Forums that forbid AI content… How's it going?

(I notice we’re setting aside the question of crawler load, crawlers taking content for training, and the social and economic consequences of the current rapid developments. That’s good.)

For myself, on a low volume hobby site,

  • we’re trying to agree and formulate a written policy
  • we deal with things as they come up
  • the most egregious examples are essentially spam, so we delete and ban
  • otherwise, we remonstrate, perhaps in public and perhaps in private, and we may delete posts

A suggested form of guidance might look like this:

  • ‘Owning’ the content of messages that you post (i.e. reading & understanding and not blindly copy & pasting content,regardless of where this comes from).
  • Trying to answer your own questions to the best of your ability first (e.g. by searching the forum) before starting new threads.
  • Communicate specifics in a succinct manner so that other users can read & understand in order to help, i.e. avoid long walls of repetitive or irrelevant text, or overly broad statements without sufficient information.
  • Keep discussions on topic, avoid meta discussions (particularly around use of AI - be that ‘best practice’ or ‘ethics thereof’).
  • Keep conversations respectful and remember that we have useres with different backgrounds, view and opinions.
  • Have fun! This is meant to be a hobby.

(In our hobby environment, there’s an extra angle, which is use of LLMs within the hobby, which covers a spectrum of possibilities and has both its enthusiasts and its detractors.)

3 likes