4 ms·
My company currently has a guideline that includes “therefore” and similar words as an example of literary language we should avoid using, as it makes the reade
by torben-friis 1y ago
My company currently has a guideline that includes “therefore” and similar words as an example of literary language we should avoid using, as it makes the reader think it’s AI.
It really made me uneasy, to think that formal communication might start getting side looks.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoWhat’s worse is that this window might shift as writing becomes less formal and new material is included in the training corpus. By 2035 any language above a first grade reading level will be grounds for AI suspicion.
- csa 1y ago> By 2035 any language above a first grade reading level will be grounds for AI suspicion. Probably 5th grade, but your comment is directionally correct.
- Loughla 1y agoI sat in a meeting with professionals where one person asked for the presentation to be reworded at a fifth grade reading level. He said it with a straight face. I work at a college for fuck's sake.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoThis seems double plus ungood
- p1anecrazy 1y agoIsn’t that “ELI5”?
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago5-year-olds are not in fifth grade.
- sixtyj 1y agoBy 2035 we will live in the world full of TikTok videos where ability to write will be absurd to people as Not Sure in Idiocracy… this is hyperbole, ofc… but you know what I want to say.
- bonoboTP 1y agoWhenever there are commonly agreed upon and known tell-tale signs of AI writing, the model creators can just retrain to eliminate those cues. On an individual level, you can also try to put it in your personalization prompt what turns of phrase to avoid (but central retraining is better). This will be a cat and mouse game. Content factories will want models that don't create suspicious output, and the reading public will develop new heuristics to detect it. But it will be a shifting landscape. Currently, informal writing is rare in AI generation because most people ask models to improve their formulations, with more sophisticated vocabulary etc. Often non-native speakers, who then don't exactly notice the over-pompousness, just that it looks to them like good writing. Usually there are also deeper cues, closer to the content's tone. AI writing often lacks the sharp edge, when you unapologetically put a thought there on the table. The models are more weasely, conflict-avoidant and hold a kind of averaged, blurred millennial Reddit-brained value system.
- jjani 1y ago> Whenever there are commonly agreed upon and known tell-tale signs of AI writing It's been two years now since such commonly agreed upon signs appeared yet by and large they're still just as present to this day.
- mh- 1y agoSurvivor bias. You don't know what you're not spotting in the wild.
- viccis 1y agoWords like that were banned in my English classes for being empty verbiage. It's a good policy even if it seems like a silly purpose. "Therefore" is clumsy and heavy handed in most settings.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoIt has been banned in pre-AI style manuals.
- tbossanova 1y agoI write “therefore” therefore I am an AI.
- torben-friis 1y agoI’m curious about this (I’m not a native speaker). What alternative would you use when you want to emphasize a cause-effect relationship, in an engineering context for example? “Most times A happens before B, but this order it’s not guaranteed. Therefore, there is a possibility of {whatever}.” Alternatives that come to mind are “as a consequence”, “as a result”, “this means that”, but those are all more verbose, not less. A simple “so” could work, but it would make the sentence longer, and the cause-effect relationship is less explicit I think.
- viccis 1y agoJust take it out. It makes no difference. You set it up so clearly in your first example. "Most times A happens before B, but in this order it’s not guaranteed, so there is a possibility of {whatever}."
- torben-friis 1y agoThat forces me to keep the phrase going though, which is my usual problem when both the A,B, and whatever are already long winded.