If you're new to Hive, you might not realise that for many years, curators like me have been reading posts and deciding on their worth in terms of upvotes and engagement. For most curators in most communities, at least the ones I speak to on a regular basis, a good post is about effort and originality. For many, it's about personal stories that make the post human.

There is a lot of work that goes into curation on HIVE.

We care less about grammar and more about people. We are very aware than many are writing in their second, third, or fourth language. We go out of our way to celebrate, reward and bring attention to people, especially newbies and the lesser known Hivers. We check their engagement history and know the ones who make an effort to connect with others. We check their post history, seeing whether it's consistant with what they've posted before. When we suspect it's been copied from elsehwere, we'll check. We often have conversations with people if they're doing the wrong thing, giving them opportunities to do better. There's a whole heap of work to make sure that people are doing the right thing.

Why? Because, of course, there's a reward pool.

It's incredibly unfair that people gain rewards for work that isn't theres or is very poor effort when others are working hard to do their best. We see it as theft. When a bad player is upvoted, that takes away from the good players.

Image Co Created in Stable Diffusion

There's also outside scrutiny. We ask ourselves about Hive's reputation. If people think we are full of shit posts and plagiarism, how does that impact onboarding and the HIVE price?

For the last year, curators have been spotting posts written by AI.

In simple terms, that's an artificial intelligence, not a human one.

Remember what I said about how curators valuing the humanness of a post? The people stories?

I've talked to many people over the months since AI written content started appearing on Hive. The two things that keep coming up is reward pool rape and lack of human stories.

If you want to mess with curators, go ahead. Just don't complain when you get downvoted or muted.

Now here's the kicker. People do complain when their AI generated content gets flagged, and more than often firstly deny it, then make excuses, then argue that AI content has value.

Let's agree with a couple of things to start with: AI language models are wonderful tools for adjusting grammar, helping structure work, and saving time. We understand that, and we empathise with people who feel self conscious about writing in English and use tools like Grammarly or translator apps to polish their work. In fact, we have absolutely no issue with these tools.

But what we're not okay with is people using AI to come up with the ideas, or write the post based on an idea.

What some people are shocked about is how we can tell. Without giving away our secrets, we've been around a bit, and we have some tools that help us check. We're also not stupid.

Here's a few scenarios that alert us:

• A user that often writes in poor English suddenly writes a post with perfect grammar.
• A user write generic content such as 'How to Grow Tomatoes'
• Certain language cues within the content suggest it's not genuine
• There is very little engagement with the post - comments might be met with a simple 'thankyou' rather than engaging with the content on a deeper level.
• When we ask CHAT GPT a similiar question based on the post eg 'how to grow onions' it will be eerily similiar.

After that, if it comes up as AI generated on a checker, it'll then be ignored, muted, downvoted or reported.

Of course, the whole world arguing about the legitimacy of AI written content, and worrying it will be hard to tell very soon.

Sure.

But this is HIVE.

Why should you be rewarded for low effort when someone else has put in the effort?

Is saying it's 'my idea', but the AI wrote the post, a legit reason to be lazy and not write the post yourself?

If the community rules say 'no AI generated content', what makes you ignore that?

What makes it so hard for you to keep being human, putting in human effort, on a social media that rewards human stories?

It's more black and white than you think.

With Love,

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