User:SHB2000/Synthetic nominations
Opens ChatGPT: write me a max 600 word nomination statement for u4c on wikimedia meta wiki. my username is user:SHB2000 and I need you to answer "Tell us who you are, why you are applying, and your relevant experience" and "Please describe what do you hope to do if elected" as separate sections.
- I am SHB2000, an active contributor primarily on English Wikivoyage, where I serve as a sysop, bureaucrat, and checkuser. I am also active on Commons, Wikibooks, and Meta-Wiki with administrative roles. My experience includes counter-vandalism, handling abuse, closing discussions, and assessing consensus.
- As a checkuser, I work on sockpuppetry and cross-wiki abuse cases, requiring discretion and adherence to privacy standards. These roles have given me practical experience applying policy fairly in complex situations.
- I am applying to the U4C to support consistent and fair enforcement of the Universal Code of Conduct across Wikimedia projects.
- If elected, I will focus on fair, proportionate, and evidence-based decisions, with clear communication where possible. I aim to support transparency while respecting privacy, and to work collaboratively with local communities.
- My goal is to help ensure the U4C is a balanced and trusted body for handling complex and cross-wiki conduct issues.
And there we have it: a beautifully crafted nomination statement. Polished and efficient, too. Forget all the other candidates who had to actually put time into explaining why they think they're suitable for the role; real efficiency is when you spend as little time as possible and do it all in one edit.
This process is remarkably simple. All that needs to be done is to dump all your permissions to the GPT, and voilà! The chatbot will do all the heavylifting other candidates do manually, all while pretending to have personality. So devoid, in fact, that some of the content generated might be pure horseshit, but that's okay: it's called efficiency.
To maintain this streak of efficiency, the next step is to walk away and forget about the nomination. Laziness? Nah, you're just proud of your superb time-management skills getting a chatbot to write a very tedious procedure of writing a whole 150 words – yes, one hundred and fifty fucking words. (You don't realise how difficult that is? What a pity.) So tedious, in fact, that the onus of deciphering your text should go to the community. That's what we call peak efficiency.
The community then spends hours breaking down the very polished prose, all written in a single go. People start wondering if what was written was pure hallucination, or even if the person they are voting for actually exists inside the corporate-HR-filtered word soup. It turns the nomination process into a scavenger hunt where the prize is finding a single sentence that wasn't generated by a server farm in West Des Moines.
Inevitably, someone will notice this unusual level of efficiency, pointing out a rather random-ass website called "zerogpt.me" or "gptzero.com". At this point, you hit panic mode and have three choices:
- a) blatantly lie about it, even though it's incredibly obvious;
- b) claim it's a language barrier, even though there's always the option of writing the nomination in your own language and using DeepL or Google Translate, or;
- c) claim it's to "improve the flow" or "be professional".
- (This shouldn't be confused with actual professionalism, which, at the very least, involves having a bit of respect for the project to use something called « your brain ». In actual professional statements, the length of the statement is often directly proportional to how little the candidate actually has to say.)
Your efficiency then pisses off the entire community, performing really poorly (regardless of whether it's a permission request or if it's an election). The nomination stops being a reflection of your user history; rather a test of copying and pasting text from a browser tab and converting it into wikitext. Without having ever crafted an original thought, you've undergone the entire nomination/election process. But, but, but...that's just the price of efficiency!
TLDR and in all seriousness: if you can't be bothered to write something as simple as a nomination statement to explain why you should be trusted with said permissions, why should the community be bothered to read them? This isn't about using AI for copyedits/proofreading, which is completely fine; this is about using AI to write entire statements, which is plain lazy and an utter insult to the community.
I also fully recognise that English is not everyone's stronghold; however, that is not a valid excuse to let AI write your nomination for you – in such cases, it is almost always better to write a nomination statement in your native language and use a non-LLM to translate that into English. Nobody is going to judge you for language imperfections.