[augment_me]

I noticed that despite really liking Karpathy and the blog, I was am kind of wincing/involuntarily reacting to the LLM-like "It's not X, its Y"-phrases:

> it's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer

> it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation

There would be no reaction from me on this 3 years ago, but now this sentence structure is ruined for me

[spaceman_2020]

I used to use a lot of em dashes normally in my writing - they were my go-to replacements for commas and semicolons

But I had to change how I write because people started calling my writing “AI generated”

[athrowaway3z]

2026 will be the year of the ;

[fzzzy]

so you switched to using hyphens instead?

[karpathy]

You’re absolutely right!

Jk jk, now that you pointed it out I can’t unsee it.

[matsemann]

Yeah, came to read Karpathy's thoughts, but might as well ask an LLM myself..

[kakapo5672]

Very broadly, AI sentence-structure and word choice is recursing back into society, changing how humans use language. The Economist recently had a piece on word usage of British Parliament members. They are adopting words and phrases commonly seen in AI.

We're embarking on a ginormous planetary experiment here.

[reshlo]

> The Economist recently had a piece on word usage of British Parliament members. They are adopting words and phrases commonly seen in AI.

Many of the speeches given by MPs are likely to have been written beforehand, in whole or in part. Wouldn’t the more likely explanation be that they, or their staff, are using LLMs to write their speeches?

[d-lisp]

I hated these sentences way before LLMs, at least in the context of an explanation.

> it's not just a website you go like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that "lives" on your computer

This type of sentence, I call rhetorical fat. Get rid of this fat and you obtain a boring sentence that repeats what has been said in the previous one.

Not all rhetorical fats are equal, and I must admit I find myself eyerolling on the "little spirit" part more than about the fatness.

I understand the author wants to decorate things and emphasize key elements, and the hate I feel is only caused by the incompatible projection of my ideals to a text that doesn't belong to me.

> it's not just about the image generation itself, it's about the joint capability coming from text generation.

That's unjustified conceptual stress.

That could be a legitimate answer to a question ("No, no, it's not just about that, it's more about this"), but it's a text. Maybe the text wants you to be focused, maybe the text wants to hype you; this is the shape of the hype without the hype.

"I find image generation is cooler when paired with text generation."

[killerstorm]

It is not a decoration. Karpathy juxtaposes ChatGPT (which feels like a "better google" to most people) to Claude Code, which, apparently, feels different to him. It's a comparison between the two.

You might find this statement non-informative, but without two parts there's no comparison. That's really the semantics of the statement which Karpathy is trying to express.

ChatGPT-ish "it's not just" is annoying because the first part is usually a strawman, something reader considers trite. But it's not the case here.

[amelius]

Karpathy should go back to what he does best: educating people about AI on a deep level. Running experiments and sharing how they work, that sort of stuff. It seems lately he is closer to an influencer who reviews AI-based products. Hopefully it is not too late to go back.

[hojinkoh]

We need to integrate how Singapore and Japan do oral English into our writing I guess.

Joking aside, as a nonnative English speaker who spent quite a bit of time to learn to write in English "properly", this trend of needing to write baad Engrish to avoid being called out in public for "written by an LLM" is frustrating...

[yard2010]

I cannot unsee this anymore and it ruins the whole internet experience for me

[another_twist]

Same here, had to configure ChatGPT to stop making these statements. Also had to configure bunch of other stuff to make it bland when answering questions.

[andai]

The way to make AI not sound like ChatGPT is to use Claude.

I realized that's what bothered me. It's not "oh my god, they used ChatGPT." But "oh my god, they couldn't even be bothered to use Claude."

It'll still sound like AI, but 90% of the cringe is gone.

If you're going to use AI for writing, it's just basic decency to use the one that isn't going to make your audience fly into a fit of rage every ten seconds.

That being said, I feel very self conscious using emdashes in current decade ;)

[huevosabio]

Same, I cringe when I read this structure.

[nathias]

It's not text - it's clickbait distillied to grammar.