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"Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

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Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#241

Post by TZubiri »

Drupon wrote: post #14

An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.

Either it's LLM generated, or it's written by someone who wants to be ambiguous about using LLMs.

Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist.

I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generated content identifiable as such.

If for some reason you are an em dash lover that was hurt by the LLM debacle, I'm so sorry for your loss, but look who's on your side, give the em dash a funeral and let it go.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#242

Post by TZubiri »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #154

You'd be laughed at if you said that ChatGPT could help you with graduate level mathematics in 2024, but this year, AI models on simple prompts are solving previously unsolved Erdos problems. It seems silly to imagine that there is some fundamental barrier between human intelligence and AI, and that AI could never do many of the things that humans can do. Inferring intent, gauging sentiments, factoring in cultural va…

As mentioned in the article, the point of language is to communicate with other humans, and you need a human to do that.

Mathematics is famously rigorously defined, it's roughly analog to AI beating humans at chess. Sure it's impressive, but it's also something you'd expect machines to be good at.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#243

Post by inopinatus »

TZubiri wrote: post #241
Drupon wrote: post #14

An honest to god article full of em dashes that's not because it was AI but because it was a human using them as a crutch to get around crafting sentences that flow naturally. Almost brings a tear to my eye.

Either it's LLM generated, or it's written by someone who wants to be ambiguous about using LLMs. Either way, I'm not reading it, it's a clanker or a clanker collaborationist. I mean, how would you even write an em dash? There's no button in the keyboard for em dashes, it's not in ascii, it's just not something we write in internet text with, it's a safety watermark put into LLMs by OpenAI to help making LLM generate…

Your argument goes as follows: “I’m incapable of it, therefore no-one is capable of it”.

Followed by, “You should abandon your preferences because I don’t share them”.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#244

Post by anigbrowl »

epihelix wrote: post #222
anigbrowl wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly have their place, but are massively overused in contemporary American prose. This might be slight more of an east coast thing, but that's just a subjective impression that I'm not willing to spend time measuring. To me they come off as faddish, with many writers using them where commas and semicolons would have done just as well. I think their popularity stems from teh fact that provide the sense of a…

It's a fad that has been going strong for centuries in published literature, so I'd guess an awful lot of authors world disagree with you. You can restructure any sentence to use fewer forms of punctuation -- but if you do that, you'll lose nuance. And nuance, in writing, is a very fine thing.

The em-dash has indeed been around for centuries, but the fad I refer to is its overuse in contemporary American prose. IF you look at Google Books n-gram viewer, you can see it went through a surge of popularity over a few decades that then fell off sharply.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E2%80%93&year...

It's also notable that the em-dash is approved in American Manuals of Style, while discouraged in British ones. I was unable to find longitudinal data for the em-dash's use in magazines, blogs etc., but AI summaries suggest it's 3-4 times more used in those contexts than in news reports.

Like strawberry ice cream or apple pie, nuance is certainly a fine thing; but a surfeit of it becomes cloying, and the antipathy toward the omnipresence of the em-dash in LLM-generated prose, along with other kinds of literary expression like contrast and comparison, suggests to me that people have had more than enough of it.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#245

Post by antonvs »

toddmorey wrote: post #135
Aurornis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. This takes the form of people who spin up a lot of "agents" and give them personalities like security d…

I always imagine the model rolling its silicon eyes when it’s assigned a personality (“you are an expert growth hacker”) at the start of the prompt. Was that ever actually shown to be effective? Is it still?

The reason it seems suspicious is that it's phrased in a way that's oriented towards humans. I haven't tested this, but I suspect you'd get similar results if you said something like "orient your response to that of a growth hacker." Either one is likely to have the desired effect on the stochastic result.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#246

Post by tgma »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #199
Aurornis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I use AI for all my medical questions and doctors use AI to write software, and we both smirk at the quality the other person is getting from it. There is an interesting third group emerging: People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. This takes the form of people who spin up a lot of "agents" and give them personalities like security d…

> People who acknowledge the quality problem, but think they can deal with it by applying more AI to the output. Brute Force: if it doesn't work, you're just not using enough. What if they're right though?

It does not have to be brushed away as "brute force" necessarily. We can, and do, build more reliable systems out of less reliable components. In fact, most industrial engineering accepts some defect rate and builds margins around it.

Software is no different. Even without AI, you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries. You just tend to accept the risk because you have some idea of what the failure modes are and can work around it or manage the risk in some other way (buy literal insurance.)

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#247

Post by inopinatus »

113 wrote: post #228
hyperpape wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First sentence: > In my Ottawa life, every Tuesday evening, I take two gym classes back to back—boxing and the pompously named “body sculpt,” which makes me discover muscles I didn’t know I had. The em-dash matches how you'd speak out loud. You'd say "I take two classes every Tuesday back to back, boxing and 'body sculpt'. Weird name." (Parts of that sentence did flow oddly, but not because of the em-dash). Grammaria…

Good writing shouldn't just be how you talk out loud.

Good writing doesn’t exclude it.

Re: "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"

#250

Post by jasonfarnon »

s_tec wrote: post #91
xp84 wrote: post #45

The ending is a really powerful point. Most people apparently agree on two things: 1. AI is a great boon for all tasks and specialties we don’t have the skills to do ourselves. Understandable, since (A) we’re ill equipped to see the flaws in its output because it isn’t our area of expertise, and (B) it often can unlock great gains because if we trust it, we then don’t have to pay and wait for humans to do that thing.…

It seems to be a general principle: If AI is better than you at something, you use it. If AI is worse than you, you don't. Each time the frontier models get better, I see another wave of AI doubters suddenly become believers. People say things like, "AI couldn't code last year, but now I use it for everything!" Interesting. Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or wh…

"Now we know how that the person who said this has the coding skills of a Claude Opus 4.5 or whenever the frontier was when they flipped."

Well, once folks like Linus Torvalds concede, this doesn't carry much sting.

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