Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's Not Just X. It's Y

mail.cyberneticforests.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 155 posts

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

#131

Post by maleldil »

beej71 wrote: post #124
Baader-Meinhof wrote: post #5

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.

> It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. No, fuck that. I'm not going to think twice about what I write just to avoid an AI checker, and I will delve into em dashes with gusto if that's what the writing calls for. I'm not sacrificing the language simply to sound less like AI--that's absolutely a losing game. And if anyone thinks my hand-crafted prose is AI-generated, they're free to look elsewhere. Right now AI…

> I'm not going to think twice about what I write just to avoid an AI checker

It depends on your environment, I guess. If you're a student writing an essay or a researcher writing a paper, it's in your best interest to avoid sounding like an LLM, which means going out of your way to avoid certain idioms, even if it means letting go of things you liked to write.

I used to love a spaced en dash (the British English equivalent of the American unspaced em dash), but I wouldn't risk it now.

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

#133

Post by avadodin »

luka2233 wrote: post #90
raincole wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling humans to change how they write just so they won’t be accused of using AI is the most anti-human pro-AI idea imaginable.

AGI Plan to end humanity, act I: communicate so well they will start to communicate horribly, setting back their collective IQ by thousands of years.

Could just as well be AGI's plan to save humanity.

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

#134

Post by benhurmarcel »

atoav wrote: post #120
karim79 wrote: 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 obvi…

Exactly, without talking about automated checkers or publishing policies, if a text gives readers the impression is was LLM-generated it will affect how they judge it.

Recently a contractor presented a small internal tool they made for a very specific task. The UI text gave a direct impression to be entirely LLM-generated with no human edition. It makes the entire tool look vibe-coded, affecting how we judge it. Now I question whether they even reviewed the functionality correctness, which I wouldn't doubt if the UI didn't look generated.

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

#135

Post by vonunov »

queenkjuul wrote: post #85

I'm not dropping emdashes -- though you can always tell mine by their two-hyphen form lol I've also never used an AI detector, and probably never will. In my experience: 1. The people who rely the most on AI writing don't like to admit it. I catch obvious AI hallucinations in my boss's "documentation," and he always insists it was his own human oversight, despite it being very obviously a mistake I've caught Claude (…

> I'm not dropping emdashes -- though you can always tell mine by their two-hyphen form lol

I think of this as a dash (abstract function of punctuation) but not an em dash (concrete typographical form). I see the double hyphen as one of the possible representations of the dash¹ -- and a perfectly well-established one, to be sure² -- along with the em dash and the en dash, either of which can also be used to do the same job, depending on where you are and who you're writing for (the US uses em dashes of varying format (spacing) for that, while much of the UK uses en dashes with spaces to represent the same punctuation abstract). Are you instead conceptualizing the double hyphen as a representation of the em dash glyph?

If that makes sense then I'll leave it at that, but if it doesn't quite, then I have a somewhat longer hair-split I can send if you care for it.

1. A pseudo-glyph, maybe

2. Still acknowledged by Garner's as recently as 2003

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

#136

Post by huflungdung »

Loughla wrote: post #62
huflungdung wrote: post #3

You’re absolutely right. This is the smoking gun. This changes everything.

That is actually what I'm firmly convinced is the most dangerous thing about llm's. No matter what you put, it will always agree with you, and what's worse, it will try to make you think that you're unbelievably smart for saying x. I used one to help me plan a sales route, and it kept fucking it up. Every time I corrected it, it tried that hand wringing vizier sort of ass kissing. It's very off-putting, but I can see…

[dead]

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

#137

Post by cindyllm »

luka2233 wrote: post #90
raincole wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling humans to change how they write just so they won’t be accused of using AI is the most anti-human pro-AI idea imaginable.

AGI Plan to end humanity, act I: communicate so well they will start to communicate horribly, setting back their collective IQ by thousands of years.

[dead]

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

#138

Post by AlecSchueler »

strken wrote: post #109
jdkoeck wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is honestly a very, very naive statement. We are social animals and we naturally gravitate towards devaluing and shaming certain styles of speech. We police speech already! It’s often unfortunate, but it’s not devoid of function. I, for one, am happy with shaming LLM speech. It’s never been so easy to detect lazy thinking.

What do you think about TFA and its contention that perfectly normal language is being targeted by the AI witch-hunt? I personally avoid the em dash, but it has been used in writing for a long, long time.

> perfectly normal language

Define "normal language?"

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

#139

Post by xtiansimon »

tkgally wrote: post #59

> There is danger in evaluating for language patterns over its content I agree, but it’s worth noting that that has been done since long before LLMs. Fifteen years ago, I used to teach a graduate course on academic writing pedagogy. The students and I would read research papers on the teaching of academic writing; we also analyzed textbooks and course syllabuses to get an idea about what was actually being done in cl…

Curious about this approach to writing criticism.

What authors informed the course? What were the course’s main text(s)?

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

#140

Post by StilesCrisis »

thewebguyd wrote: post #35
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the entire point of the article is that they're not AI idioms. They're not "watermarks for text." They're legitimate language constructions that LLMs tend to overuse, but that real humans also use . Real humans do, in fact, say "align with" all the time, just as often as "corresponds." And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.

What's worse is neurodivergent writing, including my own, often resemble AI output. Now it feels like I'm having to alter my own voice in online discussions just to specifically avoid being accused of pasting an AI response. The "AI Detection" tools employed by schools also regularly flag writing from those with Autism, ADHD, and non-native English speakers as being AI generated as well. So, naturally, I can't stand…

It flags "non-native speakers" text as AI generated? Really? This beggars belief.
Post reply on HN