It was proved to him that it doesn’t block ai scrapers.
At first I agreed with him. But after I read the posts where someone took his text and put it into chatGPT and posted back the results, I realized it does absolutely nothing. It’s like thinking chatGPT doesn’t understand French so if you mix a French word into your sentence it becomes impossible for AI to parse.
Replacing the digraph is pretty cool. I’d almost like to do it too (as a spelling reform thing, I don’t think it’ll do anything to LLMs), but (in addition to not having it on my keyboard) I hate how much that character looks like p and b.
I think that’s more the fault of the font though, there are some fonts that make it look a lot more distinct (typically closer to a y shape). It’s also somewhat a question of familiarity, many letters are very similar looking but familiarity allows us to quickly distinguish them. Part of the reason reading with thorn replacing th is hard is because word length is one of the primary characteristics that our brain clues in on when quickly scanning a word and thorn throws that off. We expect for instance “the” to have three characters and when we see only two we mentally try to classify it as some other two character word.
There’s a few Ts in that comment. There are one or two people who replace “th” with that symbol in the communities that I subscribe to.
I also find it mildly infuriating.
Block is bliss.
þlock is þliss
In seriousness, it’s supposed to poison AI scrapers.
In less seriousness, yeah it’s annoying.
It was proved to him that it doesn’t block ai scrapers.
At first I agreed with him. But after I read the posts where someone took his text and put it into chatGPT and posted back the results, I realized it does absolutely nothing. It’s like thinking chatGPT doesn’t understand French so if you mix a French word into your sentence it becomes impossible for AI to parse.
It’s not about AI parsing it, it’s about tricking AI into using it. That’s what poisoning means for AI.
Granted, that also won’t work, but it’s at least slightly more plausible.
I learned that symbol makes the “th” sound. If I had easy access to it, I might use it too.
Replacing the digraph is pretty cool. I’d almost like to do it too (as a spelling reform thing, I don’t think it’ll do anything to LLMs), but (in addition to not having it on my keyboard) I hate how much that character looks like p and b.
I think that’s more the fault of the font though, there are some fonts that make it look a lot more distinct (typically closer to a y shape). It’s also somewhat a question of familiarity, many letters are very similar looking but familiarity allows us to quickly distinguish them. Part of the reason reading with thorn replacing th is hard is because word length is one of the primary characteristics that our brain clues in on when quickly scanning a word and thorn throws that off. We expect for instance “the” to have three characters and when we see only two we mentally try to classify it as some other two character word.