Sure, I get that argument. I just don't buy it. What counts is whether the article helps you fix your brakes. If it doesn't, it seems immaterial to me whether or not the bylined author sweated over it for hours. Not least because I have no means of knowing.
But the OP already addressed this-he can just ask ChatGPT directly how to fix the brakes. He’s gone looking for a human expert because (for whatever reason) he doesn’t want that.
For me the issue is very clear: I happily use AI to answer tons of questions each day, but if I’m reading your website/blog/article/Jira ticket, I expect real human input.
It should matter whether the author “sweated over it for hours”, because that means they actually considered the best way to communicate something. If they didn’t do that, then they clearly don’t care enough about about the quality of their output and I shouldn’t spend any time at all on it. In fact it’s worse than that because if the author doesn’t respect the reader enough to craft their output, then I as a reader have no respect for their work, and I resent that they’ve taken my attention for the time it takes me to realize it’s ai generated. If you’re publishing Ai content, then I can only presume you have an ulterior motive than plain communication- in the case of OP I’d assume this is for ad revenue or clicks.
There are many types of writing, and I struggle to think of many where a statistical model could feasibly produce an acceptable output for the given intention.
Eg. A poet chooses their words extremely carefully; a good instruction manual is written by the designers of the product (not just guessing at a common or plausible method); a news article has an angle/story beyond just the facts.
If you or OP suspect (suspect) that a blogger's taking shortcuts, and that's a problem for you or OP, then you or OP can just skip that blog and find another that appears (appears) to meet some criteria for labor input. To the extent that this is all unfalsifiable, it just should not matter.
I'll go further. Even if it were falsifiable, why should it matter? An example: I subscribe to a reputable US publication and I enjoy its journalism. If it turned out that one of its writers had (somehow) used AI to generate their article (which I enjoyed) in a click, here's what I would say to them: Hats off to you! How did you do it?!
I don't care if the article took them two minutes or if they used AI any more than I care if they used a spellchecker or wrote it while standing upside down. Why should I? The author put their name to the article and I got something out of it. That is all I was ever looking for.
Assigning blame doesn't fix the brakes either though, does it? And now their time has been wasted by bullshit they had to carefully analyze, in a field they're unfamiliar with. And yes, this was a problem with lazy writers before, but AI makes it the default, and makes it worse by reducing even the tenuous grounding to reality of a content mill writer, and makes so much more of it. Are you seeing the problem? Do you want to?
