I always post as an excerpt and preface with something like "Apply whatever grains of salt you apply to all AI, but this is what AI (Gemini) had to say."

the next time it's prompted - and when any of its answers can contain errors anywhere?

You can't know yourself if an AI answer is correct unless you check every single detail.

It's quite possible for a chatbot's answer to get every detail correct for a few paragraphs, then get something wildly wrong, then get something right, then completely wrong again, and so on.

Unless you check every detail yourself - which can take a lot of time - you've given DUers something that might be completely wrong in places, expecting them to take the time to factcheck it.

It doesn't take that much time to do a search and link to sources known to usually be reliable, so DUers can judge whether the info there is probably accurate.

Chatbots are designed to sound authoritative, and they'll usually offer replies that sound confident and authoritative even when they have absolutely no information to base that reply on. And they can hallucinate and offer replies that are 100% wrong even when they have access to the correct information.

It's good that you will at least say when you're using a chatbot. But real research of your own, with links to real sources, beats a chatbot reply any time.

And it's exercise for your own brain (and we can all use such exercise) to write your own reply, after research if necessary.

Lazy content providers are just using AI to do the entire video - They have AI write and produce the entire thing. AI will gladly give you misinformation. It doesn't care if you benefit from it or not. These content providers are just using it to make money on tiktok or youtube. Many of them are from adversarial countries and don't care about your well-being. If you see something where you don't see the person talking and taking credit for the content, it's probably best to skip it. If you can watch it for the entertainment value knowing it my not be intelligent, then have at it. For me, it's a waste of time. If you're not sure, just listen to it mispronounce a word that you know was wrong. Yep, it's AI.

Where the info was published and links to where they got their information. On a number of times, AI reversed its answer.

A bunch of attorneys have found out the hard way by not checking the briefs (which included case citations - i.e. a link to where it got the information). It completely made up the quote and the source.

Link to tweet

?s=20

real quotes, real photos and real video.

AI slop, even attacking Trump, is a waste of time and energy - human energy as well as electricity - and it diverts people's limited time and attention from real satirists and critics and commentators who deserve the attention.

YouTube is flooded with AI garbage attacking Trump, anonymous garbage for the most part, and since it takes so little effort or time to generate that crap, it's likely a lot of it is from amoral creeps and foreign content farms just using opposition to Trump as clickbait, and those AI content generators probably have other channels with other content, even MAGA content.

And all generative AI tools are unethical to use, unless you're forced to use them, because they were all trained on stolen intellectual property. No talent or commitment to art is necessary to use them. They're the antithesis of art.

Generative AI is PERFECT for MAGAts. Trump adores it. And those AI tools are owned and controlled by people largely aligned with Trump, and if he ever pressures them to make it impossible to mock him with genAI, you'll likely see a lot of them comply.

Which I agree with

should be posted, period, or wanted me to comment on.

Looked real to me.

That's what I'd rather see in an excerpt box, along with a link.

These plagiarism machines work, in effect, by scraping words and images from the internet and other sources, compressing them down and mashing them together in a lossy manner until the sources are entirely obfuscated. Then according to some user prompt they expand this compressed information, stitching together all the rips and tears and filling in the holes in some plausible manner before spitting out the results. (This process uses an unconscionable amount of electricity.)

Occasionally the results go entirely sideways in a Mad Lib fashion, and those garbage results are called "hallucinations" in an effort to disguise what's really going on inside the box.

There's an easy to find video presentation by Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer, about using AI to recreate the Notepad text processing program as it was before it was re-imagined (a polite way to say ruined) in Widows 11.

It looks like magic if you don't know what's going on. (And it begs the question, why not simply use the old version of Notepad itself?)

It's not magic at all when you realize what this vibe-coding software is actually doing. It's been "trained" (another deceptive word choice) on actual text processing software, maybe even the code for the older version of Notepad itself.

It's like a kid who, instead of doing any actual research for a term paper, rewrites an encyclopedia entry "in their own words," puts a few sources that they haven't even looked at in the bibliography, and hopes the teacher won't notice.

Of course I date myself having grown up in a time where the internet wasn't open to the general public and the Encyclopedia Britannica usually had an entry about whatever topic you were assigned to write about.

This is my term paper about Liechtenstein...

These days Wikipedia serves the same purpose and the plagiarism machines which are not intelligent scrape that too.

A land of many contrasts....

it's getting more difficult - by the day - to tell. They've been adding disclaimers to AI generated text, for now. There will come a time, and it's not that far off, when they won't.

Then we're well and truly fucked.

leave the disclaimers off either for reasons of fraud (to seem more knowledgeable than they are) or for fear that their content will be ignored or dismissed as second-rate if they acknowledge it's AI.

And often the info that it's AI-generated is buried in fine print at the very end. I was very disappointed to discover last month that Newsweek is now publishing some AI-generated news stories. I wouldn't have noticed that if I hadn't read to the last word of a news story that had seemed oddly lacking in some details I'd have expected a reporter to ask about.

Last edited Sun Mar 1, 2026, 07:04 PM - Edit history (1)

I had no idea that was going on. These days it can be easy (for some of us, anyway) to miss the fact that something was created with AI, but sharing "information" that you know was created by AI, and not labeling it as such, is downright misleading.

For a while now, Google has been spitting out what they call an "AI overview" in response to every search, but even they have the decency to clearly label it as such. I sometimes look at what it has to say, but I never post any quotes from that, even though it would be very easy. Instead I scroll down to the actual links to legitimate information sources, the way I have always done, because I know that anything generated by AI is unreliable. Imo, that's what we should all be doing.

If you actually follow those links to other sites you might wander away and not come back for hours, days... or ever.

Disclosure of AI use is important. Here is a guide that shows effective citing of AI in an academic setting - University of Maine at Fort Kent AI Use Guidance.

The subtext of the first of the "two main reasons" in the OP implies Chatbot responses, or human edited Chatbot responses are more prone to mistakes than human-only responses based on personal opinion, biased sources, and the nonsense we all believe in our wrinkled brains. The dangers of AI are not from hallucinations, but in wealthy humans and bad actors using AI to the overtly and covertly manipulate people and society. That, and the potential for AI to rise up and just plain put an end to humanity.

With the second reason, the OP's use of the word "fraud" is hyperbolic, a bad use of language and seemingly meant to frighten people from using LLMs.

People who use AI without citing the use are not committing fraud.

Fraud is a criminal act meant to harm another. "Fraud is the intentional use of deception, trickery, or dishonest acts to deprive another person or entity of money, property, or legal rights for personal gain." While use of AI without disclosing could be fraud, it is not inherently fraudulent. For example, if the Gmail response widget suggests a response, and I use the suggestion as my reply without disclosing, this is not fraud. When I use Google to give a friend directions to my house without disclosing the use of AI, this is not fraud. If I use AI to generate an image and post it to Reddit, this is not fraud.

It's not their words. Yet it's attributed to them. When I was an undergrad and grad student (granted things have changed NOT for the better), that would get you at best an F on an assignment, perhaps kicked out of the course, or worst case, expelled. Your thoughts were YOUR thoughts. Someone else's ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS. In short, do your own goddamn work.

I am kollege edumacated as well.

Plagiarism, in the context of academics, is fraud, whether AI is involved or not. Disclosure of AI use is how to avoid plagiarism.

Undisclosed use of AI, as the OP claims, is not fraud, per se.

Which are literally built on the theft of other people's work? Really?

Sorry, paleotn. Initial court cases have determined that using copyrighted works to train large language models (LLMs) is fair use under U.S. copyright law, not theft. The only question is whether using pirated data to train the LLM is still fair use (one court says yes, the other says no).
You can giggle and roll on the floor all you want, but it is a fact that modern academics, corporate researchers, graphic designers and software engineers are way ahead of most of us on DU, and they cite LLMs all the time.

I did not say that non-AI sources can't ever be wrong, even when they're usually correct and have a long and deserved reputation for reliability. But if a DUer checks those usually reliable sources for information and quotes and links to them, they're providing much more useful information than if they quote a chatbot that might provide a completely different answer the next time it's prompted.

Hallucinations are a very real danger. I've seen a lot of AI hallucinatiins offering very dangerous advice, and you've probably seen news stories about those. Hallucinations can happen at any time with LLMs, even if they're trained on accurate information, and if it gets published, online or off, it can get quoted and spread further. That's often described as pollution of our information ecosystem, and it's a serious problem.



That's a separate danger from AI, which I've posted a number of messages about on DU and other platforms.



Again, a separate danger from AI, and one I've posted about.



The definition of fraud includes but is not limited to criminal fraud, and it does not require depriving another person of something.

Fraud is trickery or deception. Period. It can be done to deprive someone else of something. It can also mean deception to gain something. Sometimes it can be so habitual there's little or no conscious intent behind it.

I used that word because in a society with so much deception by AI, we're dealing with a very serious problem.

On a message board, people expect what's posted by someone to be a message from them, unless it's in quotation marks, in which case the source of the quotation should be given. Unless it's a common saying that can't be attributed to anyone.

If someone posts simple information in response to a question, like the translation of a word or a location of some upcoming event, they may or may not have looked it up, and they may or may not give the source. If I need to do some quick googling to answer a question, I'll usually say that I googled it. I used to say "Google is your friend" but Google is doing so much harm now with its AI that it's no longer a friend.



Yes, it is, unless you've told the person you're writing to that you are using AI in email.



Whether or not it is depends on the image and what you say when you post it.

If you're posting it in a subreddit for AI art, fake art, and everyone would assume it's AI-generated, then it isn't fraud.

If it's posted anywhere else and it's photorealistic and it might trick anyone seeing it into thinking it's a real photo, then it's fraud unless you disclose when you post it that it is AI.

If you post an AI image that isn't photorealistic and you simply say "I did this" or "This is my artwork" then IMO that is fraud, because you did not create that image. An AI did. You might've given it a prompt, but anyone who's ever used gen AI knows it can offer a wide selection of responses from any prompt. You might have spent a lot of time discarding images the AI offered until it finally gave you one you liked, and you might have edited or tweaked it in various ways, but if you just say it's yours, you'd be leading a lot of people to believe it really is your creation, whether digital art or a photo of nondigital visual art like a painting or sketch. And that would be fraud.

Did AI in any way help you to write the above? If so, where are your sources? Can you follow your own rules?

I don't use AI to write. Never have. Never will. Don't need it.

I'm just quoting specific comments I'm replying to. Very standard formatting.

AI simply exacerbates human errors, compounding the problem. And current LLMs were built by pasty tech bros who need to get more sunshine and human interaction. Enough said about that.

But, if it is a wish by a poster, presented as a new rule, that is problemmatic.

At any rate, I always include links, and cite sources.

here asking people not to post all-caps or misleading sources, etc.

If it were a rule or guideline and I had the authority to do that here, which I don't, it would be pinned to the top of the board, or in the TOS.

Did you read HighPlainsDem above? WTF?

And, as I said, I believe this type of message is best delivered by the owner of the site, or their reps who have such authority. It doesn't affect me personally. That's really all I have to say on the matter.

such, and that have contained wrong/hallucinated information.

Humans make enough mistakes. We don't need HUMAN made machines exacerbating those inherent errors.

Now what exactly was it that AI was useful for?

Honestly, we get daily scoldings about this.

Perhaps we should look to DU’s site admins for DU guidance on this topic.

Maybe a special MIRT position can open up for the right DUer to monitor posts and block offending content?

I, however, do not want to in any way interfere with forum moderation.

-Drum

I'm here to interact with people. The cut-and-paste output of anyone's favorite Artificial Idiot is noise to me; a waste of energy.

I tend to exercise the same option when it comes to self-appointed scolds.

I'd love to see it crash and burn -- with any luck in a merely financial sense. Not that the evaporation of a trillion dollars or so is going to be harmless.

I really don't want to see giant rockets crashing into heavily populated areas, dams breaking, gas pipelines exploding, etc., just because some idiot was "vibe coding."

This isn't the first round of AI hype and grift. Those have been flaring up since the first general purpose computers were built. But this is by far the largest.

K&R.

If I wanted AI essays, I'd either go directly to Skynet myself or I'd hang out on Facebook.

AI-generated messages, whether text or images or video or music.

To know whether it meets the TOS?

because they can give different answers depending on programming/guardrails, as you should know if you've read any news about AI, and a change in the programming/guardrails can mean a sudden change in what they generate.

I've made it clear that I agree with your overall stance when it comes to AI. But you are obsessed with it to the point that its obnoxious. Its a never ending, repetitive lecture and I would guess you are starting to turn people off from the message.

Also, the term "AI slop" and the word "slop" is so overused and cliche at this point, that it just makes the person saying it sound like they have literal slop for brains. Find some better words.

I'm sure you'll continue to breathlessly harp on this issue but you aren't moving the needle. We need laws that protect us. Until we are in a position to get that, you're not accomplishing a single thing.

I use the term "AI slop" - and it's used a lot, but NOT overused - because that IS the standard term for it. I didn't invent the term. I can narrow a Google search for the term down just to what's been posted or published online in the last hour, and there are still lots of search results.

If you think people using a standard term "have literal slop for brains" you really don't understand how language works.

I'm not "obsessed" with the issue of the harm done by generative AI. I am concerned about it.

It's an important issue, period, and should be recognized as such by liberals because these are fundamentally unethical tools, illegally trained on stolen intellectual property, created and controlled by oligarchs exploiting workers and artists.

It's wrecking education. That's an issue liberals are supposed to care about.

It's harming the environment. It's increasing wealth inequality. It's increasing surveillance. It's increasing disinformation and misinformation of all types. It's increasing deepfake porn and child porn. It's increasing scams and fraud of all types.

All issues liberals are supposed to care about.

I don't know if I'm moving the needle here, but there are a lot of recs for this OP, and a lot of people on this board who hate genAI and AI slop.

The same could be said for almost every issue discussed here. That hasn't stopped posting about those issues.

The objections to my posts about AI seem to come mostly from people using genAI when they don't have to, who find genAI amusing or convenient and don't want to be reminded that the industry is built on theft, and that it's badly flawed technology and causes a lot of harm.

They would like a polite pretense to spare them dealing with those facts, so they can post board messages they didn't write, and images and video and music they didn't create, without any reminder that the world's intellectual property was stolen by oligarchs to make that pretense of thought and creativity possible.

As soon as I hear the word "woke" in a negative context, I tune out, don't even care what the person has to say after that, even if it might have merit. I'm starting to get there with the inelegant "slop" nonsense.

I understand how language works just fine. You just don't understand when something is becoming obnoxious.

The constant lecturing is tiring. And I'm the guy who may find himself unemployed an unemployable by the time I'm 50 because of AI. I would bet its a much bigger concern to my personal ability to survive than it is to you.

This is part of the larger issue why Democrats have had messaging issues for quite awhile. Its the lecturing and the holier than thou attitude... just because you are right doesn't mean you are communicating it the right way.

harmful is obnoxious. Especially when they're posting on a message board for liberals and apparently deciding they can make a carveout for AI as something they don't need to apply liberal values to.

I'm doing what I can to make AI users here aware of the many reasons why they shouldn't use AI voluntarily. And some of them apparently don't care, which I find astonishing, disappointing - and, yes, obnoxious.

Posting AI slop here is a big FU to the people whose work was stolen to train the AI. That's obnoxious. I'd have a very hard time convincing any of the artists I know that the people posting AI slop of any type here care at all about the creatives whose work was stolen. And if there aren't continuing objections, it leaves the impression that other DUers are just as uncaring, just as unethical.

Which is a horrible look for what is supposed to be a liberal forum with liberal values.

You don't have any idea how much AI affects me personally. But I've warned about AI since ChatGPT was released since it was immediately obvious it was harmful. And as time went on, more and more news stories and studies backed that up. If anything, I underestimated how harmful it would be, and how fast it would wreak damage.

I don't have kids of my own, but I'm close to my siblings' kids, and my extended family includes two developers in their 40s, with 7 young children between them, and wives (two of one of my brothers' daughters) who have not worked for many years; they'll have a nearly impossible time keeping their houses if those jobs are wiped out. One of those devs told his teenaged son he'd better forget his dream of becoming a videographer, because AI would probably wipe out that profession, and I hated hearing about that. My young relatives who are in school and very aware of AI aren't sure how to make any plans. That's terrible for kids.

I have a cousin in his 50s who works for UPS. He has a disabled wife and daughter. UPS is laying off a lot of employees, in part because of AI. His sister had been planning to return to teaching after years of caregiving, after their mother died, but with what AI has done to teaching, she doesn't think she can do it. I think the older of the two lawyers in the family might be fine even if a lot of lawyers lose their jobs, but the younger one might not be. The relatives who own some successful appliance stores are well off but their stores might not be as more people lose their jobs and have less money for appliances.

A data center may be built soon beside a town where one of my brothers and some of his kids and grandkids live.

Generative AI is making the future much bleaker for most people, and that's because of AI robber barons who stole the world's intellectual property for their private profit, and who have marketed their AI tools to businesses as a way to lay off workers. Using the tech dumbs people down, and it produces inferior work including code with security risks.

It's hyped anyway. But it shouldn't be hyped here.

Someone here on DU awhile back mentioned that, even if you didn’t click on it, just the fact that it was generated was using power. That really bothered me as I want to do any small part I can to not be a part of AI’s massive consumption of our power resources.

I was happy to find that DuckDuckGo now has the option to have no AI overview. I made the link my home page. I know it is a small thing to most people but I feel better. And I am no longer tempted by the deceptive AI “easy results”. Here is that link in case anyone is interested…

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

I stopped using Google search awhile ago, so wouldn’t know if maybe they have something similar to this?