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<\/p>\n\u201cThe fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about\u2014more so than if the text were generated by an LLM.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That\u2019s Eric Schwitzgebel<\/a> (UCR), writing at\u00a0The Splintered Mind<\/a>\u00a0about why he doesn\u2019t want to receive AI-written emails about philosophy, and why philosophy journals should reject AI-written submissions.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s more context:<\/p>\n I\u2019m talking about evidence about evidence: meta-epistemology. Your email or your article presents evidence for a particular philosophical view (alternatively, evidence that you support a particular philosophical view). In a simple world, I could evaluate this evidence entirely on its face: How good is the proposed view? But in the actual, complex world, it helps to have evidence about the quality of the evidence. The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about\u2014more so than if the text were generated by an LLM. This holds even if the text is exactly the same, which of course it wouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n An increasingly large part of the function of journals is to provide evidence about evidence\u2014the value of their imprimatur. The fact that an article appears in Nous\u00a0or\u00a0Ethics\u00a0is evidence that it has been through rigorous review and was judged worthy by several expert humans applying unusually demanding standards of quality and importance. Its appearance in those journals is thus evidence (imperfect of course!) that the reasoning is of high quality and the arguments worth taking seriously.<\/p>\n Similarly, if I know that an email or an article was written by a respected colleague, reflecting their positive creative exertion in trying to choose the right words, guided by their intuitive expertise in how to phrase things, I have better reason to take it seriously than if I know that it was generated by an LLM and reflects only their passive after-the-fact assent.<\/p>\n Philosophers sometimes suggest that we shouldn\u2019t care if an argument was human-generated or AI-generated\u2014that insisting on human-generated prose is fetishizing personal human interaction rather than facts and argument quality. In a way, that\u2019s true: A sound argument is a sound argument. Similarly, we shouldn\u2019t care if an article was written by David Chalmers and published in Philosophical Review or whether it was written by someone with no institutional affiliation and published on an obscure blog. If the argument is good, it\u2019s good\u2014of course, of course!<\/p>\n But at the same time, we have limited attention, limited time, limited ability to understand the nuances when matters drift even a little from our tightest foci of expertise, and in these cases it\u2019s helpful to have meta-evidence. What should I read? How far should I trust the author has the details right, versus how much should I pause critically and chase down independent sources? How much should I let their way of phrasing things, their habitual patterns of thinking, the presuppositions hidden in their word choices and sentence structures, slip gently into my brain, silently strengthening my own associations and predilections?<\/p>\n Why does \u201cknowing this text was written by a human philosopher\u201d provide some evidence that the text is worth a certain degree of attention?<\/p>\n Human experts think\u00a0differently\u00a0and\u00a0better\u00a0than LLMs. Their word choices, even subtle ones, reflect sensitivities that they might not themselves be aware of. Typically, an expert\u2019s prose will be more sensitive to the matters on which they are expert than the output of a language model.\u00a0<\/p>\n And checking an LLM-written text to make sure it reflects your own thoughts is risky:<\/p>\n There\u2019s a huge cognitive difference between nodding along while reading something and\u00a0actually productively generating a text. Two reasons: First, once the text is on the page, it\u2019s easy to passively let the approximate word suffice, rather than thinking about word choice in the same effortful, active way we do when generating prose de novo. Second\u2026 I doubt that human beings, even experts, have a good sense of all the factors that shape word choice\u2014everything they\u2019re being sensitive to. You would have phrased it slightly differently, and even if you don\u2019t know that, or why, a different signal is sent and received.<\/p>\n See his post<\/a> for a good example of what he\u2019s getting at, along with an explanation for why his argument \u201cis not a call for blanket rejection of the use of LLMs in philosophical (or other) writing.\u201d<\/p>\n Related:
\u2013 Ethics\u00a0Announces AI Policy<\/a>
\u2013 The Ethics of Using AI in Philosophical Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":695237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-695236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}