Kirk Hamilton

How did the two of you get through the area?

Like just in terms of how many zombies?

Yeah.

So last week we talked about AI and we cited a blog post by an astrophysicist named Minas Karamanis.

And he wrote about like AI and how it de-skills people and so on and so forth.

And since that

episode we got an interesting email from someone going by the name boxo mcfoxo who wrote a pretty long blog post laying out a case that the essay that we cited was in fact written by ai

And so this guy, this boxo guy lays out a pretty compelling case, including one piece of evidence that I found most compelling, which is that the original essay quotes Frank Herbert in one of the Dune books and writes the sentence like,

quote, things we do without thinking, semicolon, there's the real danger.

But in the actual book, that semicolon is an em dash.

And that kind of implies that one thing you might do if you're writing an AI is do a control F and find and replace all the em dashes for semicolons.

To make it seem like you didn't use AI, which is the only way I can think of that a quote from a book would be turned from an em dash into a semicolon.

But he lays out a bunch of other cases, too.

It's pretty compelling.

And it makes it even funnier that all of these blue sky posts about how compelling the writing was.

in this thing that's kind of denouncing AI, if it in fact was written by AI.

Also on Minas Karaminas' blog, the blog that is cited, the blog in question, it says... God, hold on, I'm going to find this.

It says...

I write everything on this blog myself.

After drafting, I edit using grammar checkers and occasionally an LLM to polish the prose, which is the type of thing you write on your blog when an LLM has written everything that you write.