With AI, externalization is hitting my time and attention. Polished-looking text or code became cheap to produce, but reading it and providing feedback did not. I can no longer rely on the heuristic that producing text took effort as a sign that somebody is trying to communicate something of value.

Given that what’s exploited is mostly attention and mental labor, traditional economic solutions to externalities like privatization and structures for maintaining commons are unlikely to help, and anonymity in peer review and open source also eliminates any control through reputation or shame (though I hope somebody will figure this out eventually). What’s left is disengagement, defensive AI use, and approaches that introduce cost and friction, such as capping feedback and revision opportunities, imposing costs per submission, or requiring deposits. All of these hit everybody, not just bad actors or well-intentioned actors who use AI without knowing better.

Really thoughtful blog post. It's funny how communication heuristics like that are taken for granted and basically invisible until we have to contend with not having them anymore. How can we get signal through the noise efficiently when it's only going to get harder to distinguish?