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.

    • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
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      22 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.zipOP
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      22 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
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        22 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.zipOP
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          22 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
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            22 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.org
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              20 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
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                20 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.

    • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
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      22 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
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          22 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
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            21 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.