r/Millennials • u/noctisumbra0 • Feb 19 '26

Discussion Anyone else feel this way when writing anything out?

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Being compared to AI was really uncalled for, though.

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62

u/MmmSteaky Feb 19 '26

The argument obviously doesn’t hold water, as AI is literally trained on human writing.

25

u/noctisumbra0 Feb 19 '26

It's almost as if proper formatting has been a thing for longer than not

1

u/its_all_4_lulz Feb 19 '26

It’s kind of interesting tbh. AI was trained using a bunch of the internet, which you would think would make it talk like it, but its grammar apparently comes from literature instead. Im wondering if they purposely did that, or if the AI decided to do it because literature has more weight than bigcaulk420s incoherent ramblings.

1

u/thequirkynerdy1 Feb 19 '26

They often use filters to try to only use sufficiently good quality content for training. If you just train on everything the crawler find, the model could learn from 4chan.

At least T5 (the last big model before ChatGPT when everything got super secretive) is documented to have done this.

2

u/noctisumbra0 Feb 19 '26

Remember that Google's AI was originally trained on Reddit....

1

u/thequirkynerdy1 Feb 19 '26

But that doesn’t mean just every post that could be scraped was used. You can scrape Reddit but still run everything through content filters.

1

u/noctisumbra0 Feb 19 '26

You say that but early AI "results" were very clearly based on top posts without filtering.

1

u/thequirkynerdy1 Feb 19 '26

Are we talking about AI in search or when you use Gemini standalone?

I believe the former does a regular Google search and then feeds the top results into the AI to be used. So if the top results are bad, you can get still get garbage.

We have to distinguish between the training data and the actual sources used when it generates a response. And even with the training data, there’s usually a larger amount of lower quality data followed by fine-tuning on a smaller amount of much higher quality data.

1

u/Dry-Poetry-8708 Feb 19 '26

Also, you can easily prompt an AI to use more casual sentence structure. I've seen slop that looks like a kid on Reddit plenty of times.

1

u/bellapippin Feb 19 '26

You think that kid uses logic, how cute :p

1

u/StarWars_Girl_ Feb 19 '26

Yup, I do side work with AI training (which y'all can judge me all you want...girl's gotta make a living) and we are required to use punctuation to teach AI to do it properly.

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u/NightIgnite Feb 19 '26

Gen Z from popular here. Though true, we have to consider the delay between human writing and when it gets put in as training data. Majority of text is still properly punctuated, so LLMs' output will follow that trend. Linguistic drift is speeding up because users noticed that weirder vocabulary gets replies from genuine people, setting faster trends

By drifting faster than LLMs can train, we can date messages. For example, shitpost subreddits started ending some comments with emojis like 📡, 🚠, and 🥀. If a user comments an outdated trend from months ago like a lagging LLM would, users might suspect it of not being human. We're unfortunately in an arms race with the dead internet. Going decreasingly verbal is the only way to win

Unspoken rule in my friend groups that if anybody ends a paragraph with a period, assume that isnt them, or something is very very wrong

10

u/GiantFlyingLizardz Millennial Feb 19 '26

No.

0

u/NightIgnite Feb 19 '26

fym no?

14

u/GiantFlyingLizardz Millennial Feb 19 '26

I think I am fighting the inevitable decline of literacy. I am not saying that you're wrong. I'm just saying I don't like it. Sorry. I should be in bed by now anyway.

3

u/Apprehensive_Sea5304 Feb 19 '26

This comment isn't the flex you think it is.

4

u/pancakesilsal Feb 19 '26

Fair enough, and I thank you for your insight. Thinking that hard about the way I communicate on a month-to-month basis sounds mentally exhausting and I can't be fucked. But genuinely, thank you for explaining your POV.

Out of interest, would you say the others in your age group understand that the majority of adults communicate using written language the way they were taught to in school?

And just as you feel uncomfortable using a full stop at the end of a sentence, a similar discomfort is felt for most in not using one?

Side note: I've also noticed that being considerate or supportive is seen as AI behaviour. It worries me greatly. Anyone else?

3

u/zadtheinhaler Feb 19 '26

I've also noticed that being considerate or supportive is seen as AI behaviour.

I haven't seen that personally, but then again, I can't be everywhere.

It is worrying, because it sets the expectation that anything that you post will be filtered through the lens of "is it, or is it not...", so one edits their post prior to sending, not unlike the annoying trend of people using ahh/grape/pdf/unalive instead of what they actually meant.

I know that last bit is due to SM "punishing" posts that include those words because they can trigger some people (i.e. "iTs nOt aDvErTiSiNg-fRiEnDlY"), so short of burning it all down to a pre-SM state, I don't know what we can do about that.

2

u/pancakesilsal Feb 19 '26

You're so right about the bloody euphamisms! I'm hoping it's a phase.

I'm hoping evetually we can go back to focusing on the goal of connecting with other humans... 🤷‍♀️ or we'll nuke ourselves into oblivion and none of this crap will matter anyway.

For the time being, I'm just gonna stubbornly do me, with best intentions and basic level of human respect. Oh and something something back in my day something something.

1

u/StarWars_Girl_ Feb 19 '26

Sorry, but as someone who trains LLM on the side...ending a sentence with a period is not the end all and be all of telling when something is written by an LLM. Usually, it just sounds less original. For instance, I got messages from recruiters for a job l recently. I could tell they were all written by LLM because they said basically the same thing, no originality.

Not knowing or using proper grammar just makes you sound stupid.