Appeal to Humanity
You may have heard of the logical fallacy "Appeal to Authority." The general idea there is that it is logically incorrect to say "I'm an authority on this therefore what I just said is accurate."You see, saying that you are correct about something because "you know about that kind of stuff" or "I'm really smart" or whatever is actually logically false because it is an overarching claim that may not apply to what you actually said.
Sure if you are an expert on a topic statistically it may be more likely that any random something you said on that topic is accurate, but it is not a guarantee.
I've actually long disliked people saying "That is an appeal to authority! Wrong!" because I do actually think it can be reasonable to communicate your credentials on a topic to people when talking about that topic.
Crucially I still agree that credentials do not make you correct. If someone spots a problem with what you say, "but I'm an expert" is irrelevant to something being said as being spotted as incorrect.
I realized recently ( about 5 minutes ago ) that there is a new modern parallel to this conerncing AI provenance. I call it the "Appeal to Humanity."
The idea is that "What I wrote/created is inherently better than whatever AI could/would write/create because I'm human".
I realized this because humans tend to write/produce a significant amount of garbage information. Being human doesn't automatically make anything we say/create valuable. The value of a creation/writing-output by a human is contained fully in the result and the process to get there is irrelevant.
If the output of an AI is interesting, fun, informative, etc and lacking in false information, then it can be good.
If the output of a human is interesting, fun, informative, etc and lacking in false information, then it can be good.
The provence of creation of something is irrelevant to whether the creation itself is good. To claim otherwise is logically ridiculous.
Note this does NOT mean that we may not have significant other reasons to dislike AI creating things. It only means that yelling "but it's not human!" is logically silly.
If we are going to defend our value as humans the way to do it is not by creating a ridiculous notion of "human-quality" and then gatekeeping it as only possible to come from humans.
There is an extension to this. Once you accept that "created by human" doesn't justify a creation, it is equally incorrect to claim that "created by AI" is automatically bad.
There can still be reasons to dislike AI and the proliferation of AI for creating everything, but "It's not as good" isn't justified unless you are referring to unchecked output in a statistical sense.
In many cases, AI output can be better quality than whatever human would likely have done something instead. That does not mean always. It does not say what percentage of the time this is true.
The idea is "Judging content as poor because it was created by AI, without looking at the content, is absurd."
I will go -even further- in the next post about how the actual reality of a thing is irrelevant, only the experience.