It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.

  • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    10 days ago

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

    • Trailblazing Braille Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      11 days ago

      Maybe 15 years ago, I had a JavaScript snippet that constructed my email address and inserted it onto a page. I bet that’s useless nowadays because the bots run Chrome headless or something.

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
        1·
        11 days ago

        Require a specific interaction from the user to display your actual email (e.g. click on a button). Even if they run a headless browser, they’ll still have to parse the page to figure out what to do and then do it. That’s much more expensive.

    • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nz
      1·
      11 days ago

      Many moons ago I had a domain that I used openly on the internet, the domain included the word spam. I think they were the only email address that I never got spam to.

    • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
      7·
      11 days ago

      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.

    • Havatra@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      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).

      • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
        7·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • Havatra@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          0·
          11 days ago

          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.

          • FaceDeer@fedia.io
            2·
            11 days ago

            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.

            • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
              1·
              9 days ago

              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).

              • FaceDeer@fedia.io
                2·
                9 days ago

                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.

      • midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        0·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • Bo7a@piefed.caEnglish
          4·
          11 days ago

          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.

        • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          10 days ago

          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

        • Havatra@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
          1·
          11 days ago

          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.

          • midribbon_action@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            02·
            11 days ago

            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.

    • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
      04·
      11 days ago

      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

        • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
          0·
          10 days ago

          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

          • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            10 days ago

            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.

  • dajoho@sh.itjust.works
    102·
    9 days ago

    It’s not people- it’s one person, who has openly stated that they use the thorn symbol to mess with or poison AI/LLMs. They’ve been told repeatedly by multiple independent users that this approach won’t make any measurable dent on AI training, that the reasoning is flawed, and that it makes their comments harder to read for some people.

    Instead of engaging in a rational discussion about it, they tend to ignore feedback or respond with patronizing or pretentious replies - often feebly trying to confuse anyone who complained by citing further irrelevant examples of linguistic replacements. There’s no real dialogue; it’s just the same cycle of rinse and repeat.

    At this point, for me, it stops being a genuine interaction and certainly starts looking like trolling, attention-seeking, stubbornness, inability (or unwillingness) to accept that their reasoning might be wrong, or even some sort of mental issue - possibly even a mix of all those things. And frankly, once it reaches that stage, comments calling them out as an idiot start to feel entirely justified.

    Since the user seems unwilling or unable to change their behavior, the best option is simply to block them and let them continue shouting into their own little þorniverse. Things won’t change if they don’t want to listen.

    • Puni@lemmy.world
      12·
      7 days ago

      I know on Reddit, there’s a catchphrase that says “That’s enough Reddit for today”. I think the saying that is appropriate here in response to reading this clarification is “That’s enough Lemmy for today.”

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
    92·
    10 days ago

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

  • Bo7a@piefed.caEnglish
    4·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
      2·
      11 days ago

      Yeah, I blocked em because it was too annoying trying to parse their posts - and the comments weren’t very contributory anyway

    • guy@piefed.socialEnglish
      11·
      11 days ago

      Which is weird, because it took exactly 2 seconds to find out that þ equals th by reading an entire sentence, and thereafter one can read the text just about as good as normal text.
      People who struggle with þ maybe has other reading issues 🤷

      Huh, þ apparently autotranslates to th when I try it. That’s funny

      • Bo7a@piefed.caEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        The point is that they are doing it purely to be annoying at this point. They have been shown many times, by people who actually work in the model training space, that their stated purpose is not achieving what they want.

        • AtariDump@lemmy.world
          02·
          10 days ago

          But start shaming them publicly and they go whining to the mods or .world who threaten to block you.

      • Bo7a@piefed.caEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        if your idea of fun is making it harder for other people to read your posts for no reason other than annoying them.

        it made sense at first if they actually believed that this was going to do anything to an AI scraper. But they obviously know by now that that’s not the case.

    • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
      32·
      10 days ago

      Idiot is a very strong word to describe this. For a place so typically welcoming of neurodivergence this feels really dissonant in the grand scheme of things.

      I get major ick vibes from this particular take on the situation.

      • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
        21·
        10 days ago

        Actually using the thorn isn’t so much the problem. It’s the misinformation. He constantly spreads in the b******* along with it.

        If he was just doing it to do it, I don’t think anyone would really care.

        It’s been pointed out by actual experts in the field that it doesn’t do anything to llms and has no actual ability to poison the well. At this point. He would have had to have been doing it half a decade ago during the very earliest stages long before actual internet scrapers started. Which basically makes the whole exercise pointless.

        So if you want to use a thorn use a thorn but just use it to use it. Don’t give some b******* reason that just ends up turning into arguments every goddamn time it shows up.

        • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          11·
          10 days ago

          So if you want to use a word use a word but just use it. Don’t give some bullshit filtering with *’s every goddamn time it shows up.

          Also it’s fine to use goddamn but not bullshit? I’d guess this was some voice to text thing, but the asterisks were properly escaped.

      • balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one
        12·
        10 days ago

        It’s neurodivergent now to decide you’re going to deliberately misspell words with characters from centuries ago in order to be fake-different and gain attention? Amazing how far we’ve come in like 5-10 years.

        • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
          32·
          9 days ago

          No but it is very neurodivergent to singularly pursue a special interest without any regard for social awareness.

          And very neurotypical to label that person as annoying or just doing it for attention.

            • tomenzgg@midwest.socialEnglish
              2·
              4 days ago

              If we strip all context from the original circumstance, I imagine we could.

              But that’s not what happened, is it? You elected to editorialize that the user is doing it to be fake-different and to gain attention, despite them never going out of their way to do so, never once that I’ve seen actually say it has anything to do with poisoning AI (not that it matters, either way), and never responding when people disparage them to their “face”; literally, just typing the way they want to type and not responding to the behavior of others, the literal opposite of seeking attention.

              Which any autistic person could tell you is highly relatable: they’re just off doing their own thing and it just infuriates the allistic folk who now have to make fun of them and say shit about them because, “Can’t they tell how annoying they’re being? Can’t they read social circumstances? I mean, I’m all for tolerance but they should really understand the way their behavior inconveniences me and makes me uncomfortable and now I’ve got make it their problem.”

              It annoys you; fine. Different strokes; but you didn’t just say it annoys you: you assigned motive and character to this person because you’re so annoyed and any neurodivergent person would recognize that behavior from when it happened to them.

              That’s clearly what AstralPath was referring to and you, then, lined up to the plate to participate further.

              That’s what I was pointing out; it’s not a generalized argument: it’s a capturing of an explicitly neurodivergent experience and taking it out of that context is, of course, going to make it fall apart.

              • balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one
                1·
                3 days ago

                Why does it matter that I assigned motive? It’s an annoying person on the internet. Do you get upset when people ascribe annoying behaviors to some made up reason when you’re driving?

  • MourningDove@lemmy.zip
    4·
    9 days ago

    lol! That’s the “no LLM is going to steal my shit guy!” He’s still around? Man. If it’s who I think it is, they used to be completely normal.

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    63·
    9 days ago

    Gotta be real for one mo.

    People here are being very… what to call it, Reddity? Twittery? Shitty?

    Someone does it for multiple reasons. It’s their “signature”. Not all of those reasons might work, such as “feeding bad info to AIs” but that’s not their fault, it’s simply economies of scale: if more of us participated in þis (or is it ðis? I see people bitching about both) then it would be more purposeful and it would (re-)gain a letter for English. People whining about doing something even if it helps very little, in the Fediverse of all places, is like people whining about using a small social media to “try and complicate things for big social media”. Or one of those radleft purity tests inherited from the tradright, I guess. Dunno which one is worse.

    Me? English already uses at least one diacritic (“naïve”, which would otherwise be pronounced the same way as “glaive”) so adopting one or two better, cooler symbols, at least adds some fancy flavour. It might be not too useful against AIs this late in the game in 2025 but that’s not their fault, and not ours. Ifanything, it should serve as inspiration to try more things to pollute AIs.

    And if that’s not the reason? I’ll buy that too. It gets me to practice AltGr, for one. It looks cool when printed. It makes for a nifty smiley ( :þ and yes, smileys are better than emojis). Whatever your cup of tea, have some. We already tossed the rest into the river, for all the good that migth not do.