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> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays. A huge AI signal to me is not em dashes, not emoji
by bitwize 5mo ago
> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays.
A huge AI signal to me is not em dashes, not emoji, not even the "not X, it's Y" construction which oh god I'm falling into the trap right now aren't I.
It's a combination of these factors plus a tendency to fluff out the piece with punchy but vague language, often recapitulating the same points in slightly reworded ways, that sounds like... an eighth grader trying to write an impressive-sounding essay that clears the minimum word limit.
Did the bright sparks who trained these things just crack open the printer paper boxes in their parents' homes filled with their old schoolwork, and feed that into the machine to get it started?
- zbentley 5mo agoAnother commenter above this proposed a pretty compelling theory for the source of this style: SEO-inflated prose online. If the models were trained on the internet, "higher quality" content needed to be indicated to them during RL somehow. Search engine ranking is an easy-to-obtain metric that's kind of like "quality" if you squint, turn around, and lobotomize yourself. So the AIs have a high likelihood of producing the kinds of content that is rewarded by Google SEO.
- rustystump 5mo agoBingo but i also think it is just the nature of the technology. It is going to be wordy but not usefully so.
- mike_hearn 5mo agoThat's circular though. Why does that content get ranked highly? Because it gets a lot of backlinks, long clicks, etc. So people seem to like it.
- skydhash 5mo ago> Why does that content get ranked highly? Search engines only show a snippet of the content and that always looks convincing. It's the whole content that is off and, unfortunately, a few seconds/minutes can pass before you realize it (If you ever do).
- tyingq 5mo agoWell, and Google's proxy read of "quality" might have flawed assumptions. A concise page where you get what you need and leave quickly might read as "high bounce rate".
- mike_hearn 5mo agoSearch engines track that. It's what a "long click" means. If you click a result, then return fairly fast and keep searching or clicking other links, they infer low quality (for that query at least).
- Gigachad 5mo agoAnother hint is when the structure and formality of the response doesn’t match the medium. Like when someone sends you a whole article back in DMs along with headings for the sections. Even though real humans write like that when writing documents, they never did that in informal messaging.