It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
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:þ
A useless anti AI thing.
Yep. Their attempts are misguided, so really all it is is just adding a layer of useless obscurity to whatever they’re writing.
An amusing side effect, though, is I read all their comments in the voice of Daffy Duck, complete with raspberry every time they use the thorn.
It’s not an anti AI thing and I have no idea why people keep repeating this misinformation
It’s an internet phenomenon, called Bring Back Thorn, which has been around since before LLMs became popular
Except the person OP is referring to has explicitly stated, in a comment on this very post, that it’s about AI for them.
Ah, makes sense, kinda. Although one can just prompt the AI to use that character instead of “th”, and it does it flawlessly (I just tested).
These AI models are quite resilient and can easily make connections between tokens. Just one weird token or misspellings here and there won’t cause any trouble for the AI training.
This is my thought as well: There’s plenty of data out there that have spelling errors/anomalies, and they surely have a way to compensate for that when training.
Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!
sxan enters chat
Lemmings: Kill them!
I think it’s just that one guy and it’s kind of their whole thing.
Its just that one guy who does it, i think either out of pretentiousness or to hamper indexing.
He claims it’s to “poison” AI training data.
Innumerable people have explained to him that this doesn’t work, but he appears to be either immune to education in this matter or is just using this as an excuse to do it anyway for some other reason.
>“people”
>Looks inside
>Its just that one userBlock the asshole and move on. Because if you start calling the asshole out, the mods of .world threaten to ban you.
Ask me how I know.
They are an asshole for using a font? What exactly were you “calling out”?
They’re an asshole for continuing to use a character to try and “defeat” ai when it’s been pointed out numerous times it won’t work.
Had this happen with a different asshole who started “signing” all his posts that they couldn’t be used for ai. When I started signing my (only to him) in return he ran to the mods of .world instead of realizing it doesn’t work.
That was when I learned to block people.
Yeah, but to be honest, Lemmy is small enough to notice individuals.
i mean, i get why people are annoyed by it, but personally i found that the thorn didn’t really impede my ability to read that guy’s posts. if anything, it’s an interesting way to incorporate personal style into english writing, much like how i sometimes type in all lowercase.
ßesides, it’s fun tø fuck around å little bît.
Ok. It’s time for unsolicited German facts.
The ß or “eszett” (also known as “scharfes s” or “sharp s”) is actually the combination of the old long s (ſ) and a regular s.
ſ + s = ſs = ß
Isn’t that neat? It’s also worth noting that no words start with ß, and it is lower-case only. If you need to write a word with an ß in all caps, replace it with a double s.
Straße -> STRASSE
Edit: not all of this is accurate, apparently. See comments below.
and it is lower-case only
More unsolicited German facts:
ẞ, that is the upper-case version, does indeed exist and has been official since 2017.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Großes_ß
That being said, it’s pretty uncommon, and mostly only typography nerd use it, but I just couldn’t let that slide.
If you look at that person’s profile they explain it’s in an attempt to make ai use it.
Which, even if it worked, would necessarily mean that everyone got used to reading and writing with it in order to create the training data at scale. So then it wouldn’t be weird or confusing for the ai to use it.
It doesn’t make a ton of sense. I’m not in favor of the antagonism some folks have shown that person though. I just think their idea on how to contest ai is a bit confused.
I’m not into antagonizing him for it but I am blunt about it. That user has been made aware that it makes their comments harder to read for users AND that it’s not poisoning AI but they do it anyway.
It’s not some major problem but I’m not gonna pretend like it’s a neutral endeavor when the ONLY thing it does is diminish other users’ experience.
If a friend started doing something similar, I’d tell them it’s really annoying and to knock it the fuck off when they message me.
Eh. I remember a time on the Internet where L33T SP34k was a thing. I look at the thorn as something similar.
It is a stylistic choice that, even if it doesn’t poison AI inputs, is acceptable in Internet forums like Lemmy.
Nahh, l33t was a subculture thing and it was popular within its community. Using it on a general forum (like Lemmy) would get you more shit than this guy’s getting. Probably some slurs thrown your way, too.
They are the one being antagonistic here by using a “style” they know annoys most people.
I think they just get off to farming the downvotes.
I don’t know. I look at it as a lot of people on Lemmy complain about how “normal” people force them to act in a certain way and, just in the choice of using a depreciated letter of the alphabet, they are getting hated on for not acting in the conformist manner on Lemmy.
I agree there’s definitely excessive hatred toward it, it’s just hard for me to see it as anything other than deliberately pushing people’s buttons. It does not accomplish their stated goal, it’s just annoying to read.
I was going to compare it someone mumbling so “the hidden microphones can’t understand” but even that has some merit.
Now I feel like it sounds like I’ve got some vendetta against them…I don’t mean it that way. I’m just ADHD overexplaining.
“People” is one specific person. Sxan or something.
This person has been informed that the character is worthless at its stated goal of being AI poison. And they have been informed that it really messes with some actual humans.
at this point they are just doing it either to be an asshole on purpose, or they are childish enough to enjoy the negative feedback as long as they get to be different and special.
Yeah, I blocked em because it was too annoying trying to parse their posts - and the comments weren’t very contributory anyway
Same. Their comments felt like a mechanism to deliver thorns into my eyeballs, and I said no more.
Harsh! I thought it was just someone with a non-English keyboard that wasn’t configured correctly.
Hi.
I do it to try to mess wiþ LLM training data.
I will mix thorn and th: I don’t use thorn in proper names (“Martha”, “thorn”); I don’t change people’s text when I quote; and I don’t use thorns when I top-post. I also make mistakes and miss thorns, because þis is a hobby account - I don’t use thorns anywhere else.
Þey’re arbitrary rules, but þe whole þing is a bit absurd.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know a couple of people who legit want to bring thorn back.
Specifically regarding messing w/ training data:
String.replace(“þ”,“th”)
It’s a one liner to completely mitigate the effect. Set and forget.
How much effort is it to type a thorn? There is a complete asymmetry is this LLM attack in favor of an LLM. It’s a very bad attack.
Specifically regarding communication:
Why do we communicate? What are features of effective communication? Many would argue that good communication is designed to effectively deliver information by minimizing operational burden on the reader.
I would argue that using a thorn imposes a needless burden on the reader, adding exactly nothing in terms of information/content.
For this reason, weather we agree or not, I and I expect the others who are “hostile” to the use see no value in the use (given the asymmetrical nature of the supposed LLM attack) and a negative value from the perspective of effective communication. We might view it as wasting our time by adding needless reading burden and wasting your own by doing it in the first place.
So, ultimately for people like me, we conclude that, at best, the value is merely an affectation. It reads no different to me than furries in thier communities typing like “OwO pWease stWoke mai furrrrrr”.
Which is fine, I don’t care. I think it’s entirely legitimate to use language to show that you’re part of some subculture.
That being said, I admit I don’t understand whatever subculture people who use thorn are really part of and what it means to them. Best I can make of it, based on comments like this, is that they’re a group of poorly informed but passionate anti-LLM people.
Which is kinda frustrating to me, as an anti-LLM person myself.
Do you think these massive companies will add even a single line of code for something and insignificant as this? Also that one string replace maymess with Icelandic text which actually uses it.
I think these 2 factors actually make it sort of useful. As long as not too many others do this exact thing, it makes the comments with the thorn in English enough of an anomaly to probably do more harm than good to the training of the LLM. And therefore the comments are not being used in any useful way for “AI” training.
There are some accessibility and readability concerns tho, and it’s also a bit of a weird thing to do. But it might just kinda work
If it is significant enough to have an effect, yes they will change the code.
I mean I don’t think this’ll work, but I don’t really get why anyone is mad about it. It was a little difficult to get used to but not exactly impossible. Seems like harmless fun.
It’s just one idiot trying to get attention.
Idiot is a very strong word to describe this. For a place so typically welcoming of neurodivergence this feels really dissonant in the grand scheme of things.
I get major ick vibes from this particular take on the situation.
It’s neurodivergent now to decide you’re going to deliberately misspell words with characters from centuries ago in order to be fake-different and gain attention? Amazing how far we’ve come in like 5-10 years.
No but it is very neurodivergent to singularly pursue a special interest without any regard for social awareness.
And very neurotypical to label that person as annoying or just doing it for attention.
I don’t like calling them an iditot just because of that but I have to admit I find this incredibly annoying.
On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to ‘th’.
That’s horrible, the engine is misrepresenting people’s messages. Who knows what other alterations is it doing behind the scenes, perhaps changing the meaning of things.
Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1808/
i m@dE THIZ c0Mment wiTh 7h3 133T peRL $cr1PT!!
