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Baader-Meinhof 3 hours ago

I 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.

rpdillon an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

lobf 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is my position with this stuff. It became part of the LLM loop because it’s used a lot- it’s used a lot because it’s effective.

Now we’re going to stop using effective rhetorical methods because they imply AI, even if we know we’re not using AI?

It reminds me of, as a teenager, asking my dad if he ever saw Led Zeppelin live. He hadn’t, because he didn’t really like fans of Led Zeppelin and didn’t want to be associated with them.

As an ashamed fan of certain bands I get this instinct but I also promised to myself when I heard this that I would do my best to not allow other people to influence how I thought about things I enjoyed.

On the same note I’m trying to be “braver” about things like em-dashes, though my personally style has always been to use them as I did in this comment- like this, which I guess distinguishes me, until an LLM picks that up too…

omoikane 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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."

pveierland 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

add-sub-mul-div an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's like knowing to stay away from a Github repo because it has a readme that's full of emoji bullet points.

userbinator 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I actually find the "AI idioms" rather less grating than emoji-vomit. That said, I don't know why certain LLM output seems to be full of the latter; certainly no real human writing I've seen has that style, but perhaps it's a result of training on data that probably should've been done without.

spiralcoaster 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought I was the only one that did this. Double stay away if at the end you find out it was "made with love"

chipotle_coyote 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What's worse is neurodivergent writing, including my own, often resemble AI output. Now it feels like I'm having to alter my own voice in online discussions just to specifically avoid being accused of pasting an AI response.

The "AI Detection" tools employed by schools also regularly flag writing from those with Autism, ADHD, and non-native English speakers as being AI generated as well.

So, naturally, I can't stand the phrase "write like AI" when these things tend to come up because no, there are no humans that "write like AI" it's the models that have stolen the literary devices from us and now have poisoned them.

SubiculumCode an hour ago | parent [-]

That is an empirical question. Do you have empirical sources you'd care to share?

Maxatar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The article is not God, just because it claims something doesn't mean we have to accept it.

For better or worse (and pretty much for worse), these usages have become AI idioms. Language evolves over time, things that used to be harmless become offensive, certain terms end up taking on the complete opposite meaning than their original meaning, and we are watching certain language patterns and idioms become watermarks for AI and while it sucks, it doesn't make it false.

chipotle_coyote an hour ago | parent [-]

I'll just quote from the article, which no one claimed was God and that's really a weird way to dismiss it, but you do you:

"We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought."

And, I'm sorry (I'm not), but I am not going to just roll over and shrug and say "welp, guess we all need to dumb our writing down to keep well-meaning idiots from screeching 'AI! AI! AI! WHOOP! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!' at us." That isn't the evolution of language. It's Idiocracy.

crooked-v an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Once upon a time, using em dashes—which hardly anyone knew how to conveniently invoke—was a fun writing quirk to have.

Now I'll have to find something else to overuse: maybe sentences structures around colons, or use of Japanese 「hook brackets」.

ohyoutravel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well reading between the lines I don’t think they’re saying all of those uses are AI. They’re legitimate constructs, like the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, all of which I used to use regularly. But now they’re AI tells so I use them sparingly.

card_zero 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sociolinguistic register happened.

wazdra 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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...