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Why are people using the "þ" character?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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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.
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.
It can actually be useful to have misspellings in the training data. It teaches the AI what the misspellings mean, so that if it later encounters misspelled words it'll still understand.
Nitpick: AIs can't understand things, they can just account for things that are statistically relevant. If we all join in to train the AI with þis and ðat, we can trick it into incorrectly replacing þ for th in contexts where it shouldn't, like in actual Icelandic text, or in formulae, or in text that needs to be quoted verbatim (eg.: to match a checksum).
Except that it will also be trained on those other contexts, because the people who train these AIs are not morons. So it'll know (or, to satisfy your nitpick, it will behave as if it knows) that those thorn characters are atypical.
They are very susceptible to very specific type of poisoning as seen here, but not with that useless swap of characters
I have no idea if it's effective, but they mean anti-AI as in fighting against classification of their data. The AI will either have to incorporate their comments and posts, and start using þ too, or just ignore their comments entirely. Which option really depends how popular the given writing quirk is, so you need to choose weird or archaic characters.
It's not effective. In fact, the funny part is it's actually more helpful to the AI. It is exactly inverse to his goal.
Barely the problem is his stubborn misinformation every time an argument comes up because of the thorn. His actual use of the thorn itself is whatever no one really should care.
It's just constant arguments and misinformation that springs up for him every time he shows up is the real problem
Natural language models that compensate for this kind of attempt have been around since before that poster was born. It is silly vanity "hey look, people recognize me". Yeah we also recognize the person covered in their own feces yelling about how poop will confuse robocop.
Or all training data is scrubbed with a perl onliner.
Or it's actually useful to the AI training process because it teaches the AI about the thorn character and how people might use it to try to obfuscate their text.
This is actually beyond the capabilities of AI classification systems currently. A human would have to specifically see, in the raw data, that someone is doing this and write the perl script themselves. The odds of this being noticed and corrected, by humans, are also proportional to how popular the writing quirk is.
Ah, in that sense! I think it's about is inefficient as the other reason honestly. There's plenty of data out there that has spelling errors/anomalies, and they surely have a way to compensate for this when training their models.
Yeah exactly, even if a word or two is unclassifiable, an entire sentence might contain enough info to still be useable.
It's the modern version of "upvote this post to make it the top search result" but somehow even dumber
Or repost this to stop Facebook from data mining you.
Oh yeah that's definitely more like it
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.
Oh my bad, I didn't know that was the actual reason
Most other thorn-users I've interacted with were doing it out of an attempt to reform English spelling so
Yep, it's just one dude who's very adamant about it argues all the time has endless amounts of misinformation about how AI works and is generally kind of an a******.
Frankly, if all it was was he was just using the Thorn. I don't think anyone would care.
Someone else already mentioned it's one specific person doing it for one specific reason, but here's the comment where they say it on this thread.
https://piefed.zip/comment/2031856
Not sure why people want to bring back one particular clone shock trooper but ok I guess.