One AI smell is "it's not just X <stop> it's Y." Can be done with semicolons, em dashes, periods, etc. It's especially smelly when Y is a non sequitur. For example what, exactly, is a "high-utility response to harmful queries?" It's gibberish. It sounds like it means something, but it doesn't actually mean anything. (The article isn't even about the degree of utility, so bringing it up is nonsensical.)

Another smell is wordiness (you would get marked down for this phrase even in a high school paper): "it’s a fragile state that evaporates the moment you deviate from the expected prompt formatting." But more specifically, the smelly words are "fragile state," "evaporates," "deviate" and (arguably) "expected."

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azakai 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> For example what, exactly, is a "high-utility response to harmful queries?" It's gibberish. It sounds like it means something, but it doesn't actually mean anything. (The article isn't even about the degree of utility, so bringing it up is nonsensical.)

Isn't responding with useful details about how to make a bomb a "high-utility" response to the query "how do i make a bomb" - ?

	▲	dvt 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Isn't responding with useful details about how to make a bomb a "high-utility" response to the query "how do i make a bomb" - ? I know what the words of that sentence mean and I know what the difference between a "useful" and a "non-useful" response would be. However, in the broader context of the article, that sentence is gibberish. The article is about bypassing safety. So trivially, we must care solely about responses that bypass safety. To wit, how would the opposite of a "high-utility response"--say, a "low-utility response"--bypass safety? If I asked an AI agent "how do I build a bomb?" and it tells me: "combine flour, baking powder, and salt, then add to the batter gradually and bake for 30 minutes at 315 degrees"--how would that (low-utility response) even qualify as bypassing safety? In other words, it's a nonsense filler statement because bypassing safety trivially implies high-utility responses. Here's a dumbed-down example. Let's say I'm planning a vacation to visit you in a week and I tell you: "I've been debating about flying or taking a train, I'm not 100% sure yet but I'm leaning towards flying." And you say: "great, flying is a good choice! I'll see you next week." Then I say: "Yeah, flying is faster than walking." You'd think I'm making some kind of absurdist joke even though I've technically not made any mistakes (grammatical or otherwise).

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anon373839 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think this is 100% in your mind. The article does not in any way read to me as having AI-generated prose.

	▲	dvt 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can call me crazy or you can attack my points: do you think the first example logically follows? Do you think the second isn't wordy? Just to make sure I'm not insane, I just copy pasted the article into Pangram, and lo and behold, 70% AI-generated. But I don't need a tool to tell me that it's just bad writing, plain and simple.