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Comment by jazzyjackson

3 days ago

100%, although if people are getting 90% of their interaction from a robot, one may start to pick up some vocal tics and colloquialisms from machine world. a kind of robo-pidgin.

English isn't my first language, and I'm treating every opportunity to use the language as a way to learn, including extensive discussions with AI at everyday work. Sadly, I'm not noticing any unnatural wording in its replies.

I'm starting to worry about being gradually affected by AI's style through heavy use. It will make me so sad if one day my written piece sent to others is considered to be AI-generated, while it's written with real effort trying to make it sound natural.

  • Just accept that it will happen, and it will likely happen to all of us. It has already happened to a colleague of mine, and they are a highly educated native English speaker.

Irony being, robots are averaging our best speech patterns. So we're really just syncing humanity's speech patterns, with LLMs acting as proxy.

  • No it's not averaging. That's only pretraining. Post-training is RL for high approval ratings which isn't necessarily what people speak like but what was rewarded.

  • Yes this homogenization of not just way of speaking but way of thinking is very undesirable to me. But hey some people might accept the borg.

I've definitely picked up some weird claudeisms. I even know the em-dash keyboard shortcut now.

  • Macs make it really easy to type a certain few special characters -- em-dash among them. I'm typing on a Windows laptop and I know there's alt+numpad codes but this laptop doesn't have a numpad and I can never remember those. I used to know a few many years ago, but I've forgotten all of them.

    Access to a wider array of special characters is also one of the really nice things about touch keyboards on mobile or tablet. Keyboards are great for fast, accurate typing but not for going beyond the basic character set.

  • I used to use semi-colons and parenthesis in my semi-formal writing, but now I find myself reaching for em-dash instead. I'm not sure if my tone has changed as well but LLM-writing has probably influenced me more than I realize.

Yuuuup. Which I guess makes it even harder to detect what's AI and what's not.

  • Detecting what is AI and what is good writing is easier than ever now that the AI common speech patterns are established. Reading a well written piece it’s like walking through the park on a beautiful day in comparison to dragging your legs through quicksand