Maggie Appleton

@maggie-appleton · 9 positions · On ppll ↗

Designer, anthropologist and illustrator who writes about the web, tools for thought and generative AI on her digital garden at maggieappleton.com. Her 2022 essay "The Dark Forest and Generative AI" put the reverse Turing test -- proving you are not a language model -- into the vocabulary of the independent web.

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What Maggie Appleton says most about

AI writing 4

Writing that is specific, local and grounded in a real life is the cheapest available proof that a person wrote it, because models default to generics.
Once generated text is everywhere, readers will become sceptical that there is a person on the other end of anything they read online.

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AI slop 3

Once generated text is everywhere, readers will become sceptical that there is a person on the other end of anything they read online.
The volume of generated content arriving is different in kind from the spam the web already had, and we are not prepared for it.

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LLMs 3

Language models have codified formal written language at a moment in time, which leaves informal, inventive, in-group speech as the place where humanness still shows.
The way to show a reader you are not a language model is to think critically and originally, because that is the one thing the models cannot yet do.

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