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.
> 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.
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…
—
You're not using that, neither in the past from what I can tell, nor in this comment.
You're just using a hyphen/minus instead of a colon, that's not an llm-ism
The above isn't slop. It's shit though!
- = hyphen
-- = n-dash
--- = m-dash
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."
Obviously there are exceptions; you can use certain constructions in a way that's still unmistakably human, or use them within a larger context of unmistakably human writing. But in general it makes me think about Orwell's argument against cliches:
> A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
If LLM-isms give readers the impression that I'm too lazy to phrase things in my own words, even if I did in fact phrase things in my own words, then I take that as a sign that I should pick better words!
Granted, I've had a strong desire to write as distinctly and un-cliche-ish-ly as possible since long before ChatGPT's public launch, so I might not be as grumbly as other commenters who feel like this would force them to change how they write.
Possibly, but it's not a necessity. Click baiting (i.e. yt videos) has evolved to stable standards, that's at least my impression.
Also, products often only get improved until they are "good enough", not until they are "good". It happens, but then they just iterate towards the "how bad can I become" baseline from the other side.
AI companies generally are not in the "let's make the best AI possible" business but in the "let's make the most money" business. This just hasn't fully manifest because they get flooded with VC.
And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.
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.
"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.
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.
> While the detectors were “near-perfect” in evaluating essays written by U.S.-born eighth-graders, they classified more than half of TOEFL essays (61.22%) written by non-native English students as AI-generated (TOEFL is an acronym for the Test of English as a Foreign Language).
> It gets worse. According to the study, all seven AI detectors unanimously identified 18 of the 91 TOEFL student essays (19%) as AI-generated and a remarkable 89 of the 91 TOEFL essays (97%) were flagged by at least one of the detectors.
Now I'll have to find something else to overuse: maybe sentences structures around colons, or use of Japanese 「hook brackets」.
It's not X, it's Y, though? Couldn't be me.
No, fuck that. I'm not going to think twice about what I write just to avoid an AI checker, and I will delve into em dashes with gusto if that's what the writing calls for.
I'm not sacrificing the language simply to sound less like AI--that's absolutely a losing game.
And if anyone thinks my hand-crafted prose is AI-generated, they're free to look elsewhere. Right now AI detectors peg my pre-AI work as 30% AI-generated, and I'm certain that number will only increase as LLMs improve.
It depends on your environment, I guess. If you're a student writing an essay or a researcher writing a paper, it's in your best interest to avoid sounding like an LLM, which means going out of your way to avoid certain idioms, even if it means letting go of things you liked to write.
I used to love a spaced en dash (the British English equivalent of the American unspaced em dash), but I wouldn't risk it now.