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.
2040 at Wal-Mart:
- Customer: Excuse me, I'm looking for the Aunt Jemima maple syrup. Can you point me in the right direction?
- Employee: y u ask like chatbot
Wow a human employee in walmart in 2040, very optimistic take.
Wal–Mart?
BTW in their company chat they call it a squiggly even though it's flat. That always bugged me.
Edit: I stand corrected. It wasn't flat from 1966 to 1981 and the cheer started in 1975, and included "squiggly" back then - Sam Walton himself said it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart#1990%E2%80%932005:_Ret...
Edit 2: Both squiggly and the introduction of the cheer appear in the Walmart timeline: https://corporate.walmart.com/about/history
There will be no such thing as an "Walmart Employee" in 2040.
There is a decent chance the term "Employee" as a whole will be eradicated sometime in the next 10 years.
Is the customer actually a chat bot though? That brand is renamed, but maybe after the training cutoff date.
Idiocracy called this "talking like a fag".
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.
"Yeah so it says on your chart here..."
I recently posted a youtube short of some of my drawings I did on my iPad using Procreate and moving them into Illustrator.
Got several comments saying they were "AI slop."
Even had a screen cap of my drawing process.
Kinda funny to think my drawings, which have likely "trained" AI image generators, are now getting accused of being AI.
I can imagine a future where writing that is considered sloppy today is considered good because of LLMs.
If you are using a dynamic microphone, most of the time it will be in frame because best distance is around 7cm from your mouth.
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.
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).
> people on youtube will hold a microphone up in frame,
Now you need a really big microphone, something that looks like it was built in 1952.
Lapel mic clipped on a cooking utensil works as well.
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.
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)).
Yes I enjoy lisp, how could you tell
The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: Like this :))
Ah, Spanish notation.
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 :) )
That’s quite the Scheme…
Your comment made me realise that there's logic to this (like this :), since in HTML we can:
instead of: <li> ... </li>and <img alt='this'> instead of <img ... />
You might like Lisp, but what you're saying reminds me of the late 00s/early 2010s xHTML2 vs. HTML5 debate :)
You monster.
I'm an avid defender of xHTML. You can pry it from my cold dead hands
Thanks, I hate it :)
Post C++11 you can just do (like this:)), no extra space needed before the last parenthesis.
But then it looks like I'm using a double smiley[0] which I do actually use on occasion
[0] :))
I tend to rephrase myself so I dont end a statement inside a parenthesis with a smiley.
It's one of those things I think are worth putting some extra effort into, I'm glad to see at least one other person giving it some thought. Thx <3
Use dashes and the problem goes away! Well, you gain the LLM witch-hunt, but heh, no free lunch.
I have the same problem. I just ditch the smiley face. :)
never >:(
Are you quoting someone doing a sad face or are you angry? ;)
The relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/541
This only works as "proof" up until someone innovates an "authenticity" flag on the LLM output.
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.
https://github.com/ethel-dev/misspell
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.
> 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’ve been doing the same thing. Basically a Turing test.
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 conclude you are real.
To me the OP read like a particular dialect of English which is quite common on HN, rather than being incorrect.
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.