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It's Not Just X. It's Y

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111–120 of 155 posts

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#111

I like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.

Nah pry my lists of 3 from my cold dead hands. And my emdashes sometime after that. It's not X, it's Y , though? Couldn't be me.

It's a useful construction. "It's not true love, you matched with her on Hinge last week and have never met her, please don't send her $1000 in Apple gift cards" is punchy.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#112

I like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.

I utterly detest the idea of having AI potentially lock me out of my own writing style.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#113

I like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.

I don't think so at all. Models are trained in many ways and are changing aggressively, resulting in different patterns in different regions, domains, languages, and will be different 3, 5, 10 years down the line. Having everyone try to learn and adapt around how to stay within very magical, fuzzy, and ever-changing boundaries to avoid appearing to be an AI, instead of focusing on producing good writing or communicat…

> will be different 3, 5, 10 years down the line.

Possibly, but it's not a necessity. Click baiting (i.e. yt videos) has evolved to stable standards, that's at least my impression.

Also, products often only get improved until they are "good enough", not until they are "good". It happens, but then they just iterate towards the "how bad can I become" baseline from the other side.

AI companies generally are not in the "let's make the best AI possible" business but in the "let's make the most money" business. This just hasn't fully manifest because they get flooded with VC.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#114
I remember someone posting about the most human of all traits being reassuring to see: Typos. I'm pretty sure people are not as averse to leaving or finding typos in text as they were 5 years ago, as these days it's a signal of humanity.

Same has been applying to art for a while. Several artists who have an "AI-ish" style have been wrongfully crucified for using AI. And been forced to post videos of their process end to end, in order to prove that they aren't using AI. It's a thing for artists to post their new stuff with: "AI could never do this."

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#115
post #89
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my position with this stuff. It became part of the LLM loop because it’s used a lot- it’s used a lot because it’s effective. Now we’re going to stop using effective rhetorical methods because they imply AI, even if we know we’re not using AI? It reminds me of, as a teenager, asking my dad if he ever saw Led Zeppelin live. He hadn’t, because he didn’t really like fans of Led Zeppelin and didn’t want to be asso…

An em dash looks like this — You're not using that, neither in the past from what I can tell, nor in this comment. You're just using a hyphen/minus instead of a colon, that's not an llm-ism

I like to use a lazy variant -- it's not a double dash, or a weirdly written plus, it's a an em-dash that says "I don't even have this key on my keyboard, are you actually using alt-codes or what am I missing?". Not with a shout or a whisper, but with the quiet courage of just being -- but not an incomplete representation of a whole, but rather the fullness of that very distillation of honest, simple pragmatism. Not less, just different.

The above isn't slop. It's shit though!

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#116

I remember someone posting about the most human of all traits being reassuring to see: Typos. I'm pretty sure people are not as averse to leaving or finding typos in text as they were 5 years ago, as these days it's a signal of humanity. Same has been applying to art for a while. Several artists who have an "AI-ish" style have been wrongfully crucified for using AI. And been forced to post videos of their process end…

Slightly off topic, I'm not sure, but way back in the day (2000ish) a friend of mine used PERL scripts to scrape all the big databases which existed at the time, namely IMDB.

He used PERL for scraping and the same for generating "new" content with what he had scraped. He made a bunch of static websites with ads. The sites connected to each other. Sports, Celebrities, Movies, you name it. He had a formula.

Those sites were profitable enough that he could travel the world and have fun, basically. His mother collected the cheques from Google and cashed them into his account.

Now to get to the final point here, his secret was simply TYPO INJECTION to avoid Google's then embryotic duplicate content detection.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#117
post #95
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it hasn't escaped your notice that the LLMs don't tend to stick to just the one set of idioms/devices. They're constantly running new batches of them into the ground

It's not just "It's not just X; it's Y", it's other stuff too

Congratulations, you've made the meme recursive.

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#118
post #40

"So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny." This is honestly both terrifying and well arti…

no its not terrifying. its just raising the level of writing, if you are using not x but y then you fucking better justify the need to use a negation

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah pry my lists of 3 from my cold dead hands. And my emdashes sometime after that. It's not X, it's Y , though? Couldn't be me.

I think the real tell is when Y~=X. It's just performative. Like genuinely formative (the other tell is real/actual/genuine over a weak claim).

i was just yesterday yelling at Gemini for telling me, five times in a row, that it "had found the absolute truth of the problem" when it was wrong all 5 times lol

Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y

#120
post #40

"So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny." This is honestly both terrifying and well arti…

Last week I read through 10 project proposals by students. Two of those ticked all boxes for LLM writing throughout their full text. Not that I checked for LLM-markers specifically, but if a text makes you go: wait a minute, am I reading the output of an LLM? only to then present you with more markers also content-wise, that will have an impact on the human reading the text.

And it should. If someone sends me an obvious copy-paste mass email it also has an impact on how serious I take that email to be meant as an actionable proposal targeted at me specifically.

If they half-ass their proposal which has to do with language I can reasonably infer they may also half-ass the real world implementation which in this case also had to do with language. If you're unable to describe your own idea on half a page of paper in your own words, maybe the students who are able to do so should be treated fair.

I don't care wheter or not they use LLMs, in fact do. But engage with the ideas and results and convince me you really care about them.

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