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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Is the customer actually a chat bot though? That brand is renamed, but maybe after the training cutoff date.

Wow a human employee in walmart in 2040, very optimistic take.

Wow a human in 2040, very optimistic take.

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.

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

Interesting use of "Aunt Jemima" that nobody caught on, why did you use this particularly, afaik it doesn't exist anymore for being "racist"?

It would appear that you know wrong.

What do you mean by that? The brand was renamed several years ago:

https://www.pearlmillingcompany.com/our-history

"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."

Maybe the fashions will have swung against woke by 2040?

I didn't know it was discontinued in 2021. It was my favorite maple syrup growing up.

From what I read, it just got re-branded, not discontinued.

I caught on but was more offended by referring to it as 'maple syrup'

Idiocracy called this "talking like a fag".

"Yeah so it says on your chart here..."

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? :)

Anathem is a book ;)

Probably should also explain how to use a book…

You’re talking about ancient technology here…

Shaka, when the walls fell

“Welcome to Costco. I love you.”

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).

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.

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.

> 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 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'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 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'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 can imagine a future where writing that is considered sloppy today is considered good because of LLMs.

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

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

Your comment made me realise that there's logic to this (like this :), since in HTML we can:

    <li> do this
    <li> and this

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 :)

I'm an avid defender of xHTML. You can pry it from my cold dead hands

Thanks, I hate it :)

You monster.

I have the same problem. I just ditch the smiley face. :)

never >:(

Are you quoting someone doing a sad face or are you angry? ;)

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] :))

You could use a bracket in the smiley (like this :]) as is sometimes used when nesting parentheticals.

I sometimes do the opposite and use brackets for the parentheticals [like this :)]

The answer is obviously to balance your smiley faces and wrap the entire statement in the smiley face sentiment. ((: 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 :) )

That’s quite the Scheme…

Ah, Spanish notation.

You have to invert the front one! (⸵ Of course, only noticable if it's a winky ;)

Turned Semicolon (U+2E35 ⸵)

Use dashes and the problem goes away! Well, you gain the LLM witch-hunt, but heh, no free lunch.

The relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/541

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 love kaomoji so I use this on occasion but nothing can match the subtle passive aggressiveness and level of expression unmatched by anything else :)

You're really on to something there (-:

I’ve always been bothered by instances of your first example, and I mostly use “XD” instead of “:)” to sidestep the issue in my own writing.

Synthetic example:

"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.

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.

This only works as "proof" up until someone innovates an "authenticity" flag on the LLM output.

https://github.com/ethel-dev/misspell

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'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’ve been doing the same thing. Basically a Turing test.

> 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 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.

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