A useless anti AI thing.

Relevant XKCD : https://xkcd.com/1808/

>"people"
>Looks inside
>Its just that one user

"People" is one specific person. Sxan or something.

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.

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.

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.

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 thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.

Lemmings: Screw corporate social media! Here we can do as we please!

sxan enters chat

Lemmings: Kill them!

I get that it's one person, I get that it's an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to counter-AI, but also isn't it kinda cool to advance the human language in a personal way. I'm surprised Lemmy is so upset by it, maybe that's just the boomer mentality or maybe it's the mentality of hating change, but like everyone can admit the English language is obtuse and hard to master and that's partially because we have less letters than we have phonetic sounds (look at phonetic, it's actually fOnetik). Couldn't we use some advancement in that area of our life? And wouldn't a grass roots movement on Lemmy symbolize the kind of simple, systemic changes we need more of this world? I mean isnt it kinda punk to improve the world in whatever way you can?

Idk, just reading the comments in this thread people seem more antagonistic than I would expect. It's not like we're/he's jumping to the shavian alphabet. It's just a single change that anyone can immediately solve after reading a sentence or two with it present.

Point is I like it. And I have no idea how to type it on my phone lol

I vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.

Because they're pretentious twats who can't even use it correctly.

I think it's just that one guy and it's kind of their whole thing.

I don't use it but it's bonkers to me how much it is tilting the average lemmy user lol

Just for the thun of it

On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to 'th'.

Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can't a fella be a lil quirky in peace?

Im almost certain it’s trolling with the AI reason as an excuse. It would have very little effect on an AI, which would recognise the character as anomalous and discard it or ignore the comment. The only other person I saw doing it replied with every character replaced with similar nonsense when I stated similar to them. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was their former account as it was a while ago and it was copping bans because of it.

Autistic people of Lemmy: THEY’RE DOING LANGUAGE WRONG!!!

Also autistic people of Lemmy: ÞEy’Re DoInG lAnGuAgE wRoNg chortle

Non-autistic people of Lemmy: Hahahahaha sorry that’s the joke

Interesting what's written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.

Just like calling X "twitter" or "the hellsite", or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than "I like it that way". How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.

Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽

TIL about the AI poisoning thingy.

I used to be in r/bringbackthorn so I just thought it was a fun thing lol

From what I understand it's a way to subtly screw with AI. Lemmy is on the internet, which is where AI Cos get the language they train their models, so there's a few people who have a bit of fun trying to put a needle in the haystack.

I always liked the thorn though, ever since I learned about it on QI. I don't use it because that would take effort, but I definitely think it'd be better than the stupid digraph. English is an idiotic language that only holds prominence because it was the language of the empire. Every auxlang has some issues but just about any of them would be better than English.

You will be shocked to learn that "þ" is actually a letter used in modern Icelandic. It's not just an old letter. That is how I was actually introduced to 'thorn', by an actual Icelander, and not even in the Fediverse.