7 ms·
It's Not Just X. It's Y
- Retr0id 5mo ago> RLVR is weirder, and I suspect it's why we see "It's not X, it's Y" so often. This feels like an easy enough hypothesis to verify, for anyone in the business of training LLMs - does the not-X-but-Y rate increase after RLVR?
- andy99 5mo agoIt’s unlikely this is true. LLMs are way more mad-libs / templates than we like to admit, that’s (ironically) not a judgement about their capability, it’s primarily just an observation. But it’s also what plain old SFT, which I believe is the primary culprit, ends up imparting.
- huflungdung 5mo agoYou’re absolutely right. This is the smoking gun. This changes everything.
- Starlevel004 5mo ago[flagged]
- H8crilA 5mo agoIt's not just an unlock. It's a major discovery.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoNow I see the full picture.
- flexagoon 5mo agoI'm zeroing in on the main culprit.
- rzzzt 5mo agoWait, there could be more things to consider.
- matheusmoreira 5mo agoThis is the crux of the analysis.
- Loughla 5mo agoThat is actually what I'm firmly convinced is the most dangerous thing about llm's. No matter what you put, it will always agree with you, and what's worse, it will try to make you think that you're unbelievably smart for saying x. I used one to help me plan a sales route, and it kept fucking it up. Every time I corrected it, it tried that hand wringing vizier sort of ass kissing. It's very off-putting, but I can see how someone struggling with social interaction could be sucked into that nonsense.
- fragmede 5mo agoMy custom instructions to ChatGPT starts with "Never apologize", which seems to work.
- vonunov 5mo agoFor what it's worth (or maybe just for the record) I have a counterexample: Gemini once dug in its heels and insisted that some ebay listings for GPUs were scams because the cards they were selling hadn't been released yet (they had been, but its training data was too old, I assume). I went a few rounds with it and it kept pushing back, which was odd for sure, as I'm also used to being able to essentially just say "no, x = 2". There was a lot happening in that session (it was really someone else's and he just kind of lets his context windows fill up with all sorts of stuff), so I bet it would have sufficed to start a new one, but after a point I just wanted to see what would happen. It didn't concede until I sent it a PDF of some kind of white paper or tech spec sheet or something that included release dates from an authoritative source. I may need to find that session later, because now I'm wondering if it was entirely the PDF that did it, or if it also helped to point out that the info cutoff could be a factor, and I don't remember whether I tried the latter first. Also not sure off the top of my head what the situation was as far as model, custom instructions, or whatever else.
- huflungdung 5mo ago[dead]
- rvz 5mo agoAnother bunch of dead give aways in code bases with READMEs is the repetitive: - "No X, No Y, No Z." pattern - "Here is X - it makes Y" The worst and most obvious one is the constant over use of emoji ticks and crosses.
- Retr0id 5mo agoFor calibration purposes, I offer you a pre-LLM README I wrote that includes an em-dash* followed by "No X, No Y, No Z": https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/stelf-loader https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/stelf-loader *actually a hyphen but it's functioning as an em dash.
- zamadatix 5mo ago"Hyphen functioning as an em dash" is an expected human thing as it's what's easy to type. It's specifically an actual em dash which got bulldozed, much to the dismay of those who bothered to put the unicode character in.
- edbaskerville 5mo agoIf you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.
- zamadatix 5mo agoOr those of us that use a full featured editor when writing md! This reminds me of another em dash+AI related topic: I've noticed LLMs have an extreme bias towards spaces around the dash while people can go either way with it.
- rzzzt 5mo agoThere's something similar in Microsoft Word, Ctrl-Alt-Minus on the numpad.
- Baader-Meinhof 5mo agoI like that these AI idioms exist. They're like watermarks for text. It's worth the cost of humans avoiding them. Companies will eventually train their models to be undetectable, but society would be better if they didn't.
- chipotle_coyote 5mo agoExcept that the entire point of the article is that they're not AI idioms. They're not "watermarks for text." They're legitimate language constructions that LLMs tend to overuse, but that real humans also use. Real humans do, in fact, say "align with" all the time, just as often as "corresponds." And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.
- ohyoutravel 5mo agoWell reading between the lines I don’t think they’re saying all of those uses are AI. They’re legitimate constructs, like the em-dash, en-dash, and hyphen, all of which I used to use regularly. But now they’re AI tells so I use them sparingly.
- card_zero 5mo agoSociolinguistic register happened.
- Maxatar 5mo agoThe article is not God, just because it claims something doesn't mean we have to accept it. For better or worse (and pretty much for worse), these usages have become AI idioms. Language evolves over time, things that used to be harmless become offensive, certain terms end up taking on the complete opposite meaning than their original meaning, and we are watching certain language patterns and idioms become watermarks for AI and while it sucks, it doesn't make it false.
- chipotle_coyote 5mo agoI'll just quote from the article, which no one claimed was God and that's really a weird way to dismiss it, but you do you: "We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought." And, I'm sorry (I'm not), but I am not going to just roll over and shrug and say "welp, guess we all need to dumb our writing down to keep well-meaning idiots from screeching 'AI! AI! AI! WHOOP! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!' at us." That isn't the evolution of language. It's Idiocracy.
- wrs 5mo agoThis is how early forms of "reasoning" in LLMs worked: just literally inserting words like "Wait...", "Hmm...", "Let me reconsider...", "But is it really..." into the token stream.
- flexagoon 5mo agoIs this not how current forms of reasoning work? It seems like the open models still output things like that, and the closed ones all just summarize their thinking instead to avoid distillation, but probably do the same thing internally.
- wrs 5mo agoI think the basic idea is the same (not being a frontier lab researcher I couldn’t say for sure), but there are different techniques, such as “reasoning tokens” that aren’t literally words, and more interesting structures than just sticking them into the stream.
- adt 5mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#Negative_parallelisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing#...
- downbad_ 5mo agoSigns? Those are normal ways of writing? What the hell? Is everything AI now?
- mschuster91 5mo agoProblem is, everything gets poisoned by AI these days, and it gets worse when there's some sort of reward attached. Karma points in the case of Reddit and HN, in Wikipedia you got a ton of commercial actors and propaganda/distortion campaigns. And that's why everyone on the receiving end of the AI slop deluge is so paranoid.
- dawnerd 5mo agoDid you read it though? They explain very well their reasoning with real examples.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago> In the end, shaming people for writing that gets flagged as AI can lead people to sidestep structures the model has learned from us It's interesting why LLMs generate constructions like this more frequently than they presumably exist in the training set. I wonder if this is some sort of mode collapse caused by post training, and/or maybe because they are training on synthetic data so these things become self-perpetuating and self-amplifying (a feedback loop)? The lesson for humans worried about being falsely identified as AI is just learn to write better! It doesn't matter where your repertoire of phrasing comes from (copying AI or not), but one of the basic rules of writing is not to repeat yourself unless you are doing so deliberately for a purpose. Go ahead and use "It's not just X. It's Y" if you want to, but if you use it multiple times in the same short piece of writing, then you may deserve to be called out for poor style, if not for being an AI.
- Maxatar 5mo agoIts not model collapse nor does it have anything to do with training data frequency. It's simply RLHF where the humans hired to tune the conversational style of these LLMs preferred certain idioms over others and so the reward function for these LLMs gravitated toward using them. If LLMs generated text based on training data frequency they'd likely be some of the most vulgar and hostile things ever created. The internet is full of insults, profanity, and low effort content. The repeated phrases are a side effect of reward optimization rather than some kind of model collapse.
- busssard 5mo agonice article, but i think as a non native english speaker, i always use the model in english for reasoning and then translate the output to my language. most of these considerations do not apply. because the translation step is taking out alot of these language artifacts
- phildenhoff 5mo agoDo you manually translate or translate with an LLM? While reading, I was wondering how common these kinds of written tics are in languages outside English.
- rq1 5mo agoYou’re absolutely right to push back on this. Sometimes it’s not just about the Ys but also the Qs.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- coldtea 5mo ago>Recent overuse by language models has led many to declare it bad writing. I'm not so sure. It is bad writing.
- verbify 5mo agoAlways? There's never a place for it?
- vonunov 5mo agoNot always or inherently, I would say, but if you can't help consciously noticing how much a piece uses tricolons, or negative parallel constructions, or dashes offsetting punchy clauses at the ends of sentences, then the style has probably become what you might call overseasoned
- chrisweekly 5mo agoI'd say it's average writing.
- karim79 5mo ago"So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny." This is honestly both terrifying and well articulated. High praise to the blog author.
- card_zero 5mo agoThere are plenty of idioms, find a different idiom, tough titties.
- vonunov 5mo agoSurely it hasn't escaped your notice that the LLMs don't tend to stick to just the one set of idioms/devices. They're constantly running new batches of them into the ground
- saghm 5mo agoIt's not just "It's not just X; it's Y", it's other stuff too
- userbinator 5mo agoCongratulations, you've made the meme recursive.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jdkoeck 5mo agoThis is honestly a very, very naive statement. We are social animals and we naturally gravitate towards devaluing and shaming certain styles of speech. We police speech already! It’s often unfortunate, but it’s not devoid of function. I, for one, am happy with shaming LLM speech. It’s never been so easy to detect lazy thinking.
- ai_slop_hater 5mo ago> Because if Pangram's AI system found me guilty, that's the end of my career. That's literally extortion. How is this different from humans? When I went to high school, my teachers extorted me too. Especially subjects like English and unlike Math, where evaluation is 100% subjective.
- jltsiren 5mo agoI don't how the English evaluation works in the average (US?) school, or even what's in the exams. But it's possible to have useful native language exams with objective evaluation. Until 2006, the national Finnish/Swedish (as a native language) exam at the end of high school in Finland consisted of two essays. One was based on materials that were provided, and another on a topic that was given. I believe there were a few options to choose from. Both essays were scored independently, and your score was the better of the two. If you had learned to write essays, it was effectively an intelligence test and a good predictor of future academic success across many fields. Including CS, as my department found out. In particular, the ability to write essays was a better predictor of success in CS studies than the scores in mathematics and natural sciences. Probably because there has always been a large subset of CS students who are otherwise good at CS but can't handle anything resembling mathematics.
- amarant 5mo agoClearly humans always type "it's not merely X, but also Y"
- vonunov 5mo agoIn my experience, and as someone who has technically been a professional copy editor before (in the sense that I got paid by someone to perform line/copy editing of some material or other, but definitely not who or what you would think if I only said I used to be a copy editor), the uses of "not only, but also" that didn't have anything wrong with them (or didn't deviate from convention, if you like) were in the minority by far. Assuming people in the last few years haven't all become suddenly interested in that particular construction and skilled in its use, the presence of an improperly implemented NOBA should remain vaguely reliable as an indicator of authenticity :D
- ilaksh 5mo agoSurely these leading tells will be trained out of models pretty soon, given how well known and overused they are. And it might make the writing slightly worse in a way. But it is quite annoying how often this type of construction is used in everything at the moment. I think that the current models are still like over-achieving savants rather than true human level because the largest model is only 1/10th the complexity of the human brain. I've recently become fairly convinced that new hardware paradigms (like types of CIM) are about to move from research into real-world development and scaling. So I believe within a few years, the model sizes will increase by another 10 times. Compared to upcoming 100 trillion parameter models, humans will obviously be _much_ dumber/slower than AI in all fields. Already with the 10T models, some LLMs beat 99.9% of humans in competitive programming. The AI hatred from many may actually continue to increase, but in cases where the bottom line matters, we are rapidly approaching the point where writing or work product that looks like it is human-authored will be suspect just on that basis. In other words, for some people it will be the reverse -- "this work looks like it was created by a human" could be devastating for your businesses credibility at that point.
- pvillano 5mo agoIn one of the essays posted here, which was, ironically, about AI in education, a sentence, that an AI could not possibly write, that I could possibly write, because of its length and unusual structure, before finally reaching the verb, went on for 25 words. I don't know if it was written that way to show trust in the reader's intelligence, show disregard for reaching a wide audience, show a demonstration of skill, or was artifact of someone just thinking at that level.
- BLKNSLVR 5mo agoYour first sentence is 45 words and contains 9 commas. > I don't know if it was written that way to show trust in the reader's intelligence, show disregard for reaching a wide audience, show a demonstration of skill, or was artifact of someone just thinking at that level.
- Ferret7446 5mo agoIt's been a while since I've seen such a whoosh worthy comment.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- vonunov 5mo agoThe robot can be made to write any such thing In the interest of not occupying significant page/screen height with LLM output, example prompts+responses here: https://dpaste.com/H9DXKNYQH.txt https://dpaste.com/H9DXKNYQH.txt
- streptomycin 5mo agohttps://fakewriters.onrender.com/ https://fakewriters.onrender.com/ is a good example too
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- tkgally 5mo ago> There is danger in evaluating for language patterns over its content I agree, but it’s worth noting that that has been done since long before LLMs. Fifteen years ago, I used to teach a graduate course on academic writing pedagogy. The students and I would read research papers on the teaching of academic writing; we also analyzed textbooks and course syllabuses to get an idea about what was actually being done in classrooms. While phrases like “critical thinking” did come up, the overall focus was clearly on language patterns: sentence and paragraph structure, the use of transition words, vocabulary for hedging and boosting (i.e., making assertions seem weaker or stronger), etc. In a university context, it can be very difficult to evaluate student writing based on its content. In humanities-focused and creative writing, what the student decides to say can be seen as an extension of the student’s personality, identity, and individual experience; if a teacher evaluates the content, including the reasoning, it can seem that the teacher is evaluating the student as a person. And if the students are in the sciences, especially at the graduate level, the writing teacher often won’t even understand what the students write because it is too technical. Teaching and evaluating language patterns, not content, is often the only option.
- xtiansimon 5mo agoCurious about this approach to writing criticism. What authors informed the course? What were the course’s main text(s)?
- tkgally 5mo agoThe focus of the course wasn't writing criticism or particular authors. It was on how writing teachers can teach current and future researchers how to write research papers. A narrow field, perhaps, but at the research university where I worked there was demand for such writing courses, and my class looked at how such classes can be taught at a meta level. Many of the students themselves became writing teachers. This was all before LLMs. The assumptions behind my class have since been upended, now that easily available chatbots can produce academic writing that, at least at the structural level, is perfectly fine.
- martincsweiss 5mo agoI liked everything in this post, with one exception. I'm less sure that avoiding speaking like an AI is robbing us of language useful in critical thinking. I'm far more worried about people offloading their critical thinking to AI systems and losing the habit. Also, the Greeks were worried about rhetoric and, in my opinion, rightly so. The skill to argue a point well is different than those that are needed to be correct. To become a skilled rhetoritician was viewed as dangerous (and right now AIs are only moderately good... though they are improving fast).
- Papazsazsa 5mo agoPeople stopped actually reading when we dropped classical liberal education, right after WWII. This is merely the end-state of industrialization, which is efficient and soulless.
- paradox460 5mo agoIt's bigger than that, it's large https://youtu.be/1Pr8xnNi7OM https://youtu.be/1Pr8xnNi7OM
- karim79 5mo agoBut are we the baddies? https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY?is=-e0nPJsvkBD7DFI2 https://youtu.be/ToKcmnrE5oY?is=-e0nPJsvkBD7DFI2
- Der_Einzige 5mo agoWe solved this problem already with the antislop sampler: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
- queenkjuul 5mo agoI'm not dropping emdashes -- though you can always tell mine by their two-hyphen form lol I've also never used an AI detector, and probably never will. In my experience: 1. The people who rely the most on AI writing don't like to admit it. I catch obvious AI hallucinations in my boss's "documentation," and he always insists it was his own human oversight, despite it being very obviously a mistake I've caught Claude (and importantly, no human coworker) making repeatedly 2. I don't trust a machine more than myself to judge writing 3. Obvious AI "tells" just make it clear i don't need to keep reading, not that i need some kind of validation. In some sense, i guess that might save me time? But i still have to have read enough to know what it is... In general, i think the author makes great points about how _LLM "thinking" is just the reproduction of the language of reasoning_, that is not necessarily a replacement for actual reasoning. It'll take a lot more than that for me to believe an AI is "thinking" and not just giving statistically reasonable answers (reasonable or actionable though they may be)
- vonunov 5mo ago> I'm not dropping emdashes -- though you can always tell mine by their two-hyphen form lol I think of this as a dash (abstract function of punctuation) but not an em dash (concrete typographical form). I see the double hyphen as one of the possible representations of the dash¹ -- and a perfectly well-established one, to be sure² -- along with the em dash and the en dash, either of which can also be used to do the same job, depending on where you are and who you're writing for (the US uses em dashes of varying format (spacing) for that, while much of the UK uses en dashes with spaces to represent the same punctuation abstract). Are you instead conceptualizing the double hyphen as a representation of the em dash glyph? If that makes sense then I'll leave it at that, but if it doesn't quite, then I have a somewhat longer hair-split I can send if you care for it. 1. A pseudo-glyph, maybe 2. Still acknowledged by Garner's as recently as 2003
- aleph_minus_one 5mo agoAn old xkcd comic that is somewhat related to the current witch hunt that some text that the author claims he wrote himself was actually written by an AI: Turing Test https://xkcd.com/329/
- js8 5mo agoTLDR - it's not just AI detection. It's policing of human thought. Anyway, yeah, people trusting AI to do a better job in reasoning than fellow humans, without justification, worries me. We have no formal theory of informal reasoning (that LLMs mimic), so we cannot verify it any better than with humans. You have to trust someone, to ground your beliefs. Trusting AI is just trusting some other people (who trained it) by proxy. Once you realize it, you might as well try to trust people you know.
- 0gs 5mo agothis article is great. we need to protect our ways of thinking, and it's going to be -- already is -- extremely difficult
- cdata 5mo agoFor everyone claiming that this is a trope of LLM text because it is a trope in the training data: how do you know this trope doesn't emerge during RLHF?
- yogthos 5mo agoAn excellent article that perfectly articulates the absurdity of focusing on style of writing over content.
- drc500free 5mo agoIt's easy to focus in on particular linguistic tics, which will probably get smoothed away in future training. The underlying issue is that the LLM is trying to ape meaningful writing - which takes the reader from A to a surprising Z - without generally basing it on a meaningful insight. Most of the common tells stem from that desire to signal the gap between what it's writing about now and how you previously thought things worked. And they really fall flat when it's writing about some milquetoast truism with all the edges sanded off. Rather than have "Z" be self-evidently interesting, the LLM need to tell us that it's not "A". Except no one thought anything was "A" in the first place, and the "Z" is barely a "B" let alone a "Z". Or things are "quietly X," implying that there is some secret knowledge that other people have. Barring that, the LLM will signpost arguments, telling you how interesting things are. "This is the critical part..." before launching into another banal non-observation. Why have only "Section Header" when you can have "Section Header (another idea I had) - omg I just have so much to say about this". Maybe a list of weak ideas, presented in multiple ways. Bulleted with emojis. As a rule of three. As choppy sentences in a paragraph. All of these follow the same pattern - trying to follow the FORM of having something interesting to say that differs from consensus understanding, without having the intelligence or boldness to actually midwife a new concept into the world.
- peterlk 5mo agoAI output reads like homepage marketing content (e.g. the text that fades in when you scroll down an apple product page) expanded to fill some context window size (the paragraphs tend to be about the same size). What you get is vacuous, choppy, wordy, and hyperbolic. I have found that adding secondary passes for tone and style improve the readability dramatically.
- vonunov 5mo agoMarketing content without a reader persona or a writer persona, or rather, without the backing of a real consciousness with agency and life experience. I wonder if this might be part of why there are waves of different tells (in addition to the model updates): People pick up on an uncanniness in the writing but aren't fully aware of it or its nature, so they seek indicators and find what's there to find at the time
- helloplanets 5mo agoI remember someone posting about the most human of all traits being reassuring to see: Typos. I'm pretty sure people are not as averse to leaving or finding typos in text as they were 5 years ago, as these days it's a signal of humanity. Same has been applying to art for a while. Several artists who have an "AI-ish" style have been wrongfully crucified for using AI. And been forced to post videos of their process end to end, in order to prove that they aren't using AI. It's a thing for artists to post their new stuff with: "AI could never do this."
- karim79 5mo agoSlightly off topic, I'm not sure, but way back in the day (2000ish) a friend of mine used PERL scripts to scrape all the big databases which existed at the time, namely IMDB. He used PERL for scraping and the same for generating "new" content with what he had scraped. He made a bunch of static websites with ads. The sites connected to each other. Sports, Celebrities, Movies, you name it. He had a formula. Those sites were profitable enough that he could travel the world and have fun, basically. His mother collected the cheques from Google and cashed them into his account. Now to get to the final point here, his secret was simply TYPO INJECTION to avoid Google's then embryotic duplicate content detection.
- sedatk 5mo agoI think people overestimate the radius of avoidant behavior against AI idioms, and underestimate how the trove of AI generated text actually influence people's writing. It's not a one way street. If you mostly read AI generated content, your writing will inevitably resemble it.
- mstaoru 5mo agoIt's fine. People will always find something to be publicly unhappy about. Example 1. Someone reached out to me on LinkedIn "from HN", when I replied to their initial message they just said "You look like an AI trawler" and disconnected. Example 2. I read a popular non-English tech blog aggregator which also encourages comments and discussion. Since ~1.5 years ago every other comment is "thank you author, but if I wanted to read AI I would as AI" or some variation thereof. Would it be some kind of "reverse psychosis"?
- tapete1 5mo agoI stopped reading at "Nerd rating".