Sentence constructions like this definitely scream AI: "That's a reasonable bias for an exploratory tool. It's a ruinous one for a triage queue..."

I will upgrade the "why it matters" to "and now AI output is part of the training data". A day is coming when the punched-up AI verbiage will be the norm and hard to distinguish unless you're from the previous generation. Sort of in the way that I miss some aspects of Usenet.

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genxy 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I had a dude in a conversation non-ironically use "load-bearing."

I could only follow up with, "that is a genuine insight."

Not a single person visibly flinched in pain.

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scottyah 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Careful, you might have been talking to a Real Engineer. Perhaps even a structural variant that use this phrase pretty much daily.

	▲	genxy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We weren't talking about "seeing a man about a horse barn" we were talking about software.

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ChrisClark 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I use load-bearing all the time, mostly in jokes about something

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hhh 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yeah? it’s not that weird of a term

	▲	dymk 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s weird when someone starts using terminology that is heavily over-indexed by LLMs out of the blue.

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alexjplant 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.

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Avicebron 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a scary thought, llm's training on llm output. People trained by default of ubiquity to think and read llm output produce their own llm-esque writing.

Seems stifling. We'll need someway to reward human creativity and out-of-bounds thinking before our greatest corpus of human intellect is a bounded by whenever and whatever was trained on.

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adrianN 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Writing and later the printing press have already considerably stifled human expressiveness. Language used to be noch more fragmented and diverse before mass media (or the Bible in every household). In my grandmother’s time you would have difficulty understanding people from three villages down the road.

	▲	airstrike 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not sure enabling people three villages apart to communicate with each other counts as "stifling human expressiveness"

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tskj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't understand this mindset, why is it people on here think humans have some kind of magical ability machines don't or can't? Five years ago I would never have predicted this kind of human chauvinism here. It's some kind of weird romanticism almost.

	▲	Sharlin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe because everything LLM-written is written in the same style with no creativity, diversity, or idiosyncrasies? If all humans suddenly started writing in a single, bland, corporate style, that would be a tragedy, LLMs or not.

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ctoth 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So is it that humans are inherently creative, machines could never do what we do? Or is it that humans will only replicate our training data, and so we have to ensure that machines don't bound our training data? Or are you going meta and gently pointing out the absurdity? (I hope it's this one!)

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gdulli 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Human creativity is not only not being rewarded, but people are increasingly talking like consuming too few tokens is something that's actively used against them.