> It's the thing that minimizes the loss during the RLHF phase, and the RLHF phase is the one that's aimed at maximizing engagement (it's literally trained on that).

I don't think RLHF is the biggest reason its style is the way it is.

A lot of it is that it's trained on everything they could get their hands on, which includes domain-specific literature and books that go all the way back to the advent of writing, and then will pick up habits that are common in some specific domain or in 19th century literature etc. that are less common in most modern writing when no attempt is being made to do otherwise.

Do you really think that RLHF humans were requesting more em-dash?

> Websites have pretty much stopped using ad-blocker-blockers, it seems that it's not a fight worth fighting for them. Does that mean that ad-blockers are useless?

Websites have pretty much stopped using them because they realized readers with ad blockers will stop using the site sooner than stop using their ad blocker, and since websites have a network effect, it's better to let a minority of readers block ads when having them makes it more likely they'll distribute links to the site. And because it's the user who controls the browser for web pages, which gives ad blockers a decisive advantage.

> Most people don't even care about ads, I don't think they care about slop either, that's why there's slop posts and obnoxious websites that are unreadable without an ad blocker. A slop blocker used by 10-20% of the internet users wouldn't change the calculation more than ad blockers did.

Sites don't want users to use ad blockers, but having a user with an ad blocker is still better for them than not having the user at all, because of the network effect.

Whereas many sites don't want slop at all, and then if slop detectors work they'll put them in the site itself and block the slop for 100% of users. At which point the slop generators have a 100% incentive to find a workaround instead of a 20% incentive, which is different.