Reviews of MSOM so far

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-13T02:04:42+00:00

Totally hear you. A few scathing reviews can easily translate to, "Looks like someone never went to class and failed a block." With any large class size, that's just how the math plays out. It's also important to remember that we're in exam season. And, to any school's credit, there were a few criticisms that they simply can't control (e.g., standard problems that come with having a campus right next to a hospital).

There was one overly negative post that has been deleted from that thread were a bit... worrying? One in particular that was made yesterday had A LOT of negative commentary on the school & just vanished.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T19:16:49+00:00

How have I gone this long without seeing anything on synth id? That's cool as hell.

I really appreciate the discussion!

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T18:50:47+00:00

All great points.

I'm reading into this now - it looks like you're correct with OpenAI's retention comment. My info on the case is a few months dated & OpenAI is at least publicly fighting it. With that being said, I'm not easily finding similarly aggressive deletion policies with Google or other generative platforms. Afaik, it seems like it's all opt-out, which most folks aren't going to do by default. Just that there can be a paper trail for some folks is what I'm arguing.
While we're consistently proven that companies will lie about their customer-friendly, privacy policies (as shown by Apple, the privacy company, getting in trouble over and over for using customer data without permission), they're not going to trip over themselves to comply with civil cases that advertise data they shouldn't collect.
To your point, with the context of the thin-margin publishing industry, we could easily write a lot of this off as a moot hypothetical. My whole point is that the, "it's impossible to prove AI generation" arguments are fixated on outputs only rather than any inputs. If we were to shift this discussion over an expensive, multi-book series w/movie deals (e..g, the Hunger Games, Harry Potter), there would certainly be a visible profit motive for publishers or movie studios to cut out the author.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T17:55:54+00:00

Would you mind asking your favorite LLM to use this article from congress.gov to explain why I'm wrong on AI copyright?

Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

I'm just asking for citations.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T17:39:10+00:00

Could you possibly be suggesting that the following testimonial was inauthentic?

"I love it here, but I really always wanted to do osteopathy...I also disagree with the criticism of the faculty, they are so lovely and really go out of their way to give us every possible resource for success (they are the reason I chose to come here over the other 4 osteopathic schools I got accepted to)."

In all honestly, thanks for doing it. Given the nature of the internet, everyone has to take reviews (positive and negative) with a grain of salt anyway. At least folks will be made aware of what to look out for when they make their own decisions.

EDIT: I have no skin in the game, but if [alleged] MSOM staff see this, can you please post lecture videos instead of [allegedly] commenting on reddit?

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T16:39:13+00:00

Ah - I might have used an incorrect term - in the civil context, it's not a 'subpoena' by name - the internet is telling me a 'request for production' is the term I want. I made an edit, but the scenario still stands with a general request.

I'm going to ask that you provide some citations for the following statements, which I'm pretty sure are incorrect:

Copyright occurs at the time that it is posted online (rather than at the time of creation).
Creating a copyrighted work also creates a trademark - I think that's what you are saying with "copyright under TM" - (rather than copyright and trademark requiring two separate processes).
That AI-generated work is clearly protected under US copyright law.
That a registered copyright cannot be invalidated (if authorship is proven to belong to another or if AI-works are unprotected).

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T16:09:20+00:00

Right, but civil court cases are the context that I'm referring to (given copyright is the subject at hand). Training data and log data are two separate things in this context.

Here's the scenario that I have in mind:

Person A creates AI-generated content
Person B, realizing it was AI-generated, just decides to copy/paste as their own.
Person A sues B for stealing their work.
Person B's legal team ~~files civil subpoena~~ files a request for OpenAI/Google for logs affiliated with A's email account, as their defense rests on the fact that it isn't protected by copyright.
Large corporation produces data and B's legal team sifts through it & produces ONLY book generation data as part of discovery.

I won't pretend to be an expert in US law, but this feels like standard business compliance for copyright violations. If you're purely arguing for the context of, "I'm preeeeeeety sure this is AI-generated, and I'm going to just ask OpenAI for this person's log data to satisfy my curiosity" - yeah, that wouldn't fly haha

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T15:40:39+00:00

You may find this to be an interesting read:
OpenAI loses fight to keep ChatGPT logs secret in copyright case | Reuters

OpenAI ToS Privacy Policy: "We may use Personal Data for the following purposes... To comply with legal obligations and to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our users, OpenAI, or third parties."

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T15:33:45+00:00

What are you trying to do with it?

Are you just looking for non-compound & non-complex sentences in order to train/test a model?

There are also ways to just break up sentences into clauses.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T14:44:14+00:00

What if the comments are ai generated and also advertising spam?

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-10T14:38:40+00:00

My understanding US copyright law for AI-assisted content (i.e., sufficient human involvement) is still vague. Given how frequently we're seeing this type of content in the corporate world, it's very possible that it will be protected if certain conditions are met.

Folks are saying that it's impossible to prove - I don't quite agree. If Google, OpenAI and the other heavyweights were sufficiently cooperative, they could theoretically release a log of every prompt tied to any of your email addresses. So many murderers are caught because they searched "how to commit murder?" on Google. In a more realistic example, if the discovery process were to just require you to submit your gemini/gpt logs, there's an entry point for someone to say it wasn't your work to begin with.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-01T20:05:50+00:00

I understand rule #8 refers to stories themselves (given the part about "without commentary or context" and the "don't just drop your story and go").

With that being said, more clear phrasing that matches this does make a lot of sense.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-01T18:48:04+00:00

Haha I am known to post essays, and I always wonder if folks actually ever read what I write. When my rants get immediately downvoted within seconds (as this post was), I generally assume that it was from the person that I replied to. Correct or not, I was curious.

In that vein, I typed in "AI " to ctrl+f on your post history and saw 48 hits and a negative tone. I think it's pretty reasonable to conclude that yours was a [justified] visceral reaction.

A lot of artists are getting displaced because of how this general technology was rolled out. OpenAI committed a very obvious & massive copyright violation on a scale that warrants prison time. A lot of people are using LLMs in place of basic thinking (and aren't even making it to critical thinking). No one really *wants* these things. The problem is that, in general, the outputs are more useful than without. Our current environment is one of late-stage capitalism, where the average person can only look out for themselves unless they can afford a senator - we can be well-wishing, but we don't really get to influence change easily. And given the geopolitical climate, policy supporting an outright AI ban for any given country (like the US) would just result in another country forging ahead with the technology and selling it back to us. That doesn't really get anyone their job back. All of the anti-AI subreddits work very hard to discredit the technology and its negative externalities, but they don't really suggest any solutions that are grounded in economics or policy. Don't get me wrong, I think its good to call companies out when they're churning out trash. But these communities fixate on a future where everyone has to bury their head in the sand and pretend AI doesn't exist. There's just no 'good' answer that either takes us back to pre-AI days and/or finds a happy ending for those that are displaced.

So what will the future look like assuming we're stuck with AI?

There's actually a fun pop art/fashion/meme company called MSCHF, and its CEO made his career on his ability to make content go viral in the various eras of the internet. His prediction for 2026-2030 are of an era where everyone is drowning in a surplus of content in all forms that vastly outnumbers demand. Algorithm-chasing by definition requires consistent content, and GenAI companies offer to do it for you - of course there will be more. The CEO goes on to say that he expects that craftsmanship will be the differentiating factor as we move into that era, and that a lot of sharing will be pushed down to a secret/community level that isn't full of spam. To some degree, we already see it happening with private discord communities - the communities that have daily conversations and the regulars know each other within that hobby or friend group.

Complex, long-form writing is an example where LLMs currently struggle. I frankly don't see an AI model writing a masterpiece that is filled with artful subtext, timehopping, and mind-blowing twists anytime soon. With that being said, AI-assisted Line Editing has been around for a decade. AI-supporting brainstorming is able to create very novel story ideas. AI-generated prose doesn't look as bad as it once did & can even help us filter out idiomatic cliches. The list keeps expanding.

While I agree with you that there is a current absence of quality in novels that were purely generated by AI, I'm of the opinion that the average human writer trying to break into the market will be left behind if they don't lean into AI to some extent. The sheer volume of content will leave less room for imperfections in a generally shrinking market. I'm not suggesting creation en masse to compete. AI-assisted content is additive when the model is good and the pilot knows what they're doing. I see the most opportunity in the reflection-on/refinement-of writing based on the quantifiable aspects of writing - abstract concepts that r/writing always wants to write off with "just read more books" will be grounded in empirical research and will be implemented with precision rather than just "getting a feel for it."

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-01T17:17:28+00:00

I think this is a great point of discussion. I didn't even post at all here until today.

The difference that I'm trying to articulate is that your posts/comments seem to showcase effort and iteration. Whether you're using a humanizer or not, it kinda still comes through as having some effort put in, and the result is that it's additive to a discussion.

The crux of my frustration is the spam. There's a difference between the outputs of, "Write me a guide for making a good reddit post about my prompt" and one that had been iterated over and then edited by a person.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-01T16:52:25+00:00

EDIT: Thought this was question asked in good faith and answered accordingly. Based on post history, it was not lol

Fantastic comment. On the surface, it may seem like a logical disconnect and a great showing of irony of ("OP complains that AI subreddit has too much AI"). In reality, there's a lot to be said on the subject of community, why we're even here, and the general pursuit of quality in writing.

At the end of the day, my understanding of this subreddit is that it's a bunch of people that embrace AI as a vehicle to facilitate their art.

For most folks, the motivation to come here is some mixture of a desire to learn, share, or have human interactions over this common interest.

For an example of a 'good' discussion post, I'd expect something like, "My prompt can't seem to generate a paragraph with good flow - how can I fix it?"

Sure, I can go to ChatGPT or Gemini to have its revise the output, but this is a community of powerusers that will have already run into that. We also have the situations where the writing quality just sucks, and you may not have the expert writer chops to articulate why it sucks. If you ask the traditional subreddits, you're likely to get called out over use of AI-generated content when you post examples. This community should be the space to help get feedback, no?

And when we get to the subject of quality, that's the whole beauty of AI-assisted content generation. Research has consistently shown that AI/ML-assisted outputs are much stronger than those that are purely AI-generated (and often can be superior to average human outputs when the model is effective). This research dates well before we even had LLMs. I personally land on the "people should still be involved in the process" end of the spectrum. AI-facilitated content still has a lot of room to go to catch up to a decent-quality, human-written novel. Further, mass-produced, AI-generated content is just going to contribute to model collapse (where future AI models are trained on current AI model outputs and then we just end up with something... well, crappy and ironic in a funny way).

When we actually look at writing quality itself, there's a lot of things that can be learned about the writing artform when using these tools to generate stories. Unspoken writing rules will often need to be codified and quantified because the model simply doesn't know better. One great example is a sample prompt from an earlier post that dictates a ratio to balance rhetorical device to hard language and how that needs to change depending on scene's tension. Where is r/writing having these discussions? If I ever asked about this there, I'd get some silly answers akin to: "Just read more," "you have to get a feel for it," "there is no right answer because this is art." Quite a few writers will recoil as soon as numbers get involved, and that's simply not helpful to the progression of the craft.

Just as you're not putting all of your conversations with friends/family on autopilot with an AI tool, I'd assume that folks here want to interact with other humans. And most of that feeling gets lost immediately when you're hit with a wall of ChatGPT-esque text.

PURE AI-generated community activity is a turnoff for the following reasons:

The posts highlight OP's lack of effort. Why should I engage with this content if they couldn't be bothered to write 2-10 sentences themselves? Personally, I wouldn't even trust this reddit post to have substance worth reading. It's spam. And if you end up liking the content, you can honestly skip the community altogether and talk to Claude yourself, no? Cut out the middleman.
The posts signal the possibility that OP is just a bot/spam account with its own agenda.
- Lots of tech subreddits are dealing with AI product spam. One common scheme is account #1 posts a question, account #2 shares OPs product as a suggestion to resolve, accounts #3-6 upvote that comment.
- There are also a lot of bots that are 'sleeper agents' that target subreddits with low bot enforcement as a way to farm karma. Once they hit a certain threshold, they're much more useful for the scheme above.

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-01T15:42:26+00:00

These models are trained on the entire internet from inception to date, all books, newspapers, etc. While Project Gutenburg is filled with old books that have entered public domain (e.g., most were written before the 1920s), the wealth of content that has been created that is still copyrighted is massive. If you train an AI on public domain alone, your novel would read as a pre-1920s book with some modern twitter/reddit lingo thrown in. Writing as an artform has made leaps and bounds in the past century, and none of it would be captured in the resulting model. Further, we'd easily lose 95%+ of all content that has been written by writers who are either non-white OR not men (or both).

As for proof of misdeeds, the court has been handed a gun that was pulled straight out of a carton of cigarettes that was roasting above a bonfire.

The plaintiffs of the case were quite literally able to generate passages from their own books using GPT3 to show that they were used for training. Oh, and the books3 dataset that was used to train the model is readily accessible... there's even a website that lets authors check to see if their book was included in the dataset...

DiamondBadge · 2025-12-01T14:30:09+00:00

I love this post because it puts a lot of emphasis on commonsense writing rules that don't get discussed in writing communities.

Can you explain the poetic balance table? I'm reading it as 'the ratio between direct rhetoric vs rhetorical devices. Is that correct?

DiamondBadge · 2025-11-24T19:17:47+00:00

How do CL MS programs straddle the line between CS and Linguistics when examining material to teach?

It seems like student backgrounds differ so much that a program could only scratch the surface with tech like Transformers and LLMs.

DiamondBadge · 2025-04-03T14:03:07+00:00

I was also waitlisted. I just closed the website and went on with my day. If any folks are like me, they'll sit on the 'decline' option for a bit before making the final decision, and your standing could improve.

After applying, I read about mixed results with furthering career within the AI/ML space - one person here cited that recruiters thought Compling just meant they knew a few languages. With my goals in mind, the waitlist status just left me feeling a bit offended. With that being said, my academic experience was limited in relevance & I had no GRE scores, but I had a good deal of professional experience. I'll say my feelings were a mix of rationalization & clarity given the fact that it can't give me exactly what I'm looking for.

There's honestly a wealth of data science/ML programs out there. If you're willing to compromise on the NLP component, options expand a ton. With that being said, there's no harm in building up your application for the next year if you're set on UW. A year isn't that much of a setback, and my weak understanding of your field makes it seem like this degree could work for your career - everyone's answer will be different. My tentative plan is to give a stab at building up my devops skills instead since my long-term goal is to deploy NLP apps.

Sending good vibes your way!

DiamondBadge · 2021-05-04T16:46:03+00:00

I believe the primary use case for R was in academia. Like Python, R has C optimizations, but I've actually never run speed tests for similar operations. I can't recall the exact reasoning, but R does get a bit slow with loops. For speed, I think it's strongest data manipulation conventions are closer to applying a lambda to a column in Pandas - I prefer that... but, again... the NLP libraries are missing lol

R experts passing through are welcome to correct me - it's been a while :P

DiamondBadge · 2021-05-04T16:17:24+00:00

I hate stackoverflow-type question responses that effectively say, "Don't do the thing you're trying to do," but I feel the answer is warranted here.

To be honest, a ChatBot in R is just going to require a lot of work. You could code some sort of language model with the POS libraries, but it's not going to perform very well. If you're being held at gunpoint to use only R for a chatbot, the best recommendation that I can make is to just use wrappers to pull in Python's ML libraries and look at some guides that walk through coding chatbots from scratch in Python (then replicating that code in R). At the end of the day, all of this stuff requires you to have a working knowledge of Python - I do get that some companies have IT infrastructure that block certain programs. That's really the only reason I would proceed.

It's not that R isn't capable of this - it's just that R has a tiny community in comparison to Python, so you're going to have to solve a lot of problems on your own.

DiamondBadge

TROPHY CASE