It is definitely marked, whether it’s “clear” depends on the individual and how quickly they’re reading. If I see a really long post, I might skim it to see if it’s worth reading in depth, and in that case I might miss where it says “I asked ChatGPT” at the top.
In general, following some standards makes things easier for everyone. There is a poster here who insists on formatting quoted text with italics instead of inside a quote box, and it always takes me a couple beats to figure out which words are his and what he’s quoting. Having some gentle guidance for how to format AI quotes is IMO better than a generic “clearly marked.”
It absolutely should be this. I come here to read posts by people and do want to have to see AI results. If I wanted to know what any of those AI tools had to say, I’d use them myself.
AI is anathema to the Straight Dope. The more we can marginalize it, the better. I like to at least pretend people are being thoughtful about what they post.
In all fairness, the post itself was my commentary on a ChatGPT quote that could just as easily have been an excerpt from Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or any other reference source and was indicated as such.
Quote box would have been better, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
Personally I don’t normally use AI for posts and don’t see a point unless the intent is to discuss the output for some reason or another.
AI is a big part of our society, it’s just going to become more prevalent over time whether people like it or not, and it’s going to be a discussion topic.
I would expect so. However, I think the intent is to firmly distinguish between AI generated reference material and using AI to generate your actual posts and passing it off as your own words.
If people wanted to engage in a conversation with AI instead of humans, they can go right to ChatGPT’s site.
Agreed, so I support the idea of including AI-generated content when talking about AI, but not using it in place of a real post. Essentially, I support all you’re saying here.
Any significant content from a source that is not the poster themselves, should be formatted in a way that it’s obviously not the poster’s own work.
Whether that’s an official rule or just a suggestion is up to the mods. The post linked to above should not have earned a warning, but a mod note to format better.
Oh, just to be clear I wasn’t taking issue with your action - I was giving you fair credit that despite not being clear with the rule I cited, you made a fair, good-faith effort to credit that it was AI work. Yes, would additional formatting make it more clear? Sure. Which is why I supported a “best practices” option as a partial solution going forward. At most, per @Atamasama
Is how I would have handled it in one of the forums I was responsible for. Unless it became an ongoing issue of course.
Why is AI generated content subject to quotation rules that any other sort of attribution to anything else isn’t?
Other than neo-Luddite “the fact that some folks here have a deeply ingrained hatred of AI.” sort of nonsense. I mean, @msmith537 clearly attributed it to ChatGPT, marked it out, and it was very obvious. And he got disproportionate vitriol thrown at him because he dared use AI. Which seems very much like old men yelling at the clouds here in 2026, but I digress.
If you, the reader has a problem with it, skim down the page. But this seems like you’re trying to gatekeep sources and attributions because of some sort of dislike of certain sources like AI. And if we’re doing that, why stop at AI?
I feel like requring this hurdle is going to do more harm than good; we’re basically caving to the Luddites among us who don’t like change, and you’re going to have people NOT post useful stuff that they found via AI searches, because they don’t want to bother with the formatting BS. Gates kept, but ultimately there are more useful applications than not, especially in the “Wide ranging and comprehensive natural language search engine” type uses of AI, rather than asking it opinions and to analyze anything.
There are at least 3 posters that do that regularly. I would be in favour of stopping that. Not only are long passages of italics hard to read it also confuses the issue of quoting vs emphasis. Just stick it in a quote box if it’s a quote.
I would like a direct quote from Wikipedia, or from NPR, or from the NYTimes, or from a .gov site, or from anywhere else citeable to be in a quote box and to include the source of the cite.
Really depends on what you’re using it for. Asking it to identify which sitcom episode had the dancing alien or to identify an old faded book cover is typically fine (and the answer can be confirmed). Often it’s actually really good at that and better than trying to Google it.
Asking AI something like “Is chunky peanut butter better than smooth?” is garbage. It’ll just slap an argument together that could change from moment to moment based on the history of the asker, how you prompted it and basic randomization. I see Reddit posts about AI all the time where someone smugly announces “I asked ChatGPT if AI is awful and it agreed with me!!!” Posting those responses here is pretty much a waste of time for the reader since it doesn’t reflect the mind or opinions of the human poster nor does it actually convey any meaningful information from the LLM.
I have no personal issue with AI but I also recognize its limitations at present and don’t have any issue with being asked to put LLM responses in a quote box. Heck, if you’re copy/pasting more than a line or two from Wikipedia, that should be in a quote box as well.
I have been around quite some time- using “” or italics has always been acceptable. Now, I know how to use a quote box to quote another posters stuff (altho it doesnt always want to work), but I have no idea of how to use a “quote box” for say Wiki quotes.
I guess I’ve lost track of what the rules are. Can anyone give an example of a quotation rule that AI-generated content is subject to that, for example, Wikipedia quotes are not?
I shoud have said “potentially subject”. That was the whole thread genesis; some people got (unreasonably and disproportionately IMO) upset that the results of an AI prompt was pasted inline and not as something they could easily avoid.
My point was that why is AI unique? Pasting any long quote is equally annoying if you don’t want to read it, and AI is being singled out by grumpy old people because they don’t like it.
Maybe the solution is general quotation guidelines, not AI specific ones?