If you’ve never seen Jim Carrey’s 2007 psychological thriller The Number 23, then congratulations. It is a film about a man who sees the number 23 so many times that he ends up going bonkers. I used to think this film was stupid. However, now I appear to be living it.
My own personal number 23 is a rhetorical device: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” Everywhere I look, there it is. Whenever I hate myself enough to scroll through Facebook’s wilderness of algorithmically suggested posts, I find myself being smacked in the face with sentences such as: “Self-improvement isn’t a trend, it’s a lifestyle shift,” and “The small wins aren’t just moments, they’re the majority of your life.” Once you notice it, it becomes impossible to ignore. This weekend during a Peloton class (I know, shut up), I heard an instructor bark a variation of “this isn’t X, it’s Y”. Yesterday, a character did the same during a TV show I was reviewing, and I dropped a star from its score in retaliation.
You know where this is coming from, don’t you? “It’s not X, it’s Y” is an AI mainstay. It’s one of ChatGPT’s most insidious tells. No matter how innocuous a prompt you enter, AI will always find a way to sneak it into its response. Ask it if you should put more ham in your pasta, and it will tell you: “Ham doesn’t just taste good – it makes everything else taste better.” Ask it if you should chase a bee around your garden and it will say: “Bees aren’t stupid – they’re hyper-specialised”.
It’s beyond irritating to me that because LLMs were trained on writing that uses such constructions, being competent at writing now makes me get accusations of using one to create a post or comment.
This isn’t really the case on Beehaw, but head over to Reddit, post a cogent, well-reasoned comment, and the knives are out.
I think the most infuriating part is that instead of engaging with the content (I’m there mostly for debate, anyway), they attack the structure and lob accusations. That’s not a conversation.
But do you not see how redundant the construction is in the given examples? You’re right that it has a place, but that place is not literally every paragraph you write.
An LLM doesn’t understand the rules of when certain linguistic constructions enhance the communication of the writing, it just repeats a pattern that existed in the training data in places where it’s not necessary. That’s why it is so jarring and inhuman to read.
Yeah I see it but thats not what the problem is. The author isnt saying “ai’s points of contrast arent relevant or helpful” its calling out the construction itself. The author complains about the ineffective writing of ai, and then names the wrong problem. Its like saying "the problem with ai writing is ai keeps usimg the word “the”. No that isnt the problem! There are problems and that isnt the one. It isnt a stylistic quirk, its the way the quirk is used that stands out, just like you said.
But actually I’m just having a laugh trying to fit in as many “its not x, its y” comments as I can. I’m all about criticizing ai but theres so much to actually criticize and this misses the mark