Title text:
You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word ‘delve’. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3126/
As someone who has been mistaken for an LLM at least twice in the past couple of years, yeaaah. Sometimes I write like that. The LLMs learned from people like me. I can only hope it was smarter, more productive people with the same sort of writing style and not from anything I’ve produced… although it would explain a thing or two.
I am not sure how many times I’ve been mistaken for ChatGPT, but I don’t think my writing style is actually very similar.
I’m pretty sure that when people say that, most of the time, they actually mean, “I want to disagree with what you’re saying, but I lack the ability to do so legitimately. If I simply accuse you of using an LLM, people will assume I’m right and I will ‘win’.”
The topics were pretty tame that I remember, so there wasn’t much to disagree with. I was just being… uh. Florid? Verbose? Sesquipedalian?
It might be a neurodivergent trait; the need to use the right word to communicate exactly the right meaning even if it runs to several syllables.
It might lose a few people, but I’ve got to say what I mean.
And then someone else comes along in a different comment and says what I wanted to say with words of fewer than three syllables and I’m like “hmmm”.
I’ve never seen LLMs talk like what you’re describing, though.
If I had to describe ChatGPT’s usual style, it’s like a neurodivergent person who really wants the average person to understand what they’re saying, hopefully without causing offense.
So it’s almost as if it were trained on Reddit?
(No offense intended! I hope you get what I mean! ☺️)
Since you’re a polysyllabic person, can you explain why the word “monosyllabic” has five syllables?
Information entropy. You need roughly as many syllables to explain the same concept with mono- or disyllabic English words as you do with a scientific polysyllable. Admittedly, some of it is “I know this word! See how smart I am!”, but another part is how much more fluid it is to say. “Monosyllabic” rolls off the tongue a lot more easily than “having only one sound”.
(The funny answer here would have been “No.”)
On top of all that, monosyllabic is accurate to the intended meaning while “having only one sound” is not: a single syllable word often comprises multiple phones and/or phonemes.
I may be verbose, but I’m way less friendly than most LLMs
You just need to start inserting more Ai type punctuation into your text — like an Em dash for example.
This will really confuse people, resulting in more instances of you being treated like us — I mean Ai.
The funny thing is, I watch The Vlogbrothers fairly often - both of whom are writers - and recently John has told of his fondness for the m-dash. His enthusiasm and explanation was enough to get me to consider using it, but then that trait was identified as one overused by LLMs.
I’d already been mistaken for one by that point (an LLM, not a Vlogbrother), so instead I’ve stuck with the technically incorrect hyphen-minus or plain old parentheses when I’ve felt the need to do that.
Nice try Hank we know you when we see you
Found Dave Green’s Lemmy account
Bitch ass LLMs putting spaces before and after their emdashes—I REFUSE!