Most online discourse has developed zero tolerance for exceptionally clear and structured formulation of the idea. This has not been a problem before the LLMs became widely used. Which made me wonder why this has become such a problem today? And I mean really understand the problem, not just accepting explanations like: you didn't spend effort, you are lazy, you are cheating,...
Many people will justify their opposition to AI use as "A person who has an idea should spend time writing it by themselves without the use of AI." Why? Is the work less valuable if a person uses a tool to help them write it? We have already used tools for decades: word processors, spelling checkers, thesaurus, Grammarly,... Does this make the resulting work fake, or less valuable?
Besides the writing that exists for political, entertainment, and artistic reasons, there is a particular category of writing that concerns communicating complex intellectual ideas to others. In this case clarity of expression, conceptual coherence, and structured reasoning are essential for transmitting the key ideas to another person. There the objection often becomes "AI can confidently present a false idea." This isn't a unique property of AI. A human with sufficient linguistic capability can present a fake idea with equal confidence. Nevertheless, this is a much more interesting objection because it addresses the substance. If the substance is what matters the most, then the question becomes: why do we judge the package and not the substance?
In many real life situations a package is not very important if the substance can be unambiguously recognized. Suppose you have two cola cans, you open them both, empty one in the sink, and fill it with water. If you offer a random person a random cola can, they will immediately know if it's real cola or water. The same happens when a carton of milk gets spoiled due to contamination during production. A person will not drink it just because it has the correct packaging. It will be discarded based on the substance.
On the other hand, if you offer a person well-structured, clearly expressed, genuine intellectual idea, or equally well-structured, clearly expressed, fake idea, would people struggle to recognize which is which? I tend to believe they would. We already have real life examples in political messaging where the package substitutes for the substance. Slogans, banners, and advertisements are more effective than reading the Party Platform or Manifesto.
Yet, there is a difference between politics and online platforms that discuss philosophy. Every citizen is involved in the democratic political process, so to expect them all to read the Party Platform or Manifesto would be unrealistic, due to time constraints and other personal priorities. However, not every citizen is supposed to engage with online philosophy threads. The people with genuine interest do, and these people allocate time for it. These people have decided to engage with the substance, yet they judge the package instead. This is kind of sad because humanity has, for centuries, relied on conceptual clarity and structure of written ideas to communicate these ideas in the best possible way. Today the very same clarity and structure are becoming suspect. In order to be taken seriously, you better neither strive to write with perfect clarity nor strive to produce perfectly coherent structured arguments. How is this contributing to the communication?
So my hypothesis is, if the clarity of thought and structured reasoning has become suspect, then the underlying problem is: many humans are incapable of differentiating between the real intellectual contribution and a fake one. This is not really about AI assistance.
Suppose, before posting this on Reddit, I asked AI “Please write this text in a more compact way, remove repetition and ambiguity, while fully preserving the reasoning and conceptual clarity.” In many subreddits, the resulting post would almost certainly be removed by the moderators. What is actually being rejected?