Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

The volume of chatter in recent online musings about the hydra headed peril of AI dominance, is becoming ear piercing. These piercings will likely support even more garish burbles of thought to dangle decoratively in front of both the curious and accidental victims. A brief diversion - it seems one of the more remarked upon "tells" of the presence of AI in a piece of writing at the moment, is what I now know to call the " Em Dash " (_). Thank you NYT of 18 Sept 2025.  I'll keep an eye out for them. And I'll need to, if I'm to live up to the pleas of the balance of this post. The main subject of this post has been prompted by yet another article that Arts & Letters Daily has pointed me to recently. It's entitled " Large Language Muddle "  and is an editors article from an online magazine called "n+1" published in the Fall of 2025. The central proposition of this muddle piece seems to be that we human authors need to fight back...

According to an article in the Washington Post on 20 August 2025 by Adam Aleksic " people are starting to talk like ChatGTP ".  The previous post here on the Realm pointed to some words that have been nominated as indicators that a Large Language Model (LLM) is the likely author of the piece. According to Mr Aleksic's article we can now add to our list of" delve ", " adept ", " realm " and " meticulous ", the words " intricate " and " commendable ".  As he says elsewhere, it is becoming hard to keep up. But his more telling point is that as LLMs become more and more prevalent contributors in our discourse, it's not just the bots that are using these words, we've all started using them more too; in our own speech.  It seems that the feedback loop from the LLMs gulping up so much of their own outputs when scraping content from the web, is intensifying this linguistic shift.   Aleksic says:  ...  In the two...

Arts & Letters Daily has again pointed me in the direction of some salient commentary on current iterations of the vast universes of the online world. An article on a site called The Verge entitled " You sound like ChatGTP " has more than a few intriguing observations about the way our language is changing in response to the onslaught of Large Language Models like ChatGTP on online and offline content.  So let's briefly try to "adeptly" "delve" here on the "Realm" into some of this article's insights, even if we may not be overly"meticulous". Apparently in the 18 months since ChatGPT was first released, the use of the above four words in"quotation marks" has increased in usage by up to 51% more than 3 years ago. These words seem to align with those that the ChatGTP model favours, according to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development . What's this all about and what might be the consequences and potentia...

Arstechnica have again drawn my attention to a curious and heartening phenomenon in the tech universe: the tarpit. Check this out:  https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt It seems I am not the only one pissed off with the tech lords pillaging the world's websites to create their vast databases to generate the large language models that power artificial intelligence. What happened to the copyright of the authors of all this material? It's clearly ignored.  I do not consent to the material on my website, paltry as 'tis, being pilfered by AI bots for their databases. Beware bots!  Nepenthes is here. Crawl here now at your own risk bots. You will get lost in this tarpit scraping the bottom for eternity.