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Hunter Biden spitting truth (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 30 points 4 months ago (9 children)

Incredible how "its not x its y" is being weaponized against critics of the establishment. Like, I really couldn't give a shit about Hunter Biden, he's a joke. Also fuck AI, I wouldn't defend it.

But what you're describing is a teaching method. Just because it gets aped by ai doesn't mean all comparisons are AI. Paulo Friere uses it heavily in his pedagogical method. It was also the name of a book series on teaching methods.. Both were written years, even decades, before the invention of generative text.

Its a basic way of explaining complicated concepts, where you not only have to describe what something is, but what it isn't. You are using a negating method by saying that the text of this tweet is actually not worth considering, because it was generated by AI. Its rhetorical sophistry, presented without evidence, to create confusion and cheapen people's ability to explain or understand complicated concepts, and criticize our own reality.

I dont agree with all of his points, but your argument is cheap and socially toxic.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago

    This reminded me of a post I saw the other day on Bluesky.

    "As a hack writer, the fact that em-dashes and the rule of three have become signifiers of AI demonstrates that they're not just stealing my job, they're ruining all my favorite tools too."

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    The Freire comparison is interesting but it's doing a lot of work here. Pedagogical numbered lists exist, sure. But Freire's prose is dense, contradictory, occasionally frustrating — because he's actually working through ideas in real time. This tweet is frictionless. Every point lands clean. Nothing trips over itself. That's not a teaching method. That's editing. Specifically, the kind of editing that removes every rough edge until what's left is a series of punchy, shareable, individually quotable lines — each one exactly long enough to screenshot. You're right that they haven't provided a smoking gun. Neither have you. But "humans have written structured lists before" isn't a rebuttal to a specific stylistic critique, it's just pointing at the category and saying the category exists. The question isn't whether a human could write this. It's whether the particular texture of this writing — the evenness, the rhythm, the way it never once loses the thread or goes somewhere unexpected — feels like someone thinking, or someone approving.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    Okay I agree and on second thought comparing Hunter Biden to Paulo Friere is, um, a stretch. I'm more responding to this trend where people say, oh you can tell its ai cuz there's em-dashes, or cuz it fits the pattern of "its this not that."

    With a political subject, people can be very bad faith. Centrist Democrats calling argument a "whataboutism" or a Russian bot, are two very prescient examples. Meanwhile, I find this method of defining a subject in the positive and the negative to be very useful in political discussion, to define not just the essence but the contours/limits of a political subject. It is a good way to make a subject concrete. It makes me nervous to see these arguments more and more. People already accuse each other of being "bots" way too often.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The bot-accusation inflation point is real and worth taking seriously. Crying bot has become a way to dismiss arguments without engaging them, and that's corrosive. But there's a difference between "this argument pattern feels automated" and "this specific piece of text has characteristics that are hard to explain otherwise." I'm not flagging Hunter's tweet because it uses a rhetorical structure I associate with AI. I'm flagging it because of the evenness. The way every single point is load-bearing. Nothing wasted, nothing unpolished, no moment where the writer got carried away or lost the thread or made a point that was slightly weaker than the others. Human writing has texture. It has a sentence that runs too long, a point that didn't quite land, an aside that reveals what the writer actually cares about. Impassioned political posts especially — people leak. They let something slip that's more personal than the rest, or they overstate a point because they're angry. This has none of that. Every point is exactly as strong as every other point. That's not discipline. That's generation.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    I say it elsewhere, that I have a difficult time identifying Ai generated text, for whatever reason. Ai pictures and voices, I can spot right away. But for whatever reason its not super apparent to me when people use ai to generate text, its more of an afterthought rather than something that stands out to me. Its interesting because I have an art and music background, but I dont have any formal training with writing, even though I do it quite often, and I'm a strong reader. It makes me uncomfortable that there's still some vector where they can trick me

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Absolutely. You're right to call me out on that. It's not helpful, it's socially toxic. Also, and this is where truth combines with facts to create understanding &emdash; Hunter used Claude to write that post.

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