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Comment by thejarren | Hacker News Reader

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Hmmm, I wrote those words myself, maybe I've spent too much time with LLMs and now I'm talking like them??

I'd be interested in any evidence-based arguments you might have beyond attacking my writing style and insinuating bad intent.

I found this commenter had sage advice about how to use HN well, I try to follow it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38944467

I’ll take you at your word, sorry for the incorrect callout. Your comment format appeared malicious, so my response wasn’t an attempt at being “snarky”, just acting defensively. I like the HN Rules/Guidelines.

You mentioned "step change" twice. Maybe a once over next time? My favorite Mark Twain quote is (very paraphrased) "My apologies, had I more time, I would have written a shorter letter".

I thought the repetition was intentional.

This is something that is happening to me too, and frankly I'm a little concerned. English is not my first language, so I use AI for checking and writing many things. And I spend a lot of time with coding tools. And now I need sometimes to do a conscient effort to avoid mimicking some LLM patterns...

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Is that you Nietzsche? Or are you Magog https://andromeda.fandom.com/wiki/Spirit_of_the_Abyss

You seem very comfortable making unfounded claims. I don't think this is very constructive or adds much to the discussion. While we can debate the stylistic changes of the previous commenter, you seem to be discounting the rate at which the writing style of various LLMs has backpropagated into many peoples' brains.

I can sympathize with being mistakingly accused of using LLM output, but as a reader the above format of "Its not x - it's y" repeated multiple times for artificial dramatic emphasis to make a pretty mundane point that could use 1/3 the length grates on me like reading LinkedIn or marketing voice whether it's AI or not (and it's almost always AI anyway).

I've seen fairly niche subreddits go from enjoyable and interesting to ruined by being clogged with LLM spam that sounds exactly like this so my tolerance for reading it is incredibly low, especially on HN, and I'll just dismiss it.

I probably lose the occasionally legitimate original observation now and then but in a world where our attention is being hijacked by zero effort spam everywhere you look I just don't have the time or energy to avoid that heuristic.

Also discounting the fact that people actually do talk like that. In fact, these days I have to modify my prose to be intentionally less LLM-like lest the reader thinks it's LLM output.

1) Models learn these patterns from common human usage. They are in the wild, and as such there will be people who use them naturally.

2) Now, given its for-some-reason-ubiquitous choice by models, it is also a phrasing that many more people are exposed to, every day.

Language is contagious. This phrasing is approaching herd levels, meaning models trained from up-to-the-moment web content will start to see it as less distinctly salient. Eventually, there will be some other high-signal novel phrase with high salience, and the attention heads will latch on to it from the surrounding context, and then that will be the new AI shibboleth.

It's just how language works. We see it in the mixes between generations when our kids pick up new lingo, and then it stops being in-group for them when it spreads too far.. Skibidi, 6 7, etc.

It's just how language works, and a generation ago the internet put it on steroids. Now? Even faster.

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