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Artificial Intelligence and the word "quietly".


People are looking for "tells".  What is a quick way to tell when I am reading AI slop, rather than something some real human has composed? 

One of the better tells is the frequent use of the adverb "quietly" in metaphorical contexts.

LLMs have received a level of publicity out of proportion to their role within the AI world (see the above Venn diagram) in part because they impact and indeed may threaten the livelihood of people like me. So we, because loquacious folk, talk about it.

LLMs, large language models, have quietly developed the tick of using the word "quietly" a lot. You may recently have read about how a certain individual has "quietly" become important in deliberations of Congress, or how Stephen King has "quietly" amassed some large number of acreage of Maine real estate, or some whatever.

"Quietly" does a lot of work for these models. It sounds as if it is saying something about something conspiratorial or tricky, but it doesn't really mean anything.

Related, even without conspiratorial overtones "quietly" adds color in a low-risk way as in its doubled-up usage in the fourth graf of this blog post.

Also, it may have the effect of flattering readers. "You, dear reader, are now among the elite who have noticed that this fellow is important in the deliberations in Congress" - and "You and I did notice, despite the quiet, King's accumulation of realty." Congratulations on joining the cognoscenti.

[That, BTW, is a purely hypothetical example -- I have no idea whether there is any such pattern of King's realty purchases -- nor do I care.]

The LLM sort of artificial intelligence works by accessing lots and lots of texts, in order to predict the logical continuation in sequences of words where the start of the sequence is determined by the user's question. So if I ask, "Are there any patterns in the publicly available records about the investments of Stephen King" the algorithm will start putting together sentences suggested by that question on the one hand and the sources it accesses on the other.

For the types of reasons I've just mentioned, the word "quietly" fits nicely into a lot of such sequences. So nicely that it does give us a tell.


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