{"slug": "llms-damned-if-you-dont-worse-if-you-do", "title": "LLMs: damned if you don’t, worse if you do", "summary": "The Carlson Lab at the Yale School of Public Health has imposed a blanket ban on using generative AI for writing, citing the risk of career-ending plagiarism accusations that could be weaponized by political adversaries. The lab argues that even if accusations are made in bad faith, they can still damage careers, and that future accusers with access to vast computing resources could match any written text against all existing text. The decision reflects broader concerns about the political motivations behind AI companies and the vulnerability of academic authors whose work is inevitably included in training data.", "body_md": "The Carlson Lab at the Yale School of Public\nHealth has done some research and held some discussions, and posted [The\nonly reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI](https://www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the-only-reason-youll-ever-need-not-to-write-with-ai).\n\nOur lab has agreed on a blanket ban on the use of generative AI for writing….Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.\n\nEven though there’s a lot of pressure on academics to **adopt\nAI or be left behind!!1!** this is a lot bigger deal. Especially\nfor this particular research team.\n\nThey’re a public health lab, which puts them into an unavoidable\nadversarial relationship with the anti-public-health oligarchs who run\nthe “AI” companies. The “E” in [TESCREAL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL) doesn’t stand\nfor “eugenics,” but the [political\nmovement behind “AI”](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/13636/11599?inline=1) is more likely to believe in [improving\nsociety by weeding out the “unfit” recipients of health\nmisinformation](https://blog.zgp.org/how-to-massacre-a-country-with-ai/) than in public health as we know it.\n\nMore from the blog post:\n\nPlagiarism accusations are now a core part of the right-wing harassment toolkit, and knowing that those accusations were made in bad faith or for political reasons does not make them disappear.\n\nIt’s safest to assume that a future well-connected accuser will be\nable to get access to large quantities of text, for practical purposes\n*all* of it, and the computing resources to look for a pattern\nmatch between anything that the targeted person has ever written and\nanything that anyone else has ever written. They’ll be able to do the\nsearch much better than the targeted person could, even using the best\ncommercial “plagiarism detection” software and services.\n\nRelated: [On\nthe non-use of AI in my writing process](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/08/on-the-non-use-of-ai-in-my-wri.html) by Charles Stross.\n\nIf I was crazy enough to feed the outline of a story I was working on as a prompt to ChatGPT or Claude in hope of getting the stochastic parrot to do my homework for me, then it would be only my own fault and nobody else’s if the next model from the company in question was trained on my book outline and could reproduce part or all of it for someone else.\n\nAuthors of scientific papers don’t have the choice to keep their work out of training sets in most cases. As soon as it’s published or on a preprint server it will get crawled, either with the publisher’s cooperation or not.\n\n[US\nfirms that kept DEI policies despite ‘go woke, go broke’ threats\nthrived](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/dei-policy-company-performance) by Gaya Gupta. (There’s probably a pretty simple explanation\nof why this happens. (1) In order to avoid the frequent criticism that\nDEI programs are resulting in hiring unqualified people, the company has\nto document and improve the hiring process. (2) As a side effect of step\n1, they make fewer nepo, vibe, and “lgtm” non-DEI hires, so even if the\naverage DEI hire is no more than acceptably qualified, the average new\nemployee skill level goes up.)\n\n[Ukrainian\ndrones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/ukrainian-drones-wipe-out-entire-us-tank-brigade-in-live-war-game/) by Jeremy\nHsu. (This is *good news.* An army that either made the exercises\neasy enough to win every time, or didn’t release the results of\nchallenging exercises, would be a lot worse off.)\n\n[Hackers\nCreated a Device That Can Take Over a Boeing 737 Jet’s Autopilot Without\nAnyone Noticing](https://futurism.com/future-society/hackers-device-takeover-plane-autopilot) by Frank Landymore. The attack relies on plugging\nthe device, which costs less than $100, into a port hidden by a hatch on\nthe exterior of the plane, which the researchers say is easily within\nreach of maintenance workers and airline staff. Once the device is\nplugged in, it could connect to the plane’s in-flight Wi-Fi system and\nallow a hacker to remotely control the aircraft’s systems from terra\nfirma.\n\n[VC-backed\nstartups commit more fraud, and researchers think they know why](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/31/vc-backed-startups-commit-more-fraud-and-researchers-think-they-know-why/) by\nDominic-Madori Davis. But investors aren’t always hapless victims,\nthe researchers found. Beyond the outsized growth expectations that push\nfounders toward fraud in the first place, some investors unwittingly\n“co-create fraud,” Weiss said, by continuing to back founders—sometimes\nthe very same ones— who’ve previously been accused of fraud, thereby\nnormalizing it to a certain extent. In fact, the UT report found little\nevidence that alleged fraud prevents founders from raising funding for\nnew startups, even when those fraud cases received major media\nattention.\n\n(more for the [scam culture is\neverywhere](https://blog.zgp.org/mlp-2024-09-28/) file)\n\n[Saudi\ndefence pact with Turkey and Pakistan is a verdict on the reliability of\nUS security guarantees](https://theconversation.com/saudi-defence-pact-with-turkey-and-pakistan-is-a-verdict-on-the-reliability-of-us-security-guarantees-289410) by Muhammad Waqas Haider. On paper, the\ncombination is formidable. Turkey fields Nato’s second-largest army and\na drone industry that has reshaped modern battlefields. Saudi Arabia\nbrings the Gulf’s deepest reserves of capital. Pakistan adds a large,\ncombat-experienced military and the Muslim world’s only nuclear arsenal.\nAnalysts point to genuinely complementary assets here: Turkish\ntechnology which is short of markets, Pakistani manpower short of\nfinancing, Saudi wealth short of manpower.\n\n[The\nEnd of Google Search](https://www.theringer.com/2026/08/04/tech/google-search-ai-internet) by Katie Baker. (Yes, “new Google” is doing\ntheir best to ruin what “old Google” built, but [you can still (mostly)\nget the pre-enshittification version back](https://blog.zgp.org/fix-google-search/).)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/llms-damned-if-you-dont-worse-if-you-do", "canonical_source": "https://blog.zgp.org/llms-damned-if-you-don-t-worse-if-you-do/", "published_at": "2026-08-16 00:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-17 02:10:53.658169+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["generative-ai", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Carlson Lab", "Yale School of Public Health", "Charles Stross"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/llms-damned-if-you-dont-worse-if-you-do", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/llms-damned-if-you-dont-worse-if-you-do.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/llms-damned-if-you-dont-worse-if-you-do.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/llms-damned-if-you-dont-worse-if-you-do.jsonld"}}