Ask HN: Why do AIs talk like this? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do AIs talk like this?

3 pointskeepamovin4 comments

It's not X, it's Y.

That is so a genre or idiom of the current AI age. Why? I think because AIs live in language. They don't live somewhere else. So they have to exclude all the language network of things it's not in order to focus themselves on the thing it is. If they were more subconscious/symbolic like us, they could just not say that. But because their words, create their words, etc - more than us - they have to use this construction, to exclude the gigantic amount of stuff that whatever you're talking about is not.

What do y'all think?

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Doesn't need a deep explanation, they were just trained to.

Same as the Tory Power Stance a decade ago: https://i0.wp.com/order-order.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04...

I think they learned from the original chat bot that was written in Perl as a factoid bot for IRC. [1] (1999) Site has not aged well.

[1] - https://infobot.sourceforge.net/guide-0.43.x.html

They've been trained on thousands of productivity/influencer/passive-income grift blogs that surfaced in the post '4 Hour Work Week' era, when hustle culture was born.

I consumed A LOT of those blogs back then, and let me tell you they're clearly the basis that AI has learnt from, if you dig some up and read them it's very obvious.

I appreciate your honesty! When I read those kind of things back in the days before AI, I always believed the similarity in tone meant they must have all been using some early proto-AI type system to draft their copy - either that or they were all dutifully following some kind of "writing guide" - surely sold by another course!

I don't specifically recall the "not X, it's Y". But I do recall that kind of "preacher's rhetorical" tone.

Kind of funny in a absurd Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams/Jean-Pierre Jeunet "fully realized quriky world" kind of way. It turned out that the thing which ended up being most responsible for giving birth to Artificial Intelligence on Earth, was none other than the vast collected writings of online coaching course content creators in the early 21st century...

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