(note: This is Raemon’s random take rather than considered Team Consensus)
Part of the question here is “what sort of engine is overall maintainable, from a moderation perspective?”.
LLMs make it easy for tons of people to be submitting content to LessWrong without really checking whether it’s true and relevant. It’s not enough for a given piece to be true. It needs to be reliably true, with low cost to moderator attention.
Right now, basically LLMs don’t produce anywhere near good enough content. So, presently, letting people submit AI generated content without adding significant additional value is a recipe for LW admins to spend a bunch of extra time each day deciding whether to moderate a bunch of content that we’re realistically going to say “no” to.
(Some of the content is ~on par with the bottom 25% of LW content, but the bottom 25% of LW content is honestly below the quality bar we prefer the site to be at, and the reason we let those comments/posts in at all is because it’s too expensive to really check if it’s reasonable, and when we’re unsure, we sometimes to default to “let it in, and let the automatic rate limits handle it”. But, the automated rate limits would not be sufficient to handle an influx of LLM slop)
But, even when we imagine content that should theoretically be “just over the bar”, there are secondorder effects of LW being a site with a potentially large amount of AI content that nobody is really sure if it’s accurate or whether anyone endorses it and whether we are entering into some slow rolling epistemic disaster.
So, my guess for the bar for “how good quality do we need to be talking about for AI content to be net-positive” is more at least top-50% and maybe top-25% of baseline LW users. And when we get to that point probably the world looks pretty different.
(note: This is Raemon’s random take rather than considered Team Consensus)
Part of the question here is “what sort of engine is overall maintainable, from a moderation perspective?”.
LLMs make it easy for tons of people to be submitting content to LessWrong without really checking whether it’s true and relevant. It’s not enough for a given piece to be true. It needs to be reliably true, with low cost to moderator attention.
Right now, basically LLMs don’t produce anywhere near good enough content. So, presently, letting people submit AI generated content without adding significant additional value is a recipe for LW admins to spend a bunch of extra time each day deciding whether to moderate a bunch of content that we’re realistically going to say “no” to.
(Some of the content is ~on par with the bottom 25% of LW content, but the bottom 25% of LW content is honestly below the quality bar we prefer the site to be at, and the reason we let those comments/posts in at all is because it’s too expensive to really check if it’s reasonable, and when we’re unsure, we sometimes to default to “let it in, and let the automatic rate limits handle it”. But, the automated rate limits would not be sufficient to handle an influx of LLM slop)
But, even when we imagine content that should theoretically be “just over the bar”, there are secondorder effects of LW being a site with a potentially large amount of AI content that nobody is really sure if it’s accurate or whether anyone endorses it and whether we are entering into some slow rolling epistemic disaster.
So, my guess for the bar for “how good quality do we need to be talking about for AI content to be net-positive” is more at least top-50% and maybe top-25% of baseline LW users. And when we get to that point probably the world looks pretty different.