This makes me want to scream and pull out my hair.
"Reduce your vocabulary by 10-20% to prove you're a human."
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
Tell you what: "devoid" was definitely a word I knew and used in elementary school. Am I normal? Nah, not really. Imagine coming up with a machine that effectively gets to decide how humans are "supposed to" write and speak. Reduction to a mean pollutes the source for everyone. The idiocracification of humanity continues apace. @artemis This is the opposite of the curb cut effect. They're harming everyone by repressing autistic people. @artemis sounds like a white supremacy machine tbh. prescriptivism has always been racist. @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 Being compared to the average of slop data scraped off the internet in order to be "human" is incredibly awful. @virtualbri @artemis @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. @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. @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. @DimitriFayolle The nice thing about that is that it shows you that they are not people to take seriously or care about what they think. @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. 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. @artemis I definitely recommend screaming. The hair pulling bit isn't the best experience. @artemis @Rhodium103 @artemis yeah, I remember arguing on behalf of a friend when the [expletives deleted] prof insisted on: - A required number of cited quotes Buuuuuuut... - Didn't know how to exclude quotes from the analysis So... - Was trying to fail him and others. @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. 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). @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. @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. @NeadReport @IcooIey @artemis @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. @Klaxun @IcooIey @artemis @artemis my gosh I love the word devoid though @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. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatgpt-isnt-hallucinating-its-bullshitting/ @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 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. Yes, “Hunger Games for robots” is stupid AF: https://www.superversive.co/blog/hunger-games-for-robots 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. 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. @401matthall @paninid @artemis It would be better off for everyone *except* a small group of obscenely rich people. (and weird misanthropic cultists.) @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. I would like to propose “a human who's not an idiot (present company definitely not excluded)” as an alternative answer. @artemis indeed. Autistics like myself often develop a more formal style of communication. 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"?) @artemis @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. @artemis @nicklockwood I’m confused. What does the original post have to do with neurodivergent people? Reducing your vocabulary to prove you're not AI makes it easier for AI to imitate humans. 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. @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. @artemis @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 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.) @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". @artemis aaaaaa this is awful, I use uncommon vocabulary sometimes without even thinking. Thankfully my school doesn't use this crap "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." @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. @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. 😁 @artemis that was definitely what I was like as a kid, trying out words that I'd discovered. This is infuriating! @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 @artemis 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. @felyashono @artemis @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. @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. @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 @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. @artemis Spending time “un-AI-ing” is some thing that @neil_selwyn addressing in his fantastic podcast. @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 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 @artemis @Nigel_Purchase Why the fuck did we ever tolerate robots deciding if we're human enough. This started with captchas. Comme on disait chez moi : As we used to say back home: @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 @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. |
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.