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Artemis

This makes me want to scream and pull out my hair.

"Reduce your vocabulary by 10-20% to prove you're a human."

150 comments
Artemis

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.

Artemis

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.

Artemis

Imagine coming up with a machine that effectively gets to decide how humans are "supposed to" write and speak.

The Doctor

@artemis Isn't that the public school system?

Molly Cranberries-Kraig 🦃

@artemis

Reduction to a mean pollutes the source for everyone. The idiocracification of humanity continues apace.

Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸

@mckra1g @artemis Damn, those are some fancy words. You must be at least 50% AI.

FoolishOwl

@artemis This is the opposite of the curb cut effect. They're harming everyone by repressing autistic people.

A Scape Of Goats

@artemis sounds like a white supremacy machine tbh. prescriptivism has always been racist.

RetroEggy

@artemis Feels like some kind of twisted Turing test...

Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

@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. >_<

Log 🪵

@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.

Brian Tatosky

@artemis Being compared to the average of slop data scraped off the internet in order to be "human" is incredibly awful.

Roger Moore

@virtualbri @artemis
It may not even be that. Apparently the AIs need polishing to sound better, which requires a lot of human input. Because Westerners are expensive, they hire people from developing countries to do the work. The AI picks up some of the dialect of wherever the polishing happens, and that's what the "AI detector" notices. If you happen to like using whatever words or phrases the detector has honed in on, it will ding you.

jnkrtech

@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.

Mikalai

@artemis
Enforcement of stupid rules makes our language and lives poorer.
This time stupid rules are introduced with magic wrap of generative AI.

Mike Loukides

@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.

ohmrun

@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.

Dimitri Fayolle 🧪🚲😷

@artemis my dad has such a poor handwriting that I was accused several times of imitating his signature on various school documents, because of how variable his actual signature was.

Of course we turned this into an advantage at some point as schools required ridiculous amounts of stuff to be signed by parents, and they could not be arsed to do so every evening.

Artemis

@DimitriFayolle
I feel like there are some people who really, really, really just want to "catch" a kid cheating or lying just because.

The nice thing about that is that it shows you that they are not people to take seriously or care about what they think.

Dimitri Fayolle 🧪🚲😷

@artemis some of them were of this kind, and we had many conflicts.

Others were genuinely confused, just gave my dad a phone call, he said "yep, if it looks like oval crap that's probably me, I remember said homework" , end of story.

It's like these "I'm a human" checkboxes that skilled mouse users have to purposedly click slowly to "pass" the test.

Cavyherd

@DimitriFayolle @artemis

My mom flipped that on its head. She figured, if I wanted an education, I'd go to school, & if I didn't, there was no practical way for her to force me. So at the beginning of every school year, she'd pre-sign a notepad stack, & if I wanted a day off, it was up to me to fill out the "note" & take it to the teacher.

I think I skipped one (1) class in HS, bc I figured I couldn't in good conscience go 12 years & not.

Timjan

@artemis

Un-AI-ing?
Soon there'll be an AI to do that for you...
Uh. Right.

Jason Bowen

@artemis I definitely recommend screaming. The hair pulling bit isn't the best experience.

Chris Armstrong

@artemis
We went through this phase with plagiarism checkers, with students submitting endless copies of their reports to reduce the % to zero, and you end up with unreadable garbage.

Diotima

@Rhodium103 @artemis yeah, I remember arguing on behalf of a friend when the [expletives deleted] prof insisted on:

- A required number of cited quotes
- A lower than X plagiarism score

Buuuuuuut...

- Didn't know how to exclude quotes from the analysis

So...

- Was trying to fail him and others.

Chris Armstrong

@tieflingdio
I love professional negligence like that.....

Shiitake Toast

@artemis oh. Oh dear. I already have people telling me I make up words that are absolutely not made up. Not going to be great for conversation.

Cavyherd

@ShiitakeToast @artemis

Fortunately I appear to have aged out of the demographic where people give me crap about my vocab.

Like, dude, read a freakin' book (in whatever format).

feld
@artemis so the AI checkers are devoid of value, got it
neo

@artemis@dice.camp I hope """AI""" destroys homework as something people use.

The Mïghty Kräcken

@artemis I used a lot of unusual words when I was a child because I read a lot of books. Basically, I spoke like a dead author.

Louanne Cooley

@Klaxun @artemis I still have this problem. If I use alacrity in a sentence you know I’ve been reading Austen.

The Mïghty Kräcken

@IcooIey @artemis
I have to simplify my speech for the sake of the people around me, but that can be a trap. I knew a guy who called night "dark time." I'm not going to follow you that far down the rabbit hole, Tracy!

Louanne Cooley

@Klaxun @artemis Depending on the time of day and brain fog levels, “dark time” could be all that I could get out. Have called the compost “the dead food place”. So you never know what someone is dealing with. And, also, code switching can be a necessary communication mechanism.

But, that said, it is a relief to speak or write with flowing lucidity and be comprehended.

Undead Report 💀

@IcooIey @Klaxun @artemis Interesting. As my wife and I were driving around last weekend looking at fall colors i said, 'look at the color on those trees in the dead yard' (meaning cemetery). But that's just me playing with words and then I see your post/replies.

The Mïghty Kräcken

@NeadReport @IcooIey @artemis
I will assimilate dead yard into my vocabulary. Thank you.

Louanne Cooley

@NeadReport @Klaxun @artemis oh dead yard is very good.

My husband is very good at making up likely sounding words too. A personal favorite is “shmoguses” for stuffed shells.

Roger Moore

@Klaxun @IcooIey @artemis
An amusing example of this is Randal Monroe's Thing Explainer. He wrote a whole book trying to explain tech using the 1000 most common English words; he even had to say "ten hundred" for how many words he used, because "thousand" isn't in the 1000 words he was allowed to use.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_

Louanne Cooley

@VATVSLPR @Klaxun @artemis

That’s a wonderful book! My daughter was reading What If today.

Cavyherd

@IcooIey @Klaxun @artemis

I remember the near-orgasm I had when a friend used "apoplectic" in casual conversation 😂

mercurial shrimp

@artemis my gosh I love the word devoid though

it's punishing real, human intelligence in all ways

CubeThoughts

@artemis What does a large language model know about detecting text from large language models?? It's been trained mostly on massive amounts of text from before there were large language models!

So it's bullshitting people about the work of actual other people, and it doesn't even have the data set to fake it.

scientificamerican.com/article

keinna :neobot_flag_nb:

@artemis this hasn’t happened to me yet but i’m honestly a little scared of this happening because people think of these checkers as absolute and objective and it’s hard to defend against someone who thinks that

croutumn

@artemis@dice.camp this was such a big fear i had when i was writing up my dissertation, my formal writing has been sort of a frankenstein of what formal things ive read that ive picked up or thought was effective since I've been writing stuff like that, and when the plagiarism checker outputted 10% (it had an AI checker built-in) but thankfully that was just my references lmao. at the time ChatGPT was the only big LLM so i assume that it would be trained on only that but now with that stuff being trained on other LLMs i feel its gonna be a lot harder to differentiate.

@artemis@dice.camp this was such a big fear i had when i was writing up my dissertation, my formal writing has been sort of a frankenstein of what formal things ive read that ive picked up or thought was effective since I've been writing stuff like that, and when the plagiarism checker outputted 10% (it had an AI checker built-in) but thankfully that was just my references lmao. at the time ChatGPT was the only big LLM so i assume that it would be trained on only that but now with that stuff being...

Matt Hall

@artemis

Seriously, I... I read the dictionary for _fun_ as a kid. I know that's not normal but I don't need robots bullying me for it.

Also, using a bot to determine if a bot wrote something is definitely a second layer of stupid.

"Well, the machine said it was written by a machine. Who else would know so well what a machine wrote than a machine? Hmm?"

The most reasonable response I can come up with to any of this is to burn it down. Just... Burn it down.

Matt Hall

@paninid

Some variation of this is my prediction for the planet. No humans left, or at least not ones that can understand any of the machinery that continues to beep and boop, just machines chattering back and forth at each other without context.

@artemis

Matt Hall

@paninid

Incoming messages from your hairstylists automated scheduling system that communicates with your automated response system that checks with your automated scheduling system if you're available for an appointment on February 31st (because dates are hard) that checks if your heart rate monitoring system has reported a heartbeat in the last three days.

...

Burn it all down. It'd be better for everyone.

@artemis

feld
@401matthall @paninid @artemis

> Incoming messages from your hairstylists automated scheduling system...

didn't Google demo this a while ago where their Siri equivalent was able to schedule appointments for you by calling and talking to them on your behalf? I don't know if it ever went public but it was definitely interesting
@401matthall @paninid @artemis

> Incoming messages from your hairstylists automated scheduling system...

datarama

@401matthall @paninid @artemis It would be better off for everyone *except* a small group of obscenely rich people.

(and weird misanthropic cultists.)

Matt Hall

@paninid

Yeah, just worse. No hopefulness at the end. ;)

@artemis

aburtch

@401matthall @artemis I feel you on this one. I used to read the essays in the physical hard-bound copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica we had in the house.

argv minus one

@401matthall

I would like to propose “a human who's not an idiot (present company definitely not excluded)” as an alternative answer.

@artemis

Lance

@artemis As a kid, my vocabulary was well above average. To punish someone for being too proficient at language is absurd. How about we go back to having actual human teachers evaluate students?

Michael Seemann

@frumble diese ai checker sind ein größeres problem als die lllms selbst

FinalOverdrive

@artemis indeed. Autistics like myself often develop a more formal style of communication.

Cavyherd

@artemis

This would have me camping out in the principle's office roasting marshmallows over the fire that was once their desk.... 🤬

(I wonder how adding "Please FOAD, Mr. AI, you & whoever signed on the vendor" to the edit would change the "AI score"?)

Nina Felwitch :v_trans:

@artemis
A co worker has tried an AI checker on one of his papers that he did long before ChatGPT was even a thing. The "AI checker" claimed the paper to be likely written by AI.
"AI checkers" are complete nonsense and do not work.

Rbowen

@artemis This is also true of people who have learned English as a second (or third! or more!) language, particularly from certain parts of the world, and particularly people who have read a lot. They are then punished for their erudition.

The Banished Dragon Alephwyr

@artemis One of the things that's not appreciated is that if AI development breaks a certain threshold, there will come a point where human cognition is less accurate and more prone to hallucination than AI cognition, but it will still be humans judging AI by how human it is.

Jordan Kay

@artemis @nicklockwood I’m confused. What does the original post have to do with neurodivergent people?

Nick Lockwood

@_Jordan @artemis the quoter may be drawing an inference there that isn't supported, but it doesn't really make a difference to the point does it? Schools requiring kids to dumb down their vocabulary to pass as human sucks, regardless of whether they are neurotypical or not

F4GRX Sébastien

@artemis fuck that shit. We will NEVER surrender to mediocrity.

Alexander Knochel

@f4grx @artemis
You risk being burned by Mediocrates, flagged by the checker,
mauled by thesaurus rex.

billy joe bowers - Harris2024

@artemis

Reducing your vocabulary to prove you're not AI makes it easier for AI to imitate humans.

Rythur

@artemis

AI is about making computers smarter, but "AI" is about making people dumber.

Two approaches, one goal:

Make computer intelligence equal to human intelligence.

Scientist employ the first, while charlatans employ the second.

FinalOverdrive

@artemis in addition, growing up it was not uncommon for peers to call me a "robot" because of my formal language and undetectable tone of voice. I imagine the use of LLMs is leading to even more dehumanizing comparisons of autistic people to them.

Which is worse. I at least could retort with examples of all the great fictional robots. After all, where and what would Picard be without Data? There's no witty comeback against a comparison to a glorified random text generator.

Laux Myth (aka Martin)

@artemis
Truly sad the school wants you to prove the negative that you did not use AI.

imdat celeste :v_tg: :v_nb: :v_genderfluid: [witchzard]

@artemis @sudaksis So, we have to bring us down to AI's stupidity-level in for the AI to tell us that we are not an AI? Umm, I believe we took a wrong turn somewhere along the road, I mean as a species...

Aviva Gary

@artemis Damn I remember having to self edit in school because of this very thing

also shout out to the comments... all of you are right and scary

Because the thing is this is how they view education and PEOPLE

something that can be produced on the factory floor and nit picked until "right" 🤔

Mikalai

@artemis
The horrible thing flying under the radar is a pressumtion of being guilty. C'mon. When kids get used to being guilty until proven innocent, who the majority can easily vote (look at Russia)? How the minority will act, when you are apriori guilty? (crime)

Frank Bennett

@mikalai @artemis When I was in academic life, absolutely the most egregious plagiarists—students who would continue to justify their copying eve when caught red-handed—were from former Soviet satellites. (To be fair, some of the best students from those regions took time to explain to me some of the popular methods of cheating.)

Wilfried Klaebe

@artemis This stochastical parrot finder should be devoid of life.

Yes, that is a play on Monty Python's Dead Parrot Sketch, where they used the phrase "devoid of life".

R.L. LE

@artemis So... it's "reproduce the drivel of your surroundings, or be called a faker", then...?

Medea Vanamonde🏳️‍⚧️ ♀

@artemis bwahhahahaaha! i probably read as a THE CULTURE Hub Mind

Miakoda

@artemis The fact that many autistic coded characters are robots makes this funny, but it is also sad and infuriating.

DELETED

@artemis aaaaaa this is awful, I use uncommon vocabulary sometimes without even thinking. Thankfully my school doesn't use this crap

Medium Endian

@artemis

"Hey, won't this just automate bias and persecution of anyone who deviates from a flawed arbitrary baseline that was created to intentionally embody the most bland, generic, and soulless presentation of human facsimile?"

"Yeah but 💲💲💲"

"Ah I see. My mistake. Carry on."

Orca🌻 | 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

@artemis@dice.camp What makes a sentence "AI-written" anyway? I remembered reading a report of professor feeding university students' assignment to AI checker, and all those assignment that has less complex grammar and vocabilary are marked as AI-generated, which harmed English-as-second-language students. It's so ridiculous.

Reggie Huizinga :35mmil1:

@artemis Another form of neurodivergent discrimination. I wonder how may neurodivergents actually wrote that AI engine. Probably a lot.

In verbal conversation, either you have to wait for specific word selection, or endure my replacement curse words for near real time communication. 😁

Dofain

@artemis @Enalys This proves that both teachers and AI checker devs have low English fluency.

Fran Barton

@artemis that was definitely what I was like as a kid, trying out words that I'd discovered. This is infuriating!

spiegelmama

@artemis I have a good experience and a bad experience of the pre-AI days. The bad: A 4th grade teacher circled "Ergo" - used correctly to mean "therefore" - and dinged my report down to a B+.

In the good, a high school teacher was trying to get us to use notecards and outlines and all that process correctly so that we'd be prepared for college. One of her tips was to reword the source cited on the card so that you wouldn't accidentally plagiarize. Unfortunately, my memory was spectacular, and when writing up my first draft, I managed to reconstruct large passages from the original sources. My teacher asked to see me, and she asked to see my notecards. She knew how my brain worked, and suspected what had happened. She then recommended that I write down the exact text and rewrite while writing the paper.

@artemis I have a good experience and a bad experience of the pre-AI days. The bad: A 4th grade teacher circled "Ergo" - used correctly to mean "therefore" - and dinged my report down to a B+.

In the good, a high school teacher was trying to get us to use notecards and outlines and all that process correctly so that we'd be prepared for college. One of her tips was to reword the source cited on the card so that you wouldn't accidentally plagiarize. Unfortunately, my memory was spectacular, and when...

Critter (he/him)

@artemis this is extra infuriating for me as I have several distinct memories of having to fight my teachers to prove that words I used in writing assignments were a) real words, b) I did know the meaning, and c) had used them correctly. That was bad enough. The kids using gen ai are wrecking themselves, and this sort of crap is going to wreck the ones who don't need it

Felyashono

@artemis
Yeah, that's not an issue with AI. That's an issue with humans.

When I started working in customer service, I was given the advice to reduce the size and complexity of my lexicon. The words I was using caused a perception of condescension. And we don't want the customers to think I'm condescending!

Masking takes many, many forms.

#ActuallyAutistic

Goiterzan/Amygdalai Lama

@felyashono @artemis
.
I think was the point, the supposed AI isn’t any more “I” than the fools
who make it

Frank Bennett

@artemis I still remember the eye-rolls of colleagues when I'd suggest that "plagiarism checkers" (Turnitin) were a wrong-headed waste of time. I doubt that will be any different with "AI checkers."

I'm comfortable in the world I occupy, but I've been forced to realized there aren't many people here with me.

unusual zone of infecundity
@artemis venn diagram of 1984 and T2*

*or maybe I Have No Mouth
Mother Bones

@artemis Ah, the thing I learned to do in middle school for survival 😕

Robert Link

@artemis I like to think me mum would've told that school to fsck itself.

Lewis Edwards

@artemis When I was in high school and college, Microsoft Word had a grammar checker that would estimate the grade level of your document. I always tried to get that as high as possible. I guess now my papers would be rejected as cheating.

treelzebub

@artemis i am 100% positive that, if i were still in school, my neurotic ass would be filming a timelapse of myself writing papers and doing homework as proof of life

apm77

@artemis Several thoughts, including: (1) memories of the times a teacher assumed I had copied based on my language use, (2) wondering to what extent careful word use is actually "masking" (I agree it's a factor), and (3) fantasies of what I want to do to any teacher who claims to be under the impression that AI checkers are capable of doing what it says on the tin.

bigTanuki

@artemis Spending time “un-AI-ing” is some thing that @neil_selwyn addressing in his fantastic podcast.
This simply reality is that educators and by extension parents will find themselves increasingly putting in invisible labor to make human-work conform to automation requirements so that it “just-works,” because it really doesn’t without all the extra human effort.

there is beauty in simplicity

@artemis I learned a big word when I was eleven or twelve and used it in a report and got accused of copying from the encyclopedia

(if that didn't give away how long ago it was, it was more than 35 years)

the AI thing feels worse though, because my teacher just went on vibes, where now they're using algorithms that are based on other people's vibes

Kevin Karhan :verified:

@artemis Shit like this is why I refuse to let my CV get eaten up by "#AI" from recruiting companies!

#NameThemBlameThem

Radio Azureus

@artemis

Why can't the teacher be bothered to read the essay himself, I asked myself. Since the teacher knows the writing style of the kid it'll be easily to determine whether it's AI or not

Jason Howard :sdf:

@artemis @Nigel_Purchase
The future is devoid of intelligence. Hence the need for artificial kind.

Violet

@artemis
That reminds me how, when I was a school kid, teachers regularly accused me of plagiarism because my language was written "unnatural" or of cheating because I knew things I "shouldn't know yet" at that point in the curriculum.
I mean, that plus accusing me of lying about it because I didn't make eye contact.

All my teachers taught me was to despise adults (as opposed to grown-ups) that are in positions of power over kids.

@artemis
That reminds me how, when I was a school kid, teachers regularly accused me of plagiarism because my language was written "unnatural" or of cheating because I knew things I "shouldn't know yet" at that point in the curriculum.
I mean, that plus accusing me of lying about it because I didn't make eye contact.

Orz

@artemis Hm, that particular word, 'devoid' made me think if the Eldrazi in MtG are generated by an AI.

It seems to track.

Martijn Vos

@artemis

Why the fuck did we ever tolerate robots deciding if we're human enough. This started with captchas.

Tau 🏳️‍🌈

@artemis I hate AI checkers with a passion, they just don't work and if someone forces me to use them I lose all motivation to write because then I have to then modify it until the checker is happy with it

I'm not even in the spectrum, I just have ADHD but it's still a big annoyance

pgcd

@artemis rule of thumb: if GBoard can't guess the word when you swipe, you're an AI.
I am an AI, btw.

xsk

@artemis @assaf setting up a company that produces AI checkers is still the easiest way to make money out if the AI hype. Every seasoned educator knows they don’t work, research showed they don’t work, it is clear as day to everyone why they don’t work, even if you are a non technical person.

But they still sell the promise of “detects 99% of AI generated text”, which by itself is a joke as claim and should have thwarted away any educational institute.

Any “educator” that relies on AI and bullet point tests to evaluate a student is useless to any path of knowledge - with the literal meaning, and the sad thing is that they chose to have made themselves as such.

I wish they cared as much as their tenure in order to change things, but those people that would grade you less because of snake oil software are already devoid of any common sense.

@artemis @assaf setting up a company that produces AI checkers is still the easiest way to make money out if the AI hype. Every seasoned educator knows they don’t work, research showed they don’t work, it is clear as day to everyone why they don’t work, even if you are a non technical person.

But they still sell the promise of “detects 99% of AI generated text”, which by itself is a joke as claim and should have thwarted away any educational institute.

Susan60

@artemis
Or don’t to show that you’re literate, well read & articulate. Just shows what AI thinks of humans…

Médard

@artemis

Comme on disait chez moi :
Il y a l'intelligence artificielle
- et la connerie naturelle !"

As we used to say back home:
There's artificial intelligence
- and natural bullshit!"

Anna 🖖🏼

@artemis I'm a teacher. If a kid gave me an essay with an unusual word, I'd just ask them what it means in general and in this context, and if they know, no problem. Using the automated check before any human check is, well, inhuman.

Zergling_man
@artemis Just put "nigger" in it, this will guarantee 0% chance of AI.
Sonikku

@artemis AI has to go... it has to be stamped out... there are far more urgent causes than the greed of corporates and CEOs aspiring for eye-watering personal wealth.

lumpen 🍉 III

@artemis AI checkers are absolute scams, schools are being conned into forcing their students to submit content to be used as AI training datasets against their will, this shit should be illegal

Gobabu

@artemis
Wrong hammer for this type of screw.

Tufty Indigo

@artemis The real scandal here is that teaching the kid how to defeat broken automated checks is a much more useful life skill in 2024 than writing the essay.

Nini

@artemis This is middle management nothings trying to make us all talk like middle management nothings, the ergot of corpospeak. Mediocrity enforced by a template.

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