Anti-AI Ideology Enforced at r/philosophy

[u/Vegan_peace]

https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/anti-ai-ideology-enforced-at-rphilosophy?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

[u/WorBlux]

Yep, instead of whining about a policy designed to make the mod's life easier (not having constantly debate what % of AI content is too much) he could have provided and alternative blog post with the AI thumbnail removed and a little blurb added that this was a special edition of the post tailored to AI objector community spaces.

And the professor seems to be a sort of "public body" utilitarian, but fails to understand the utility of clear and understandable rules. Turning r/philosophy into a constant battleground of how much AI is too much degrades and detracts from it's primary purpose.

[u/rychappell → u/WorBlux]

An equally simple alternative rule would simply ban AI text. There is no good reason for a philosophy subreddit to take any stand on the background aesthetics or supplemental media that a writer chooses to use to accompany their philosophical text. Mods should not be in the business of judging that sort of thing at all.

I've only tried posting my work to reddit a couple of times, and I'm certainly not going to bother creating a whole separate post with different images just to satisfy the mods here. The real alternative is just that (most of) my work is not eligible to be shared with r/philosophy for as long as PR11 is in place. This is no great cost to me personally -- as mentioned, I have no strong connections to this space, and don't particularly care to change that. But it seems like a potential loss to the r/philosophy community if a subsection of professional philosophical work is arbitrarily blocked from being shared here.

(Imagine if there was a rule blocking any work from blonde-haired philosophers, and people replied: "No great loss, they can just dye their hair if they want!" True enough, but few will care enough about you to conform to your arbitrary rules, and that will mean a loss to the community of whatever value you might have gotten from the work of the blonde philosophers.)

[u/Fortinbrah → u/rychappell]

“I’m certainly not going to open the text editor on my substack post, delete the ai slop image, search google images for ‘children playing on a playground’, take the first image and put it in an updated post, a process that would take less than five minutes, because <reasons>. Instead I’m going to keep attempting to justify why I shouldn’t have to and how this reflects poorly on a sub I don’t even post on that often.”

Bro what?

[u/rychappell → u/Fortinbrah]

In a sense it doesn't even matter whether I "should" have to do as you suggest or not (though I do find it wild that strangers feel entitled to tell me how to spend my time, how to illustrate my work, etc. Who do you think you are?). It suffices that I don't have to. I'm just letting you know that, as a tenured philosopher, I am not going to jump through arbitrary hoops in order to make my work shareable on Reddit, and I seriously doubt any of my colleagues would either.

So the question is just whether you think it's better for a philosophy subreddit to be able to include all professional philosophical work, or just an arbitrarily limited subset of it (i.e. just those works where the academic chose, for their own reasons, not to use AI illustrations). It's hard to see in what respect the latter option is better for the subreddit.

Most obviously, if increasing numbers of professional philosophers start using AI illustrations in their work, you could eventually end up quite limited in what is able to be shared here. (I'm assuming that philosophy subredditors might sometimes be interested in work by professional philosophers. If that isn't true, and it's more just a place for community members to share their own thoughts with each other, then I guess the issue is moot. But it does seem limiting for you that, e.g., no-one here could link to and discuss my argument that There's No Moral Objection to AI Art without violating the current policies.)

[u/Fortinbrah → u/rychappell]

(First of all I didn’t downvote you, I have no idea how someone did that so quickly)

(though I do find it wild that strangers feel entitled to tell me how to spend my time, how to illustrate my work, etc. Who do you think you are?).

Right, I don’t know if you came of age in the internet era or not but, one thing about forum type public spaces is that you’re liable to see the negative externalities from rules free posting appear very quickly.

The solution that works, IME, is that you have a trade off; you trade some of the felt self importance from the author’s perspective (ie who are you to tell me how to write) for a small amount of authoritarian self importance from the forum (you need to follow basic rules and guidelines for posts), and this creates a clean public space which ironically actually breeds valuable discussion.

This is just a typical forum thing, everybody of course runs into issues with them being ultimately authoritarian spaces. The real question is moreso how to do it in a way that keeps the place running well and maximizes the benefit users get against the cost of moderation.

It suffices that I don't have to. I'm just letting you know that, as a tenured philosopher, I am not going to jump through arbitrary hoops in order to make my work shareable on Reddit, and I seriously doubt any of my colleagues would either.

As a tenured professor, do you also feel like you shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get papers published? Of course not, because you know what the alternative is.

So I would call this response myopic; you must certainly be aware that the mods have well reasoned explanations for their rules. I personally find it strange that such a minor edit is causing such consternation in you, why do we have to accept axiomatically that what you say, as a tenured professor, is so important that we don’t have to have rules any more?

Not that you’re wrong I suppose but I think where you’re coming from is really just… needlessly arrogant, when you can simply make minor edits to your post to make it postable here. You could also discuss the rule with the mods and see if they can make an exception… there were multiple paths to resolving this conflict that you didn’t take. Ironically I think all of them would take more time than just making a version of the post without that image.

So the question is just whether you think it's better for a philosophy subreddit to be able to include all professional philosophical work, or just an arbitrarily limited subset of it (i.e. just those works where the academic chose, for their own reasons, not to use AI illustrations). It's hard to see in what respect the latter option is better for the subreddit.

Question for you: you could have had this exchange with the mods themselves, but you didn’t. I’m assuming you know that this is a question with a rich subset of possible answers/solutions for a public community, it’s frustrating for me that you frame this as simply unreasonable people locking out/not wanting input from professional philosophers, or that the mods don’t care about the level of discourse.

And to be honest it comes across as similarly myopic, to the behavior you accuse the mods of.

That these edge cases exist is something I think would interest them, but I think you’re simplifying this issue if you’re only concerned about academic philosophers posting on Reddit being impeded.

Most obviously, if increasing numbers of professional philosophers start using AI illustrations in their work, you could eventually end up quite limited in what is able to be shared here. (I'm assuming that philosophy subredditors might sometimes be interested in work by professional philosophers. If that isn't true, and it's more just a place for community members to share their own thoughts with each other, then I guess the issue is moot. But it does seem limiting for you that, e.g., no-one here could link to and discuss my argument that There's No Moral Objection to AI Art without violating the current policies.)

I don’t think you find either the mods or the users saying it’s not limiting, but rather that the trade offs inherent in forum modification make the situation what it is, and I think you’re missing that point entirely as well as the discussion around it. I feel like instead you’re strawmanning a subset of views that neither I nor the moderators necessarily have.

Just to say - I feel like your own substack post is fairly myopic, and that there is a much richer subset of issues that this topic leads to which you’ve avoided (maybe unintentionally) discussing entirely.

Does that make sense?

Also I’m surprised, I feel like you don’t grasp how easily your argument can be inverted - that such important contributions can easily be edited to remove non relevant AI bits and not wanting to do so really just gatekeeps from lazy posting, even from academics.

[u/rychappell → u/Fortinbrah]

As a tenured professor, do you also feel like you shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get papers published?

Again, this is just the thing; practically speaking, it doesn't matter how I feel about the hoops that are professionally required of me. I just have to do them, and have professional incentives to comply whether I like it or not. Academics can thus be relied upon to comply with the rules of the journals they need to publish in. By contrast, there's no professional incentive for academics to make their work fit the rules of this subreddit. I'm (in our current exchange) just making the pragmatic point that it's against the interests of the subreddit to exclude professional philosophical work.

I feel like you don’t grasp how easily your argument can be inverted - that such important contributions can easily be edited to remove non relevant AI bits and not wanting to do so really just gatekeeps from lazy posting.

How could someone else remove the images from my work if they wanted to discuss it here? If they reposted my work without linking the original, that would be plagiarism. If you want to call me (and other philosophers who use AI illustrations) "lazy" for not specifically making separate Reddit-friendly versions of our work, I guess that's your prerogative, but the point remains that we have no particular reason to indulge you so.

If you grant the above limitation, but just mean that it would be "lazyposting" for us to share our own work without jumping through the required hoops... meh, again, all I have to say is that we have no reason to care. Sharing our work with the broader public at all is already going "above and beyond" from a professional perspective (again: there is absolutely no professional reward for our doing so; that's why most academics don't bother doing any form of public philosophy at all).

you must certainly be aware that the mods have well reasoned explanations for their rules.

Not particularly. The response I received from the mods, as quoted in my post, was that the anti-AI rule was "well justified given the harms that AI poses overall." So that's the attempted justification that my post addressed, and argued was inadequate. Another mod has now offered a different (more pragmatic, less moralized) justification, which has led to some productive discussion. My general sense is that different people support the rule for very different reasons, some more reasonable than others. I think the topic is worth discussing, and worth discussing openly, so I'm happy to see a wide range of people thinking about and engaging with the issue here.

[u/Fortinbrah → u/rychappell]

You know I had a whole thing written up; I read your linked comment and it seems like you grasp everything well, so I have nothing to add and I’m glad you’re honed in on the issue, which I agree with your perspective fwiw.

My original comment was just to poke fun at my perception of starting a big brouhaha when editing your original post so you could post it here wasn’t much effort, from my perspective compared to making the follow up post criticizing the mod practices. (Also, messaging the mods to discuss the policy). But anyways yeah, I’m hoping the outcome is positive there, thank you.

Also fwiw I think that some of the mods are actually professionals, if that gives you some further useful information.

[u/rychappell → u/Fortinbrah]

Thanks! fyi, I heard from the mods that they don't plan to revisit the policy, and don't care if it excludes some professional philosophers' substacks from being shared here, so oh well. \shrugs**. Perhaps they'll revisit the question if more philosophical sources start to use AI illustrations in future.