u/LinguistsDrinkIPAs

June is Pride Month. June is also Men’s Mental Health Awareness month. And yet, every year, Pride dwarfs MMHAM (that’s how I’m abbreviating it for brevity) by miles, to the extent that people generally are much less aware of when MMHAM is if they are even aware that it exists in the first place. I mean, look at how I formatted the first two sentences. The fact that we even mention it as a second thought to Pride shows how we’re ranking these things when they’re both of equal importance.

One of these needs to be moved to a different month. Men’s mental health deserves a separate month so that men can actually be properly recognized.

To me, it really seems like a slap in the face to give men and their mental health their own month to be recognized just for many people to not know when it is, much less even know it’s a thing (because Pride becomes the focus for the entire month of June).

I’m not saying Pride should be minimized, but because the knowledge of it being in June is so ubiquitous, it overpowers anything else. It almost seems more insulting this way than just not giving them their own month at all.

I implore you to stop this behavior and do some introspection. Why is it that you think some basic characteristic of writing is automatically telling of AI-usage?

I hate to tell you this, but there are numerous people out there who take great pride in their vocabulary and command of language, as well as their ability to speak eloquently and concisely.

Unsurprisingly, LLMs are generally trained on such use of language so that they are getting rich and robust training data, which they can use to model and broaden its speech/text-generating capabilities. What this means is that these features you’re seeing that you so heartily believe to be indicative of AI have already been present in human-generated speech from quite some time.

I won’t deny that yes, sometimes things will just have a “feel” about them that *read* as AI, but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of AI-generated things that will not come across that way, and vice versa. AI detectors are also incredibly unreliable in this sense because it’s very easy to get them to identify something non-AI generated as being AI-generated and vice versa.

If you think someone sounds like AI, then maybe it was AI; however, it is certainly not always the case.

I especially say this as someone who has been hastily and incorrectly labeled as “AI slop” before. It’s not fun.

I thought I’d be upset, but really, I’m delighted.

As you might be able to tell from my username, my degrees are in linguistics. While I’m not currently in a linguistics-driven profession, one thing I’ve noticed about pursuing degrees in it is that I’m much, *much* worse at being able to tell what words are actually real and which words aren’t. So much of our language is arbitrarily decided and follow rules that exist simply because they do, and the same thing happens with words! (Also, to clear up some myths: linguists are *not* always polyglots and no, we aren’t sticklers for grammar… well, most of us, anyway).

For example, you may be familiar with that one airport that has the “Recombobulation Area” sign, and people laugh because it’s not a real word— but also there is literally no reason why it can’t be. Being discombobulated means to be out of sorts, so there’s no reason why we couldn’t do a little ol’ back formation and create the word “combobulated” out of it, to mean “being put together” or something similar, and then slapping the re- prefix on would make so much sense!

There have been so many times where I’ll say a word and then have to ask myself whether the word I just said was currently recognized, or it I just made it up on the fly because there’s no reason it can’t exist.

The same thing can happen with grammar rules & style, too: a lot of people who are self-proclaimed “grammar freaks” will die at the sight of a split infinitive (which is when you take the infinitive form a verb— like “to go”— and put a word in between the “to” and the verb). For example, “to boldly go” in Star Trek is a split infinitive. And the only reason that rule exists is because like some guy hundreds of years ago determined we couldn’t do it, because you can’t split an infinitive in Latin; but also, infinitives are one word in Latin, not two, like in English. And yet, we follow this style for no reason except that we do, and there is no good reason to defend upholding it.

I’m curious to know if anyone here thinks similarly. Language is wonderfully weird!

Blue Choo-Choo