From today, we will be implemented a forum-wide ban on AI generated posts and images.
Any content we believe is produced solely, or almost entirely, through the use of AI will be removed. If you use AI to just touch up your grammar or formatting that is fine.
There are a number of reasons for this:
This a place for human connection, and original opinion. When people stop being able to easily detect what is authentic, original, human content on sites such as this, they may simply disengage with it.
The majority of posts flagged by users recently have been complaints around AI. We therefore believe the general sentiment of the community is against it being used here.
AI often proves an output that is of low quality, factually incorrect, extremely generic or at times entirely hallucinated.
It is very low effort to churn out high volumes of AI posts and images, but much more time consuming for others to read, view, analyse and/or interact with that content.
We hope the majority agree with this decision. We accept AI has legitimate use cases in other contexts, and are happy for this topic to be used to debate the merits and criticisms of the technology.
On a more serious note, where do you think AI bots get their information from? The answer is that they do a deep dive into Google and other search engines, as well as social media, internet forums, and other sources.
So the AI-generated response is, in fact, a distillation of the most relevant postings of humans in the first place.
I know this, because if you ask AI: “What is the best strategy for defeating court claims from private parking companies”, the response contains some of the exact wording that I have been using for many years.
However, I would caution anyone against using solely AI to generate legal documents. It can and does sometimes get things horrendously wrong.
I know from experience of researching footy stats and history that AI can return some absolute nonsense and that it all has to be cross checked. Might as well do it myself.
I asked a question, I was being lazy ! - AI did some investigating and came back with some figures - I immediately realised these were wrong- don’t do it, stick to HI (human intelligence)
Spot on, this scraping process has become a significant issue for many websites due to the sheer volume of AI bot crawlers looking for content, eating up site bandwidth. The Gasroom itself has seen up to 100k bot requests a day - apparently the high quality content here about Wycombe Wanderers is irresistible! To protect the site we now have multiple systems in place to restrict things like AI crawlers & spam bots, but the volumes at times are ridiculous.
The objective is to prevent the site being drowned in AI slop and keep the Gasroom a sanctuary of authentic human content. If you use social media you’ll likely already know how much of an issue AI generated content is; for example Instagram and Facebook are absolutely drowning in it. YouTube actively targets and demonetises AI slop as it was beginning to take over their platform.
And to your point, I think this does lead to an open question for the Gasroom as a community - what is our tolerance? We’re still at the early stages of AI so putting parameters in place now is important. Do we keep a complete blanket ban on AI imagery, or do we allow exceptions like in a dedicated AI topic?
With respect, saying you created them is a bit of a stretch. I prefer to see actual creativity rather than people filling up feeds with prompt created images, so I support this decision.
But even kit images or fake stadiums are better than people pasting 20 paragraphs of verbose nonsense that they ‘created’ with a sentence.
It’s quite comforting to know that when the machines take over, the information they’ve scraped from the Gasroom will be the cornerstone of the new civilisation.
