alt Hacker NewsI noticed that despite really liking Karpathy and the blog, I was am kind of wincing/involuntarily reacting to the LLM-like "It's not X, its Y"-phrases:
> it's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer
> it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation
There would be no reaction from me on this 3 years ago, but now this sentence structure is ruined for me
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I used to use a lot of em dashes normally in my writing - they were my go-to replacements for commas and semicolons
But I had to change how I write because people started calling my writing “AI generated”
You’re absolutely right!
Jk jk, now that you pointed it out I can’t unsee it.
I hated these sentences way before LLMs, at least in the context of an explanation.
> it's not just a website you go like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer
This type of sentence, I call rhetorical fat. Get rid of this fat and you obtain a boring sentence that repeats what has been said in the previous one.
Not all rhetorical fats are equal, and I must admit I find myself eyerolling on the "little spirit" part more than about the fatness.
I understand the author wants to decorate things and emphasize key elements, and the hate I feel is only caused by the incompatible projection of my ideals to a text that doesn't belong to me.
> it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation.
That's unjustified conceptual stress.
That could be a legitimate answer to a question ("No, no, it's not just about that, it's more about this"), but it's a text. Maybe the text wants you to be focused, maybe the text wants to hype you; this is the shape of the hype without the hype.
"I find image generation is cooler when paired with text generation."
Yeah, came to read Karpathy's thoughts, but might as well ask an LLM myself..
I cannot unsee this anymore and it ruins the whole internet experience for me
Same here, had to configure ChatGPT to stop making these statements. Also had to configure bunch of other stuff to make it bland when answering questions.
Same, I cringe when I read this structure.
It's not text - it's clickbait distillied to grammar.
Very broadly, AI sentence-structure and word choice is recursing back into society, changing how humans use language. The Economist recently had a piece on word usage of British Parliament members. They are adopting words and phrases commonly seen in AI.
We're embarking on a ginormous planetary experiment here.