Comment by alfonsodev
9 days ago
Anyone else has noticed the "is not about X it's about Y" pattern more and more present in how people talk, at least on Youtube is brutal, I follow some health gurus and WOW, I hope they are just reading the chatGPT assisted script, but if they can't catch the patterns definitively they are spreading it.
I refuse to get contaminated with this speech pattern, so I try to rephrase when needed to say what it is, not what is not and then what it is, if that makes sense.
Some examples in the AI rant :
> Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
> This isn’t about quality. This isn’t about learning. This is about control.
> This isn’t just about one closed PR. It’s about the future of AI-assisted development.
Probably there are more, and I start feeling like an old person when people talk to me like this and I complain, to then refuse to continue the conversation, but I feel like I'm the grumpy asshole.
It's not about AI changing how we talk, it's about the cringe that it produces and the suspicion that the speech was AI generated. ( this one was on propose )
I didn't see it as a changed pattern of speech, more like more texts/scripts edited or written by LLMs.
But I could be wrong, I am from a non-English speaking country, where everybody around me has English as a second language. I assume that patterns like this would take longer to grow in my environment than in an English-speaking environment.
As someone who grades and works with college students in writing classes, it's (for better or for worse) not a big change... in the old days I'd give critical feedback on "SAT English" in essays, and now I give critical feedback on "robotic language".
‘Let that sink in’ is my cue to stop reading now.
Or simply zone out if it’s someone actually talking.
I think this is based on training from sites like reddit. Highly active and pseudo-intellectual redditors have had a habit of speaking in patterns like this for many years in my experience. It is grating and I hope I never pick up the habit from LLMs or real people.
In some sense, it's good to talk about what you aren't saying, to be more informative and precise.
But like, all of these statements are basically ampliative statements, to make it more grand and even more ambiguous.
Everything being done “quietly” is another one that now grates on me.
Quiet chaos.