alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
> It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them
That's really unfortunate though. It's like Michael Bolton from Office Space: "No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
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.
> 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 detectors peg my pre-AI work as 30% AI-generated, and I'm certain that number will only increase as LLMs improve.
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 communicating as it is natural to them, seems like a recipe for bad thinking and arbitrary reactions.
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.
I utterly detest the idea of having AI potentially lock me out of my own writing style.
It's like knowing to stay away from a Github repo because it has a readme that's full of emoji bullet points.
Clean. This comment is the right shape.
I agree with the feeling. But if you agree with the analysis of the article, this cat & mouse game ultimately amounts to stop disclosing our reasoning threads through commonly accepted linguistic structures. That's quite a price to pay as a society...
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.
Humans are just trying to do what Pangram is trying to do: guess what is AI, badly. The post argues against this:
> In the end, shaming people for writing that gets flagged as AI can lead people to sidestep structures the model has learned from us: structures that are effective tools for argumentation. We take the tools of critical thinking out of the kit at the time we most need them.