This makes me want to scream and pull out my hair.
"Reduce your vocabulary by 10-20% to prove you're a human."
Generative AI is making our language and communication poorer. It does this not just by outputting its own garbage but also because now we have AI making arbitrary determinations of what words and phrases we *humans* are or aren't allowed to use.
Tell you what: "devoid" was definitely a word I knew and used in elementary school.
Am I normal? Nah, not really.
Am I human? I'm pretty damn sure I am, yeah.
Imagine coming up with a machine that effectively gets to decide how humans are "supposed to" write and speak.
@artemis Duck that!
@artemis The limitations, meaningless and actively damaging, of the one thing that is inherently human within us: our rich culture of language, developed through eons of evolutions, rich from the most basic of human games - wordplay - to the most evolved and convoluted pieces created by the artists of mankind, make the very universe weep what could be lost forever in the engraved anthologies that may therefore never be written again with faith that they are the truthful representation of the mind of the artist
@artemis and I will continue to write long, convoluted and labyrinthine sentences so that what passes for mindful stones can never hope to reproduce them, and so that their parsing is cryptic for their hilltop masters that decided that artists are mere pawns that can be substituted by Butlerian abominations
@artemis You just invented https://www.merriam-webster.com 
(just teasing; I completely agree with your perspective)
@artemis i was silly enough to think they’d compare the writing to existing works looking similarities but i guess in reality it is just like you said.
@artemis I got enough of that from my classmates!
@artemis I've always trended towards a high vocabulary — which, I might add, is something that *used* to be considered an extremely positive thing that was pushed to be grown as much as possible in kids.
And then there's how I basically *had* to go out of my way to learn the word "malicious" back in second grade to counteract some bullshit comebacks my teachers had about the boys teasing me. >_<
@artemis Feels like some kind of twisted Turing test...
@artemis openai will collapse before that.
@artemis This is the opposite of the curb cut effect. They're harming everyone by repressing autistic people.
@foolishowl @artemis "on the suggestion of tech companies we have decided to raise all curbs by 10-20 cm."
@foolishowl @artemis They're harming everyone directly. It's just automated anti intellectualism.
@heydon I read this just two days after having a discussion with people about an AI-generated text about our work group which was of the most generic kind you tune out and skip while reading. Despite me mentioning that, it was lauded as a nice piece if work.
This has something to do with having a text, picture or whatnot that has no other task than just being there. Visual or textual noise. Anything slightly individual or deviating from this would draw criticism because " thats not...
@artemis Isn't that the public school system?
@artemis When I was in 5th grade I was reading and writing at a 12th grade level and 100% I would have been getting flagged constantly as AI if that tech existed then.
@artemis I used lots of words in school that aren't around these days. But I also used to read the dictionary in class out of sheer boredom. Pretty sure I'm at least one and a half of your query about normal and human.
@artemis I learned what "dearth" meant from Keapon Laffin in Quest for Glory 2. I don't know when or where I learned "devoid" from, but it was definitely before that, and from an equally highbrow literary source.
I found an old reprint of even older Dr. Strange comic and shared it with my wife who teaches 9th and 10th grade English. She was amazed at the level of language and the number of college level words that were just there to be deciphered from context and the comic panel action.
This was a comic for kids in the 60s. She doubted that any of her high school students would know many of the words.
@MyWoolyMastadon @log @artemis I quoted Pablo Neruda in my wedding speech because I'd heard Lisa quote it in the Simpsons.
Hell, yes!
Pop culture doesn't have to be stupid.
A couple of years ago we were watching some reruns of MASH on Amazon. I'd forgotten how high brow and philosophical the language could be. They never once paused to explain things. They assumed the audience knew the names and the paradigms of thinking. The jokes and story lines worked without you knowing but you'd get an extra chuckle in knowing the word or the thinker that was mentioned.
Output of Chained Functions - like in Math - (could) have been calculated - before!
All this what's happening is not totally arbitrary.
The one thing I hate most about the AI-driven grammar and spelling checkers is how much they don't know about spelling and grammar. Simple words like cannot are being dropped from the language, and the use of simple pronouns confuses them to no end. While writing, I get subject-verb agreement issues because the AI can't tell if a pronoun or proper noun is singular or plural. I have to tell it to ignore most errors because they aren't errors. And none of this even starts to discuss writing dialogue.
@artemis Same way that certain art styles trigger immediate suspicion now. It's depressing.
@artemis Typically I would add a short preamble stating that I am proud of having a rich vocabulary and that I can prove it live.
@artemis This is how you could imagine how the robots will take over the humans. They decide what we are allowed to use and what not. And many of us wouldn't notice it. Because it's obviously already happening. 
Ok, that thought is really creepy o.o
@SteffoSpieler
I've said for ages that skynet became self aware years ago, it just worked out that it was safer and less effort to quietly train humans to do what it says instead of starting a war.
@artemis IIRC there was a huge thing on African Twitter about this: a lot of the LLM training/tagging was done by Nigerian workers (underpaid ghost labour) and Nigerian English is gorgeously full of expressive and specific terms which introduces a bias in LLMs to use those words like delve, devoid, etc, and AI checkers were updated in turn to look for those as markers and people automatically assuming stuff was written by LLMs.
@artemis
Enforcement of stupid rules makes our language and lives poorer.
This time stupid rules are introduced with magic wrap of generative AI.
@artemis It’s worst in the form of AI but I also hate it in the form of increasingly opinionated “grammar and style” checkers built into every email and doc editing software now. If I couch a phrase in any but the most blunt terms I get little squiggles telling me that I’m communicating wrong.
Computers should not be telling humans how they’re allowed to use language. Humans should not be building programs which crush out variance and expressivity in language.
@jnkrtech @artemis @timrichards
Spare a thought for people who use languages other than US-English.
Even you specifically EN-AU or EN-GB or EN-ZA or EN-NZ, you still get chagrined for daring to spell it “Colour”.
@Salvo @jnkrtech @artemis @timrichards What's next, an "AI" which will cause a gross misunderstanding or an accident because it insisted in correcting long scale to make it short or vice-versa?
And it will be off the hook for any loss incurred because it's operated by a Disney subsidiary and the company using it has at least one employee who agreed to the Disney+ EULA.
@jnkrtech @artemis @NewtonMark it’ll whinge at you when you say something in 3 words that it thinks you could say in 2, but then AI-generated paragraphs are chock full of waffle, unnecessary repetition and flowery nonsense.
@artemis@dice.camp I hope """AI""" destroys homework as something people use.
@artemis I definitely recommend screaming. The hair pulling bit isn't the best experience.
Un-AI-ing?
Soon there'll be an AI to do that for you...
Uh. Right.
I'm devoid of calm about this.
@artemis Fight this. Tooth and nail.
@artemis I read somewhere that neurodivergent is bad and weird, and they deserve it.
No, wait a minute, I'm neurotypical, and I don't read unless I have to.
@artemis When I was teaching freshman writing at a very prestigious university, I had a student who had a list of words he wouldn't use because his high school English teacher told him they were commonly misused. (affect, etc...) He'd go through these awful circumlocutions to get out of using perfectly normal words.
I fear we're going to institutionalize this kind of behavior.
Sadly, bad English instruction is not unique to our era. We've just succeeded in automating it!