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
It's Not Just X. It's Y
91–100 of 155 posts
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#92In one of the essays posted here, which was, ironically, about AI in education, a sentence, that an AI could not possibly write, that I could possibly write, because of its length and unusual structure, before finally reaching the verb, went on for 25 words. I don't know if it was written that way to show trust in the reader's intelligence, show disregard for reaching a wide audience, show a demonstration of skill, o…
Your first sentence is 45 words and contains 9 commas. > I don't know if it was written that way to show trust in the reader's intelligence, show disregard for reaching a wide audience, show a demonstration of skill, or was artifact of someone just thinking at that level.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#93I 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.
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.
Obviously there are exceptions; you can use certain constructions in a way that's still unmistakably human, or use them within a larger context of unmistakably human writing. But in general it makes me think about Orwell's argument against cliches:
> A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
If LLM-isms give readers the impression that I'm too lazy to phrase things in my own words, even if I did in fact phrase things in my own words, then I take that as a sign that I should pick better words!
Granted, I've had a strong desire to write as distinctly and un-cliche-ish-ly as possible since long before ChatGPT's public launch, so I might not be as grumbly as other commenters who feel like this would force them to change how they write.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#94 Turing Test
https://xkcd.com/329/Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of idioms, find a different idiom, tough titties.
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
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#96"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…
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#97Anyway, yeah, people trusting AI to do a better job in reasoning than fellow humans, without justification, worries me. We have no formal theory of informal reasoning (that LLMs mimic), so we cannot verify it any better than with humans.
You have to trust someone, to ground your beliefs. Trusting AI is just trusting some other people (who trained it) by proxy. Once you realize it, you might as well try to trust people you know.
Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#98Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#99Re: It's Not Just X. It's Y
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like knowing to stay away from a Github repo because it has a readme that's full of emoji bullet points.
I actually find the "AI idioms" rather less grating than emoji-vomit. That said, I don't know why certain LLM output seems to be full of the latter; certainly no real human writing I've seen has that style, but perhaps it's a result of training on data that probably should've been done without.