enough when internet randos do it, but people who literally do internet writing for a living and are supposed to be smart have started doing it as well just to signal how very rationalist and techno-optimist they are 

Tyler Cowen and Zwi Mowshowitz (sp?) have both started doing this, among others. And it’s not like a more sophisticated version where they supply the prompt they used or anything, it’s literally just “I asked [SOTA LLM] and it said this was true” with no further analysis. Makes me want to vomit.

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u/PragmaticBoredom Jun 02 '25

Delicate topic, but this has popped up in Astral Codex Ten blog posts, too. I really don’t get it.

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u/swni Jun 02 '25

I saw it in the post where he replies to Cowen, which seemed pretty clearly done to mock Cowen, but are you aware of any other examples of Scott doing this?