AI can cheaply fake almost every signal we traditionally used to judge quality. I now see this pattern everywhere, in open source, in education, in research, all breaking at the same time. I find signaling theory useful for diagnosing what is happening and why it is so disorienting, and signaling theory and adjacent literature can provide the vocabulary to discuss possible solutions.

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[–] 2 points 20 hours ago (1 child)

True, that might happen at some time in the future, I'll believe it when I see it. But at the moment most of the generated images or texts are only good enough if a human sloperator does some quality control and regenerates or edits the results until they look good. All the models i've seen so far have specific quirks/preferences which repeat as patterns. This might not be immediately apparent when a new model comes out, but it takes a lot less time to identify the quirks than it takes to train the model in the first place.

To be clear, I'm not implying that I couldn't be fooled by a genAI text or image, but the majority of uncontrolled zero-shot slop is easy to spot, because it is just that, slop. Look at any random slop readme.md in a github repo for example. The structure is always the same, it is filled with a collection of words that tries to mimick what a readme would look like, including weird jargon imitations but it lacks the clarity, personal touch, developer ego and soul it would have if a real author was writing about his own cherished creation. Look for the things that are absent instead of the things that are there. Same for identifying slop images... Image Gen focuses on the subject and gets sloppy on the "less important" bits, like backgrounds.

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