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jstanleytoday at 9:32 AM1 replyview on HN

It's not novel to me! I see it all the time... when talking to LLMs.


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strogonofftoday at 10:17 AM

If you have only seen it in LLM output, then it is clearly novel to you when it comes to actual writing. “Speech” in “this turn of speech is novel to you” is intended to mean human written speech.

I will rephrase: if you see a phrase in human speech that you have not seen used in human speech before, don’t penalise human creativity by saying it came from an LLM.

More specifically, the pattern you continue to latch onto dominates writing and has done so for decades. Right here on HN you can find instances of not merely “inanimate subject + verb” but specifically the phrase “bias compounds” from 5 years ago and beyond.

Other examples in use by humans all the time:

— River overflows

— Camera clicks

— LLM hallucinates

— Engine roars

— Secrets rest

— CD player stutters

— Ecosystem explodes

— Door invites

— Stock dips

— Airplane crashes

Antropomorphisation more generally and metaphor even more generally have existed since forever. Authors have played with form and tried to convey the point in different interesting ways since forever. Do you think Homer vibe-wrote The Odyssey?

Yes, LLM chatbots make it exceedingly easy—and it is one of their societal harms—but please do not discredit creativity by insinuating the author didn’t do the work themselves.

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