Speaking as someone who has both posted stories he wrote himself and stories he had an LLM write and then edited into something more coherent than the LLM’s raw output, I have always labelled the latter as such and would consider it dishonest not to do so. Requiring disclosure just strikes me as mostly a reminder that people should be honest. Not sure there really is a way to enforce that honesty beyond an honor policy though, especially with how it’s becoming harder to distinguish LLM output from technically sound, if uninspired human output, especially in small bits.
And yeah, intentionality and quality judgement is what distinguishes the best human writers from the best LLMs at present, and perhaps a curated data set containing just the writings and collected letters and notes of the greatest writers instead of everything on the internet indexed by Google or Bingwouldn’t be enough to make up the difference… but that’s comparing LLMs to great writers. If we compare LLMs to more middling human writers, the kind who have binged thousands of hours of junk television and read dozens or hundreds of pulp quality novels and short stories, but have barely touched the classics… they might have a better understanding of what makes a fantasy novel a fantasy novel than a current gen LLM does, but no idea what makes The Lord of the Rings a great fantasy novel, and no idea how to write their own stories with intention or how to decide when a draftis of acceptable quality and when they need to rewrite something from scratch. Perhaps not exactly the same, but I don’t think LLMs using statistical patterns is all that different from the mediocre writer rehashing stuff they’ve read before without understanding what does or doesn’t work for the tropes they’re using, couldn’t spot a plothole if it bit them, and doesn’t know how to make characters that are people who react to events instead of automatons that do whatever the plot demands… And honestly, I’m not sure I can confidently place current LLMs as low as the 50th percentile of human writers for quality… Almost certainly below the 90th percentile of Sturgeon’s law, but there’s a lot of writing out there that isn’t even grammatically sound, and even the absolute toy LLMs can manage that.
), but here’s an idea.