You have to take my word for exactly nothing. I would consider myself one of the most unimportant people concerning running the forum.
I am tired of this. I tried to help, I think I achieved the opposite, so I leave it be.
But I can guarantee that posts that I write here have near-zero polishing and absolute zero AI involvement. They stem from pure physical keyboard actions letter by letter.
That is an interesting proof of quality. You may take my honest word for it that the last post, while lengthy, has been written and typed by me entirely. If it reads polished than maybe because I used to have 119/120 TOEFL. 
Uh, I never did a TOEFL – but that is also off topic.
You completely made up this rule that you’re complaining about. The moderators have told you that this rule does not exist. Now you’re still complaining that you don’t get a vote about this non-existent rule
Well, yeah, that’s what makes them moderators. Somebody has to decide at the end of the day whether some particular post crosses the line to LLM slop or not. They are reasonable people. You can talk to them.
That’s the exact opposite of what the moderators have told you. There are no “prohibited tools”. Post do not get censored because they are “too polished or a tad too long”.
There’s a second half to discourse, too, and that’s listening. Please take care to read what I’ve been saying, too.
I do think we can improve some of the site communication around this. @Mason made a good suggestion last year that we never took action on, and @dilumaluthge discovered that we can detangle the Spam or Generative AI flag into two! When I made the change, I don’t think the ability to add an additional flag had percolated down to our instance yet (or maybe I had just missed it).
But having better messaging on the flags and resulting canned moderation direct messages should help, I would think.
The guidelines say:
- Don’t post generative AI output (but direct human language translation and minor editing is ok).
I am not making anything up. If you want to imply that being output is what counts, then I find that sophistic.
Yes, I know that and I honestly appreciate that, which may have been lost in my persistent argumentation, but that is truly the case. Nevertheless, as written above, I very much prefer very clear rules that allow to use generated output if it is endorsed and has reasonable quality.
Yes there are, read the rules. My post has been “banned” because I disclosed the use of AI (thus next time I should probably be more clever and dishonest), but nobody could really tell me where it was “slop” or whether it was not “my voice” or “my message” and whether the content was not helpful and clearly related to the discussion?
I do and please return the favor as well.
EDIT: This is exactly, why GenAI can be helpful, because it greatly helps to avoid misunderstanding in communication as the bandwidth of written communication is unfortunately quite narrow.
That might indeed go into the right direction. I would simply suggest to a) appeal to refrain from AI use in direct communication with people (e.g., more or less “chatting” or “talking” with each other), b) make clearer content quality related guidelines not simply (do not use a certain tool), and c) clearly offer the poster a chance to heal the post.
What about that?
EDIT: A more technical solution would be “transcribed video messages” so there can be no doubt; might even be a market for such a tool. 
Holy cow, I think we might have done it! @gwr: that’s the status quo, or at least the intent of it! 
If and how we improve the wording in the guidelines, flags and DMs is really the only question… along with the fact that I’d say that this entire site is for direct communication with people.
But, yes, that is exactly our intention.
But the moderators have told you that you are misreading this rule! This rule was formulated in the pre-agentic ara, when we still had ChatBots. It doesn’t say “don’t post anything that has ever been touched by an LLM”. It doesn’t say “only direct language translation and minor editing”. That is an exemplary, not a complete list. And I think “minor editing” can do a lot of work here. I’m all for rewriting that rule to
Don’t post unfiltered generative AI output (but, e.g., direct human language translation and refinement is ok).
if that alleviates your concerns.
Of course it’s the output that counts! Why do think the rule exists in the first place? It’s not because “LLM bad!”. It’s because LLMs have the ability to generate vast quantities of low quality text that can easily overwhelm the discussion. That “low quality” is the entire issue, and the rule exists to try to mitigate that.
… only reasonable people use Julia.
I beg to disagree a bit, because given that we by now produce Julia software and even Julia language itself using GenAI, it seems a bit too harsh to prevent GenAI in producing posts at least partially.
GenAI support in my opinion must not necessarily lead to unpersonal or indirect communication, if it is carefully crafted under supervision and authorized. But hey …
We all agree on that!!!
Then please clearly show me where my banned post showed low quality and was a mere data dump! That’s the entire issue for me.
EDIT: That may even be used for case-based learning, e.g., a collection of banned posts with clear reasoning: This was banned because XYZ. Where XYZ are clear quality markers, not just “that’s an English word last used by Lincoln.”
Since I’m not a moderator, I don’ know which post of yours was banned, or whether it would have crossed any of my lines. But if your complaint is about some particular post of yours that you think was flagged improperly, that’s probably not something that impacts this general discussion of the rules. You should engage on that one-on-one with the moderator that banned the post in a direct message.
Edit:
Well, yeah, okay: Don’t disclose the use of AI! You don’t have to, and the intent of the rules is such that if you’re using AI responsibly, there shouldn’t be any need to disclose it, because you’re simply making well-written posts that you stand behind. I don’t think it’s “dishonest”. Maybe your post would have been totally fine. But if you preface it with “This post was written by AI” when there’s a guideline that says “Don’t post AI”, then of course it’s going to get flagged.
Yes, I did and was not given a “low quality” indication clearly, e.g., completely unrelated, impersonal, not a human voice etc.
You claimed that there is no problem and that “low quality” were the only issue, I just cited a counterexample here to refute that claim.
Yes we indeed do.
I am so annoyed by AI interaction that I will not use it in communication (just a bit of bug fixing and generating some TeX code) – but on that other people of course might have other opinions.
The Discourse moderation tools are wildly opaque — to admins, mods, and users alike. And the direct messages the system sends were written a decade ago. I actually don’t think they’ve aged well. A message from @system that says “This is an automated message from Julia Programming Language to let you know that your post was hidden” sure sounds more agentic today than it did ten years ago.
But yes, all such direct messages include a paragraph like:
This post was hidden due to flags from the community, so please consider how you might revise your post to reflect their feedback. You can edit your post after 10 minutes, and it will be automatically unhidden.
@gwr I just checked and I see that the message you got sent in that particular case was different. I don’t understand why. It shouldn’t be different. It’s quite frustrating to me and I can understand how it’d frustrate you too.
It’s also very unfortunate that responding to or even flagging those @system messages are completely unmonitored and invisible (or barely visible, not triggering the typical notifications) to moderators.
Anyhow, we can improve most of these things.
(post deleted by author)
I get you don’t think you’re getting your way, but why dehumanize people actively trying to improve your experience?
While we’re criticizing the moderation system, are there good ideas for adding more information to feedback? I’m guessing encouraging arbitrary negative responses are probably a bad idea, but this is what I got for the earlier parody.
Your post was flagged as off-topic or unfocused. The community feels it is not a good fit for the topic, as currently defined by the title and the first post, or that the topic itself lacks enough focus to facilitate a productive conversation.
This post was hidden due to flags from the community, so please consider how you might revise your post to reflect their feedback. You can edit your post after 10 minutes, and it will be automatically unhidden.
However, if the post is hidden by the community a second time, it will remain hidden until handled by staff.
Basically just a generic “off-topic”. I’m betting the people who flagged it had a lot more to say than that. Maybe it’s not time for jokes, it’s too rude, etc, and probably not a suggestion to make the joke more relevant somehow. They could DM me, but ideally there’s a convenient middle ground (with an opt-out) between generic flags and several full conversations.