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It's Not Just X. It's Y

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41–50 of 155 posts

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in.

If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.

Or those of us that use a full featured editor when writing md!

This reminds me of another em dash+AI related topic: I've noticed LLMs have an extreme bias towards spaces around the dash while people can go either way with it.

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

#43
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A signal is not the same thing as a guarantee. Both of your points so far, i.e. your provided text & that bots often bother to replace em dashes to avoid detection, actually support that it is a signal though.

The stronger signal is the grammatical structure, not the specific glyph used.

The stronger yet signal is both combined! This glyph, that emoji, a given sentence structure, that formatting, a certain phrase. The more you notice -> the stronger the signal, the more you miss/discard -> the weaker the signal.

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

#44
> Because if Pangram's AI system found me guilty, that's the end of my career. That's literally extortion.

How is this different from humans? When I went to high school, my teachers extorted me too. Especially subjects like English and unlike Math, where evaluation is 100% subjective.

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

#45

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.

Well reading between the lines I don’t think they’re saying all of those uses are AI. They’re legitimate constructs, like the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, all of which I used to use regularly. But now they’re AI tells so I use them sparingly.

Sociolinguistic register happened.

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

#46

> In the end, shaming people for writing that gets flagged as AI can lead people to sidestep structures the model has learned from us It's interesting why LLMs generate constructions like this more frequently than they presumably exist in the training set. I wonder if this is some sort of mode collapse caused by post training, and/or maybe because they are training on synthetic data so these things become self-perpet…

Its not model collapse nor does it have anything to do with training data frequency. It's simply RLHF where the humans hired to tune the conversational style of these LLMs preferred certain idioms over others and so the reward function for these LLMs gravitated toward using them.

If LLMs generated text based on training data frequency they'd likely be some of the most vulgar and hostile things ever created. The internet is full of insults, profanity, and low effort content. The repeated phrases are a side effect of reward optimization rather than some kind of model collapse.

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

#48
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…

There are plenty of idioms, find a different idiom, tough titties.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in.

If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.

There's something similar in Microsoft Word, Ctrl-Alt-Minus on the numpad.
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