This is a complex problem. But the first step of that problem is Twitter/X
Avoid it, and the next step toward a solution may be easier.
What is the key combo to make an emdash?
On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.
It makes me think if people en masse realize most of their online interactions are with LLMs, they might as well stop using these social platforms for engagement and just switch to totally passive consumption, which gives even less satisfaction and more frustration IMO.
When in actuality what it did was kill all the fun and entertaining bots due to API limitations and leaving only the people willing to pay the $$ for a checkmark and paying for the API access.
You shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet.
If you bought into that, then congrats he sold you.
He says a lot of shit.
Robots are the new cars. The Moon is the new Mars. Turn, turn, turn.
I built this tool primarily to identify AI writing in articles and posts but it's proven useful for comments/responses too: https://tropes.fyi/vetter
Not least because a lot of these things are things that novice writers will have had drummed into them. E.g. clearly signposting a conclusion is not uncommon advice.
Not because it isn't hamfisted but because they're not yet good enough that the links advice ("Competent writing doesn't need to tell you it's concluding. The reader can feel it") applies, and it's better than it not being clear to the reader at all. And for more formal writing people will also be told to even more explicitly signpost it with headings.
The post says "AI signals its structural moves because it's following a template, not writing organically. But guess what? So do most human writers. Sometimes far more directly and explicitly than an AI.
To be clear, I don't think the advice is bad given to a sufficiently strong model - e.g. Opus is definitely capable of taking on writing rules with some coaxing (and a review pass), but I could imagine my teachers at school presenting this - stripped of the AI references - to get us to write better.
If anything, I suspect AI writes like this because it gets rewarded in RLHF because it reads like good writing to a lot of people on the surface.
EDIT: Funnily, enough https://tropes.fyi/vetter thinks the above is AI assisted. It absolutely is not. No AI has gone near this comment. That says it all about the trouble with these detectors.
I completely understand - and do not intend to disparage - the use of these tropes. With the vetter and aidr tools I try to focus more on frequency analysis. I've tried to minimise false positives by tuning detection thresholds to match density rather than individual occurrences e.g. "it's not X, it's Y" is fine but 3x in one paragraph and suspicions flare.
But other tropes like lack of specificity and ESPECIALLY AIs tendency to converge to the mean (less risk, less emotion, FALSE vulnerability) are blatantly anti-human imo.
That won't entirely weed out these tropes, but it will massively change the style.
Then add a few specific rules and make it review its writing, instead of expecting it to get it right while writing.
To weed out the tropes is largely a question of enforcing good writing through rules.
A whole lot of the tropes are present because a lot of people write that way. It may have been amplified by RLHF etc., but in that case it's been amplified because people have judged those responses to be better - after all that is what RLHF is.
"Respond within 4-12 hours."
"Do not respond between midnight and 6am EST." (Or CET, whatever makes sense.)
Right now the most obvious traits are the well-known ones that are hard for most LLMs to shake off. Em-dashes, word choices, and the very limited ways in which they structure sentences. Terseness and conciseness is also a tell, which sucks.
I've noticed that I've recently (had the urge to and) spent a lot more time with people in real life, not sure if there is a causative effect. The illusion of social interaction on the internet is fading.
When I look at sites like Reddit I have a strong feeling, at least with some of the bigger subs, that there's definitely a substantial percentage of bots talking to each other there. More on some subs, less on others. Definitely on the political ones.
https://devcommunity.x.com/t/update-to-reply-behavior-in-x-a...
> Moving forward, replies via the API will only be permitted if the replier has been explicitly summoned by the original post’s author. This means: The original author @mentions the replying user/account in their post, or The original author quotes a post from the replying user/account.
Google has spent billions trying to distinguish bots from users. And has been largely unsuccessful n
So you are saying the bots go to sleep? Not a very smart allegation.
They've upgraded to AI's recently though, usually the first response is a canned AI thing but if you keep arguing you'll get an actual human.
> AI-generated replies really are the scourge of Twitter these days. Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly rolling their own custom reply-bots
> ... and I just found out the category name for this is "reply guy" tools which is so on the nose it hurts
(You can confirm this by Google searching "reply guy service".)
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/reply-guy
The joke is that the people selling this software picked that as the name for what whey are selling, either missing or leaning into the negative connotations that are attached to that term.
I read the whole thread and there's no joke here.
AI-generated replies from bots really are the scourge of HN these days.
Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly running their own custom Claws?
1. Get more followers. A lot of people see follower count as a goal that matters to them. Replying to high follower counts may earn you a follow from them or from someone reading their replies who doesn't catch that you are a bot.
2. Establish account credibility. Does Twitter's algorithm rank posts higher from accounts that have a long history of engaging with other accounts? I don't know for sure, neither do they but they may believe it's worth trying anyway.
3. Accounts for sale. There's a market for used Twitter accounts with plenty of realistic looking activity. Maybe these spammers are building inventory.
The more determined salesmen last for 3-4 emails, but most drop off after 2 or so.
Especially for my parents who are getting targeted like crazy by telemarketers
FML we better develop social norms around this asap because this fuckin blows
AI in the middle makes colleagues more tolerable if you didn't really get along with them well originally.
If I wanted to read chatbot output I can do that. We both have the same enterprise chatbot…
I still don't understand why people use his platform and give him power he has, and we have seen that he is using that to reduce children's access to food, promote people who are examples of no ethics whatsoever and is actively working on destroying numerous democracies by spreading propaganda from right wing.
One thing giving him power to do this are users of his platforms, and anyone still on Twitter is contributing to this.
The problem is that he doesn't care about the money, so he can fuel his rage bait machine as long as he wants which would be normally not possible.
This raises a rats nest of issues, but will we be able to avoid this necessity?
So... you can't win.
Example that seems like it should be required for all age verification systems, if linkability is addressed:
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
I wonder if it is possible at all to have anonymity without admitting bots.
The reasons why Youtube and Discord are so gung ho on age verification might be because these companies that sell ads and data have a monetary incentive for distinguishing humans from bots for their investors and shareholders.
If I were to chose I'd rather have a bot infested internet than a mass surveillance dystopia.
a great link to share around !
now ive been wondering - what is the polite way to exit a conversation when it becomes obvious that your fellow interlocutor is merely a chunk of electric meat redirecting the output of sam altman? im talking blatantly obvious eg. 'its not x, its y' multiple times in the same paragraph.
> a great link to share around !
I find it odd that, when it comes to natural language, we all agree that the LLM is stuck in an uncanny valley, yet no one is acknowledging that the code it generates has a similar alien feel to it.
But personally, if I get value out of a conversation, I will continue. If I don't, I'll stop responding. Whether or not the other side is an AI is only relevant if I think I'm building some kind of rapport or friendship with someone. Otherwise what matters is if the comments makes me think, or makes me want to write something. If only AI bots were reading the comments, that would be a bigger issue than if the specific comment I'm replying to is AI-written.
The bots are going to win this war. I'm not sure of the implications of what this means though.
- "control plane", a media ecosystem where everything could be fake
- "ground plane", in-person gatherings and demonstrations, which are much harder to fake but have extremely limited access to information and are easily suppressed
I think the general outcome is simply a devaluing of open online chatter as a whole, which I definitely don't see as a bad thing.
Kinda similar to the ye olde newsgroup custom of replying "plonk" when you add someone to your killfile.
Nah, that's not natural even if a living person does it without the help of a LLM.
newcorpospeak, perhaps. Not natural.
That's the part i disagree with. I'm thinking they are the ones who trained the LLMs.
There was a really interesting talk given by Mathias Shindler (long time editor of German Wikipedia) at the 39C3 conference about this topic a few months back that is worth a watch for anyone interested in the issue: https://youtu.be/fKU0V9hQMnY