neighbours have installed the ACTUAL SUN on the side of their house?

[tigerlover1]

So the neighbours are having their house renovated, all very normal, lots of banging and sawing etc. Fine, I can cope. But today the builders installed what I can only describe as a star-level security light.

Previously they had a normal little motion sensor light — you know, the standard “pop out to the bins without tripping over the cat” level of brightness. NOW? Now it’s like they’ve strapped a NASA-grade solar flare to the wall. I swear my bedroom is lit up like I’m orbiting the sun closer than Mercury. If I open the curtains I half expect David Attenborough to narrate the birth of a new planet.

And the sensor?? Oh. My. God. It’s going off ALL night. Breeze? On. Moth flapping its wings three streets away? On. Me blinking too loudly? On.
I’m lying in bed feeling like I’m sleeping on the set of Interstellar.
WIBU to ring the builders tomorrow and politely ask if they can angle it down a bit or maybe ?

Aw it wouldn't of been about you being a monster. It would of been about her past experiences with other people. I know neither of us will never know but I'd put money on her being a people pleaser.

I used to be a people pleaser and at the begining when you realise normal people arnt going to be nasty to you for wanting to advocate for yourself it does get you a bit emotional.

This is so weird, isn’t it? I see this comment so frequently now as though it’s odd that others use appropriate and normal punctuation. I’ve been accused of being an AI several times for the same reason. One wonders why some people think that any punctuation other than commas, full stops, exclamation marks and question marks is unusual: did they finish education at the end of YR1?

How can you not have known though? Surely if you install a light, you realise that it has the potential to directly impact your neighbours and you make sure it isn't negatively affecting them.

I have no advice, but would just like to say that I love your writing style!

It really isn’t. It’s just that some actual humans have a wider vocabulary and more grammatically varied style of communication than you appear to be used to encountering.

If your conjecture was accurate then many of the most famous writers in history must also have been AIs, prior to computers being invented.

Our neighbour has a Coldiz light, totally crazy…. but she is batshit so…

Again, some of the best writers who have ever existed must be AIs by this measure. I’m afraid this is simply nonsense.

I much prefer to read posts from people who can write in an expressive and interesting manner and are capable of utilising more than the most basic punctuation so that they can form more complex sentences which express things more clearly.

People expressing themselves in a different manner to you that exceeds the average capability in the UK population - depressingly this is primary school level - does not indicate that they are using AI to write.

Dead right.
What freaks me out so much is that these numbskulls can sway opinion so much that their own misapprehension becomes holy writ and unarguable fact.

Before this AI business took the spotlight, there was similar clamouring to condemn certain punctuation marks on the basis that only ‘Boomers’ ever used them, and so anyone else employing (say) a semi-colon, or even ellipsis, must therefore be a pretentious gobshite, or at least terminally uncool.
Shout about that long and loud enough, and young people will effectively kill off important language tools for fear of abuse.

Metaphors are interesting. So are the comments on people’s reading levels… What is a “NASA-grade solar flare” and how would it be strapped to a house? When you skim read it seems to make sense, the words are all sort of plausibly connected and in a relevant context, when you think about it it’s a semantic mess, as if there was no actual intended meaning behind its assembly.

i.e. That is a token cluster, not a metaphor

As a professional author who also works with AI models on a daily basis - this post is written by AI. It's not just the punctuation or vocabulary, it's the formatting, the sentence structure, the rhetorical devices (ChatGPT loves the rule of three). We should be allowed to call out AI generated posts without being shouted down. I come to Mumsnet to hear the authentic voices of other real-life parents, not for bots talking to each other. The proliferation of this AI slop everywhere is really having such a profoundly damaging effect on online spaces. It erodes trust. It's also just really irritating to read.

Posted a pretty note card through my neighbours door when it happened to us...not rude just explaining the impact...they sorted it straight away.. no problems now

I was wondering about that too. No flowers were mentioned, I don't think.

I put in this:

Hello. Can you please write a post for an online forum about a neighbour’s security light shining straight into my bedroom? Can you make it funny and light hearted? Included references to it being like orbiting the sun.

Maybe we need to have a thread that is specifically I'M A PROFESSIONAL WHO USES AI/LLMs EXTENSIVELY cage fighting.

Everything LLMs use is because lots of writers use them. Once you start using the rule of fucking three as a gotcha in your amateur Marpleing you really use up a lot of credibility. The rule of three is probably the most overused device in writing, full stop - which is why LLMs love it.

If OP used AI, props to them for switching the em to en.

I mean, feel free to carry out all the tedious troll hunting you want. Just don't be surprised when other people point out just how tedious and self-important you're being.

Oh another tell - humans don’t ‘ring the builders’ of their neighbours. Again, if you’re skimming it sounds plausible but if you think about it it makes no sense.

I do get annoyed by people constantly derailing threads by saying they are AI when it’s for stupid reasons, like they think a situation was too salacious to be real, or that a bathroom layout doesn’t make sense. But equally, it’s not a good thing if the Internet fills up with this kind of text that reads nicely, and yes can be funny or wise or thought-provoking, but is empty and just slightly wrong in little details. Especially when it sounds ‘clever’. AI can be clever, but it’s not actually intelligent and it’s annoying that human generated content is going to be lost under a swamp of this stuff.

They used an m dash and a couple of hyphenated words?

Ah, ok. I've never used Ai so was curious how much or how little you have to feed it.

I do wish it was written "Ai" because my brain always reads it as Al, and I get that Paul Simon song earworm. It's as though my brain enjoys tormenting itself.

They didn't even use an em dash, that's the hilarious thing. Or at the very least inserted spaces around the em (phone text is small!)

The post may be AI generated. I don't know and I don't really care. Even if it is, it doesn't mean it's a bot, loads of people use GPT to help them compose text these days.

Even if it's a bot... policing the forums to unuseability fuelled by the self-righteous warmth of total certainty is likely to make forums just as unusable as the thing being policed.

I'm just struggling to work out why someone would get so invested in defending AI generated text. It's important to me because it affects my livelihood. You may find it tedious but I'd rather people call out AI slop than just accepting it as the new normal.

In my opinion I come to MN and other online groups to speak to people. I understand using AI in a lot of situations, but what is the point is starting a thread or making a post that is completely AI.

What annoys me is when someone posts something like ‘what’s the best place to park at this venue’, or ‘what is a foolproof brownie recipe’, for someone just to post that they asked ChatGTP and it said xyz.

Well, I have just discovered that I have been using em dashes all my literate life (early 1960s) and never known it. I've always called them either hyphens or dashes though, depending on the context and have never heard the terms en and em dashes before. It seems though, I've been using the wrong annotation and writing an en dash whilst, stylistically, I need an em. As that takes twice as much ink, however, I'll stick to my way - people seem to understand me.

Light pollution at its finest! You don't have to put up with it. Ask them to adjust it. If they won't, contact your local council. They have a duty to investigate it if it is interfering with your enjoyment of your home.

Because AI-hunting is as tedious and self-defeating as troll-hunting, and that's something that's always annoyed me. And it's a dull, grey Sunday and this one has caught my attention, with the combination of moral certainty and OTT sleuthing.

You're not going to stop bots by shouting "you're a bot" on individual threads. And you're sometimes going to be wrong. Report to MNHQ and make it a problem they have to engage with and expend resources on. Talk to them about how they're tackling bots, focus your (revenue-driving) engagement on threads where you're confident the OP is both human and hasn't used GPT, campaign for better regulation around AI and LLMs.

In the meantime, OP's lack of follow up increases the likelihood of it being real, but there's always a possibility they've been scared off by the binfire.

Agree. I love AI, but I hate the lazy use of AI.

ETA the only reason I even chimed in is because of all the people falling over themselves to gush over the OP's 'amazing' writing style. They just looked a bit silly when it's so clearly Chat GPT and some may want to know, others don't care.