Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity.
As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches.
The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).
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