This 'College Protester' Isn't Real. It's an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops

I wonder how much of this will just encourage protests and radicalization. If your agent is trained to match a profile of a radical, then it necessarily is spreading and encouraging that radical messaging in order to fit in and gain trust. At least with real agents there is a plausible mechanism for their judgement to filter out who is targeted and they can't infinitely propagate like the AI could.

There's a sci-fi story in there somewhere, about a government overthrown by a revolution orchestrated by AI designed to go undercover

If there isn’t, an AI could write it: https://github.com/lechmazur/writing?tab=readme-ov-file

Why should I, as a reader, spend the time to read a meaningless story that no person could be arsed to write, when I could spend a lifetime reading and never get through only the best works humanity has actually created?

There is no shortage of fiction that we need language models to address.

Honestly I feel the same about all model outputs that are passed off as art.

If it's not worth the time for the creator to make, why is it worth my time as an audience member to consider it?

There is a whole world of real artists dying for audiences. I'll pay them in attention and money. Not bots. There's no connection to be had with a bot or its output

I'm asking out of curiosity and as I explore my own thoughts on this: is there any level of AI involvement in art creation that you think is acceptable?

For instance, I write short stories (i.e., about 8-30k words). I've done it before AI, and outside some short stories I've had published I mostly just do it for my own sense of creative expression. Some of my friends and family read my stuff, but I am not writing for an audience, at least I haven't yet.

One thing I've experimented with recently is using AI as an editor, something I've never had because I'm not a professional, and I do not want to burden my friends and family with requests for feedback on unfinished works. I create the ideas (every short story I've ever written has at least 5k words in a "story bible"), I write the words on the page. In my last two stories, I've tested using AI to give me feedback on consistency of tone, word repetition, unidentifiable motivations, etc.

While the feedback I get often suggests or observes things that are done intentionally, it also has provided some really useful observations and guidance and has incrementally made my subsequent writing better. Thus far I don't feel like I've lost any of the authorship of the product, but I also know that for some any AI used spoils the pot.

For the above, I did spend time (a lot of it) to make it, but does any use of AI in any capacity render it not worth your time to read it? I am asking sincerely!

AI giving feedback on your story is a few steps up from using spell check or grammarly. Harmless enough, right?

But consider this: any feedback the AI gives us 1) not intelligent, merely guessing the next word based on similar requests for feedback it has seen and 2) always pushing your story toward a more generic version.

Not to mention, there are thousands of excellent human editors out there who's livelihood is under threat from AI editors just as much as writers are from AI writers, coders from AI coders.

I experimented with AI writing tools when they came out first. I was excited by what LLMs could do. Fiction is one place they excel, because hallucinations don't matter. Eventually I came around to the viewpoint that no matter how cool it useful they are, they're not a good thing.

AI is already destroying the publishing industry, and making it very difficult for human writers to get noticed in a sea of robot submissions. There are lots of people out there who won't want to read something if AI was used, for that reason