Would love to read, but it seems heavily paywalled, so can't.

Honestly, AI could have written this.

While it would have been a better paper if the author collaborated with a sociologist, it would have also be less likely to be taken seriously by the HN for the same class anxieties that its title is founded on.

> In this reading, the increasingly common refrain “AI could have written this” is not so much a pithy taunt, but rather a classist slur, indicative of wounded and anxious privilege. Moreover, it is complicit in the systematic exclusion of underprivileged groups from entering the class of knowledge professionals.

This is the insipid blathering of a woke cretin.

It is in fact widespread reliance of AI that will hinder groups of people from acquiring the skills to be in that class.

The idea that some internet randos commenting "AI could have written that" have gatekeeping power, preventing people from becoming knowledge workers, is preposterous.

The one way in which it is plausible is that the work to which the remark is applied is not in fact written by AI, but its author becomes convinced by the remark that such work could be written by AI, and that author adopts AI as a result. Their newfound habit will subsequently rot their brain, sending them plumetting off the ladder toward the knowledge class. I jest, but only half so.

Actually, let's examine this "systematic exclusion" claim.

Firstly, the basic premise of the article is that "this could have been written by AI" is disparagement. But disparagement is nothing new. If disparagement is intended, all one needs is "this was written by an idiot". I think that "this could have ben written by AI" is much softer. In fact, a possible interpretation of it is that the speaker believes in the use of AI, and that it could have been used to save time in producing something of the same quality. Anyway, we've had disparagement in online forums going back to dial up BBSes; it's just a new variant on plain old flaming.

If the remark is disparagement, does it add up to "systematic exclusion of underprivileged groups"?

In forums and social media, people mostly don't care who you are and are responding to the content. If it looks like AI slop, they don't care whether the person behind the pseudonym is a Stanford professor, or a german shepherd, and just turn on their flamethrower.

Let's say that systematic exclusion is happening in spite of commenters not actually targeting disadvantaged groups, but only responding to the content. What that systematic exclusion hypothesis then entails is that posts from underprivileged groups are actually garbage, and therefore attract more disparagement!

So in fact it is the author of this paper who holds a cynical, discriminatory view of underprivileged groups (whoever he imagines them to be, exactly). Underprivileged groups are morons who write garbage that could be written by AI (and thus precisely receive comments to that effect); and, moreover, are so weakly constituted that these discouraging comments prevent them from entering a knowledge professional class (in addition to the main factor, that being their lack of ability).

Someone not a member of an underprivileged group either does not write posts that are reminiscent of AI drivel, and so doesn't attract those comments, or even if he or she does, the negative commends slide right off due to their thicker skin.

Oh really? Some of the thinnest skins in the world come from privilege: for instance, think of the middle-aged man-child who buys an entire social network for billions in order to be able to suppress critical comments about himself.

The state of this headline.

This is just like the way some people decided that "Blue Check" should be an insult on Twitter. Occasionally people still say it but almost everyone ignores it. Fads like this are common on the Internet. It's just like any other clique of people: a few people accidentally taste-make as a bunch of replicators simply repeat mindless things over and over again "slop" "mask-off moment" "enshittification" "ghoulish". Just words that people repeat because other people say them and get likes/upvotes/retweets or whatever.

The "Blue Check" insult regime didn't get anywhere and I doubt any anti-LLM/anti-diffusion-model stuff will last. "Stop trying to make fetch happen". The tools are just too useful.

People on the Internet are just weird. Some time in the early 2010s the big deal was "fedoras". Oh you're weird if you have a fedora. Man, losers keep thinking fedoras are cool. I recall hanging out with a bunch of friends once and we walked by a hat shop and the girls were all like "Man, you guys should all wear these hats". The girls didn't have a clue: these were fedoras. Didn't they know that it would mark us out as weird losers? They didn't, and it turned out it doesn't. In real life.

It only does on the Internet. Because the Internet is a collection of subcultures with some unique cultural overtones.

Sarkar argues that “AI shaming arises from a class anxiety induced in middle class knowledge workers, and is a form of boundary work to maintain class solidarity and limit mobility into knowledge work.”

I think there is at least some truth to this.

Another possible cause of AI shaming is that reading AI writing feels like a waste of time. If the author didn’t bother to write it, why should I bother to read it and provide feedback?

This paper presents an elaborate straw-man argument. It does not faithfully represent the legitimate concerns of reasonable people about the persistent and irresponsible application of AI in knowledge work.

Generative AI produces work that is voluminous and difficult to check. It presents such challenges to people who apply it that they, in practice, do not adequately validate the output.

The users of this technology then present the work as if it were their own, which misrepresents their skills and judgement, making it more difficult for other people to evaluate the risk and benefits of working with them.

It is not the mere otherness of AI that results in anger about it being foisted upon us, but the unavoidable disruption to our systems of accountability and ability to assess risk.

I'd like to brag that I got in trouble for saying this to somebody in 2021, before ChatGPT

The obvious response is, "Oh, it will."

This reads like yet another attempt to pathologize perfectly reasonable criticism as some form of oppression. Calling “AI could have written this” a classist slur is a stretch so extreme it borders on parody. People say that when writing lacks originality or depth — not to reinforce some imagined academic caste system. The idea that pointing out bland prose is equivalent to sumptuary laws or racial gatekeeping is intellectual overreach at its finest. Ironically, this entire paper feels like something an AI could have written: full of jargon, light on substance. And no, there’s no original research, just theory stacked on theory.

I don't think we should as a wider scientific/technical society care for the opinion of a person that uses epistocratic privilege as a a serious term. This stinks to high hell of proving a conclusion by working backwards from it.

The cognitive dissonance to imply that expecting knowledge from a knowledge worker or a knowledge-centered discourse is a form of boundary work or discrimination is extremely destructive to any and all productive work once you consider how most of the sciences and technological systems depend on a very fragile notion of knowledge preservation and incremental improvements on a system that is intentionally pedantic to provide a stable ground for progress. In a lot of fields, replacing this structure with AI is still very much impossible, but explaining how for each example an LLM blurts out is tedious work. I need to sit down and solve a problem the right way, and in the meantime about 20 false solutions can be generated by ChatGPT

If you read the paper, the author even uses terms related to discrimination by immutable characteristics, invokes xenophobia and quotes a black student calling discouragement of AI as a cheating device racist.

This seems to me an utter insanity and should not only be ignored, but actively pushed against on the grounds of anti-intellectualism.

Reading this makes me understand why there is a political movement to defund universities.

Overall, this comes across as extremely patronising: to authors by running defence for obviously sub-par work, because their background makes it "impossible" for them to do good work. And to the commenters by assuming mal-intent towards the less privileged that needs to be controlled.

And it's all wrapped in a lovely package of AI apologetics - wonderful.

So, honestly, no. The identity of the author doesn't matter, if it reads like AI slop the author should be grateful I even left an "AI could have written this" comment.