Glad to see this posted - I have a UK trip coming up in a few months, and as a conscientious objector to the smartphone duopoly, this article will save me some irritation.
My teenager recently asked me why I write like a chatbot, apparently unaware that some human beings prefer to write in complete sentences with attention to details like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization, and that LLMs were trained on this sort of writing.
This makes me think of the fad where people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame, because it somehow connotes authenticity. I'm sure some people are already embracing a bit of sloppiness in their writing as a signal of humanity; I'm equally sure that future chatbots will learn to do the same.
"In June 2020, PepsiCo and The Quaker Oats Company made a commitment to change the name and image of Aunt Jemima, recognizing that they do not reflect our core values.
We want to thank everyone who has made us part of their family over the years, and look forward to starting a new chapter as the Pearl Milling Company."
There's a bit in Anathem about the secular society sometimes having their literacy degenerate to such an extent that they stop using alphabetic / phonetic writing systems and revert to pictographic or ideographic systems. Immediately made me think of the hospital scene in Idiocracy... and also the way some people make heavy use of emojis.
On the other hand, Korean ditched the ideographic Hanja (Chinese Character) writing system because it was too difficult to learn, in favour of a much simpler phonetic one. In Japan, the classical Kanji Chinese writing system was considered a prestige language and was customarily not taught to ordinary folks; the modern Hiragana script evolved as an easy-to-learn alternative, (initially) used heavily by women who were often not taught Kanji.
Of course, Chinese characters are not pictographic and haven't been for a few thousand years, but they are still largely ideographic.
> having their literacy degenerate to such an extent that they stop using alphabetic / phonetic writing systems and revert to pictographic or ideographic systems
What about reverting to referencing moving pictures?
Or was this intended to be self-referential and I missed the joke? :)
The creator of OpenClaw, for example, has come to appreciate grammatical / spelling errors in human writing (as he said in a recent Lex Fridman interview).
Sure, but when you see someone holding up a lav mic between their thumb and forefinger, that's not audio engineering; that has to be social signaling, or perhaps uninformed mimicry.
It's uninformed mimicry. Someone very close to me (I won't name names!) bought one and did it the other day for their business and I was absolutely shocked when I saw their draft video. I asked them what they thought the clip was for.
It's a massive trend all over IG and TikTok these days as there's a lot of mobile-friendly consumer gear that brings your Social Media Content up a fairly large way for fairly low cost. Ironically, the mimicry probably spreads because those that know what they're doing partially or fully conceal it which is by definition less likely to be noticed and therefore imitated by first timers/novices.
I'm given to understand that you've got to have your mic pretty close up to keep noise down. You don't have to eat it, but it wants to be close enough that it's going to be in frame.
Ed: I'm sure there's cargo culting going on but the visibility of the mic isn't only performative.
The thing they’re describing is people hand holding lapel mics right up to their mouth, rather than clipping them to their lapel or shirt or anything (where I assume they’re designed to go still). Seems more ‘indie filmmaker’ where actually clipping it on seems too polished, and why would you trust someone who’s from Big Lapel Mic on TikTok.
This lead to other people clipping them onto random objects to make fun of the trend for a while.
I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context. Not like I have a perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :)
This applies not only work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.
unrelated but I've never understood how to put a smiley at the end of parenthetical sentences (which comes up surprisingly often for me since I use smileys a lot and also like using parentheses). Just the smiley as an end parentheses (like this :) feels off but adding another parentheses (like this :) ) makes it look like it should be nested which causes problems since I also tend to nest parenthetical sentences (like (this)).
I like this simply for the absurdity of it, but will only use it when the entire parenthetical is modified by the smiley instead of a single word or phrase (:since I really like it:) but (it looks ugly, no hard feelings :) )
"Вот его, нет, не допустили (сама знаешь, почему)))"
My translation:
"But him - no, they didn't let him in (of course you know why :)"
When I went from texting friends in Russian or Ukrainian back to English, I missed right parentheses as a smiley; one or two - hi), hello)) - to me are like a smile, by ))) and )))) there's some laughing or some other joke going on. Native speakers could weigh in; my native tongue is English.
allow me to introduce my friend – turned smiley
here he is: ´◡`
(quite useful for brackets ´◡`)
you can find him on windows by pressing Win + ;
not as fast as typing, but quite faster then typing and then wondering if thats too much brackets or too little
I'm trademarking the improper use of it/it's, there/their/they're, were/we're, etc as a sign of my humanity. Apple's typocorrect is doing it for me anyways.
tbh u can basically do this now lol... no flag needed.
if u want it to sound more real u just gotta tell the bot to write that way. like literally just ask it to throw in some typos or forget to capitalize stuff. or use slang and kinda ramble instead of being all robotic and organized.
> I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context.
I've also noticed an increase of this in myself and others, I used to edit a lot more before sending anything, but now it seems more authentic if you just hit send so it's more off the cuff with typos, broken sentences and all.
I'm sure an LLM could easily mimic this but it's not their default.
I appreciate you including a few minor mistakes in this very post:
> I started making deliberate grammar and spelling mistakes in professional context[s]. Not like I have ~a~ perfect writing anyway, but at least I could prove that it was self-written, not an auto-generated slop. (Could be self-written slop though :)
> This applies not only [to] work-stuff itself also to the job-applications/cv/resume and cover-letters.
I got similar accusations recently on reddit lol. Just because i am used to formatting markdown i like to format some of my reddit comments. i have no idea how to avoid the accusations besides typing less formally except by typing like thisss.
I've been thinking about the "human signal" ever since the first GPT. Interestingly, a few years ago I would get people questioning whether my posts were written by GPT, but that's stopped now. I'm not sure if it's because they no longer think that or because it's not interesting any more.
I wonder if there's a way we can communicate that LLMs fundamentally can't keep up with. If LLMs have hit on being exactly the way our brains work then I guess not. But maybe we still have something special. I haven't tried how well LLMs understand language written like in Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn.
I've seen some youtube people just holding random objects as though they were microphones, I guess deliberately meming on the conspicuous microphone thing. Or maybe it helps with their confidence, I could see that.
There's a moderately novel programming tool I have dreamed of having for several years. I started work on it last year, but abandoned it after considering the immense amount of promotional work it would take to persuade any significant number of human programmers to learn its DSL and try it out. It's too big a project to be worth building for myself alone.
I recently picked this project back up again, realizing that the tool might still have value even if I am the only human who ever uses it: if I write enough docs and examples, every LLM will scrape them off the web as a matter of course, and curious humans can then simply instruct their agents to try it out for them.
Interesting strategy considering it's in line with something I'm tracking. What does the devtool you're building do?
DISCLAIMER: I’m building LLM Signal around this broader shift. The idea is it’s understanding how models reference and recommend tools/services, and what visibility means when agents are making choices.
The tool compiles a schema, with tables, procs, and queries, into a chunk of Rust or C++ code you can include into your project which implements a lightweight in-memory database.
I keep finding myself building little assemblies of structs, vectors, maps, and sets which behave like tables and indexes[1]. Wouldn't it be nice, I keep thinking, if I could just declare the data and the queries I want, then let some tool compute an efficient implementation?
The tool is meant for situations where SQLite would be overkill. Serialization, migration, ALTER TABLE, and such are all out of scope. While you could probably use it as an app's central data store, its footprint is meant to be small enough that you might whip up a little schema to help implement a single module, or a single process, within a larger piece of software.
In theory an LLM coding agent should find the consistency & performance guarantees available with this approach as useful as a human would.
Programming died back in the '90s; I haven't written any actual code in decades. All I do most of the time is write high-level, abstract prompts for the software agents which generate the code that actually runs.
I had a strange experience during one episode of the show "Amsterdam Empire", which is spoken in Dutch. There's a scene where one of the characters addresses some foreign tourists: the (Dutch) subtitles continued to make sense, but his speech was just absolute gibberish. It was startling to realize that he had been speaking English, my native language: in the moment, I did not recognize it at all.
I've often had the same thought coming from the other direction, as an English speaker learning Dutch for the past couple of years: I hear many little echoes in Dutch of archaic or poetic English forms.
That’s because English and Dutch are basically German dialects that the ruling aristocrat classes worked hard to differentiate and abstract from their ruling aristocrat class competitors in other places.
You may want lol into that, since you are realizing and noticing things, but you are seemingly still not connecting the dots correctly. Another hint, Dutch comes from Deutsche, how the “Germans” refer to themselves, which is also where the “English” came from, Angles and Saxony, the latter still being a region of “Germany” today.
In other words, you really should be referring to themselves Germans as the Deutsche of you wanted to differentiate them from the Dutch, which are basically the same Deutsche people who just live on the coast, the lowlands, i.e., the Nether-lands.
The Anglo-Saxons were not Germans, and their language was not a "German" language.
It was Germanic, derived from a common ancestor with German but absolutely distinct separate lineage and your weird ethonationalist quasi-fascist soup of of thoughts here and below is both factually incorrect and incoherent.
Actual scholars of Germanic languages don't share your bizarre biases.
The continuum of the North Sea languages is much more apparent if you undo the High German consonant shift... (and of course if you minimise the use of the words English have imported from France)
That seems to me like a really worthwhile effort, especially for the continental Europeans if they want to keep the EU alive, even if it needs major, structural reform that I am not confident it can implement without total deconstruction first. If the EU wants to survive it simply cannot allow English to dominate it, nor is even French ideal, making Dutch the official language is of course silly for obvious reasons (regardless of my affinity for it), contemporary German seems to be self-deleting in many different way for many different reasons, and nonsense like Esperanto speaks for itself. But a kind of merging or integration of the German languages of central Europe would be an ideal candidate to bring about European unity in a sustainable and healthy manner... a meeting in the middle, maybe a restoration of old high German even that is the common node.
I am generally even just sad writing this because even my proposal invariably means the total destruction of many languages, traditions, cultures, and true and healthy diversity that has defined Europe over all of recorded history; but at least if this effort of trying to mash Europe into a kind of neo-communist of uniform sludge, at least try to create something new and beautiful out of it, not some disgusting brown mush where the non-english EU speaks English, while by the end of the century the majority of people will not even be indigenous Europeans anymore.
It is sad realizing that what we are all currently witness to is a cataclysmic collapse and destruction of civilization in Europe on an order that humanity has not witness since the civilizational collapse of the Americas or even the Bronze Age collapse and minor cultural collapses and ethnocides that were perpetrated through the French proto-communist Revolution, the Russian communist revolution and the Chinese communist revolutions. It is astonishing knowing that I am living through a historical event that may even never be recorded, let alone well, because the likelihood that it will be recorded at all, let alone accurately is very low.
If a common German language could be created, along with maybe a common Romance language for Hispania and Italy, etc. at least there would be a kind of remaining legacy akin to how the Egyptian icons are enigmatic, even if their culture did not survive.
Trying to put your bizarre ethnonationalism aside, as HN is not the place for that:
Firstly, you're conflating German and Germanic, while ignoring that the common ancestor here dates to before the High German consonant shift between the 3rd and 5th centuries, that further split the German* languages, that had already long since split from the other Germanic languages.
Secondly, my point was merely that there is a closer relationship between the Germanic languages historically spoken around the North Sea, than with modern standard German that has carried with it the consonant shift, and so if you take into account Low German/Plattdeutsch, the similarities are more visible and obvious.
I see no reason to try to mush them together, but it would be interesting to see German take the approach of Norway: Norwegian have had a few fairly successful reforms actually moving it further away from Danish in some respect, but which also in some respects have mean allowing older forms closer to Norse in the majority form of Bokmål, that were retained/included in Nynorsk.
If German did the same thing and started encouraging and allowing those of the forms of minority Low German dialects that are closer to the older Germanic forms (e.g. Dag instead of Tag, for dag/day), it might over time restore some of the continuum.
Thanks for looking that up! It makes sense, of course - the line starts to drop in 1984, with the release of the Macintosh, and hits a trough around the launch of Windows 95.
It's not a term I recall hearing at all when I started using computers in the mid-'80s - all that mattered back then was "shiny new GUI, or the clunky old thing?" I really thought it was a retroneologism when I first heard it, maybe twenty years ago.
It seems to me rather less likely that someone at Microsoft knowingly and deliberately took his specific diagram and "ran it through an AI image generator" than that someone asked an AI image generator to produce a diagram with a similar concept, and it responded with a chunk of mostly-memorized data, which the operator believed to be a novel creation. How many such diagrams were there likely to have been, in the training set? Is overfitting really so unlikely?
The author of the Microsoft article most likely failed to credit or link back to his original diagram because they had no idea it existed.
What difference does that make in solving the actual problem? The real story here is not "some lousy Microsoft employee ripped off this guy's graphic", but "people using AI image generators may receive near-copies of existing media instead of new content, with no indication that this has happened".
If this has been discovered once, it must be happening every day. What can we do about that? Perhaps image generators need to build in something like a Tineye search to validate the novelty of their output before returning it.
> "people using AI image generators may receive near-copies of existing media instead of new content, with no indication that this has happened".
This has been known for a long time. The main question is how rare something is in the input data, if you're lucky you get substantial chunks of the original input back out.
Clearly, but OP would be well advised to apply Hanlon's razor. The victimhood narrative does not improve understanding, which is necessary to work for better outcomes.
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