Re: Concern about AI-generated contributions in VCWG discussions

Hi all,

Just as an experiment, I’m providing two responses, one written 
organically and the other was generated by an LLM. Please vote on which 
you think is human generated? Doing this is allowing me to explorethe 
nature of human versus AI generated content.

Vote here: *https://forms.gle/42mWD8HAouAhM9kVA*

I'll reply with the survey results in about a week.

Moses

---

Version A:

I am also worried about the slopification of not only this forum, but 
the entire practice of strategic collaboration. First, I recently wrote 
something where there was concern that my work was AI generated simply 
because I used em dashes—I tend to use them a lot, as it offers the 
reading equivalent of a thoughtful pause. I had to use an AI detector on 
an extensive article I blogged ten years ago to show that my natural 
writing style triggered the detector, when it was simply, well, good 
writing. (The article I blogged received over half a million page 
views.) I subsequently discovered that most “humanizers” simply inject 
words less likely ones, to appear human generated by reducing the 
quality of the writing.

The reality is that AI tools are now part of the cognitive environment. 
Clearly, the key issue isn’t “used an LLM” vs “didn’t use an LLM.” It’s 
authorship and responsibility. If someone uses a model to structure 
thoughts, tighten prose, and check logic — but the ideas, judgments, and 
commitments are theirs — that’s still meaningful participation. If the 
model is doing the thinking, and the human is just "phoning it in" by 
forwarding output, then yes, we’re drifting toward a lot more than just 
model collapse

The other issue is where we’re heading. Just as AI generated coding and 
video have crossed their critical thresholds of realism, collaborative 
ideation will also do so within a few years. As LLMs have slowly 
transitioned from “stochastic plagiarism” to the use of reasoning 
models, they will at some point cross a similar threshold, the "uncanny 
valley" of cognitive realism. Especially when multi-agent systems start 
emulating what we do here. At that point, our internal slop 
detectors—even set to high sensitivity so anything we read could “feel” 
AI generated—will not be able to tell the difference.

Version B:

Thanks for raising this. I think you're pointing at something real and 
worth discussing openly.

The distinction you draw between using an LLM as a tool and outsourcing 
your thinking to one is important, and I'd argue it's actually sharper 
than it might first appear. Proofreading preserves the structure of your 
reasoning while cleaning up expression. Generation replaces the 
reasoning itself. Those are fundamentally different activities, even if 
the output can sometimes look similar on the surface.

Where I think this gets genuinely difficult is that the line isn't 
always clean. Someone might use an LLM to help organize scattered 
thoughts into a coherent draft, then revise it substantially. That's 
somewhere in the middle, and I'd hesitate to call it illegitimate. The 
question probably isn't whether an LLM touched the text at all, but 
whether the person behind it actually wrestled with the problem, made 
judgment calls, and can defend what they wrote if pressed.

That said, I think the practical concern you're raising stands 
regardless of where we draw the line. When responses on a list like this 
start reading like they were produced by someone who spent 30 seconds 
prompting rather than 30 minutes thinking, it does erode trust. You 
start reading differently. You skim more. You engage less. And that's 
corrosive to exactly the kind of deliberation this group exists for.

I don't know what the right intervention is. Norms are probably more 
useful than rules here. Something like: if you wouldn't be comfortable 
explaining and defending every claim in your message during a live 
conversation, maybe reconsider sending it. That's not a perfect filter, 
but it at least recenters the expectation that contributions reflect 
genuine engagement rather than generated fluency.



On 2/13/26 3:41 AM, Filip Kolarik wrote:
> Dear VCWG,
> I want to raise a concern that’s been bothering me lately. It feels 
> like this mailing list is being flooded by LLM-generated responses.
>
> Whether or not that’s intentional, meaningful work depends on people 
> engaging directly with arguments and tradeoffs, and when contributions 
> read like synthesized summaries rather than considered positions, the 
> discussion loses clarity and momentum.
>
> I’m not arguing against using tools; I use LLMs to proofread my own 
> writing. But there is a difference between proofreading text you wrote 
> and letting an LLM generate the entire response. If normalized, we 
> risk damaging the effectiveness of the group and turning this mailing 
> list into a swamp to be ignored.
>
> Best regards,
> Filip
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/filipkolarik/

-- 
*Moses Ma | Managing Partner*
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(private)
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