It's Not Just X. It's Y.

A recent experiment testing the limits of noise-generation in diffusion models paired with verbs in the kinetic identification dataset, which has nothing to do with the topic of this post.

Against the Quantification of Integrity

When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language.

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Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking.

"It's not x, it's y."

Large Language Models gravitate toward this type of construction, called negative parallelism. It has its uses: it sets up a contrast. It's useful, especially, for reframing assumptions: "You think it's like that, but it's really like this."

It's all over social media, especially on LinkedIn, and the construction has sparked a backlash amid an ongoing war against automated language production. If you use em-dashes – you might be a bot. If you describe things that delve, quietly, or genuinely (or create lists of three, like that one), you might be a bot.

Recent overuse by language models has led many to declare it bad writing. I'm not so sure. Nobody called JFK a lazy writer when he said, "ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." Negative parallelism is a rhetorical device, and any rhetorical device is only as lazy or inspired as what it contains.

Automated Language Production

Now, we have AI detectors that claim to protect you from the witch hunt by looking for these patterns. You take your own writing and you run it through Grammarly, which will analyze word patterns that AI detectors might flag. Then it offers ideas for how to change them, which a) gives Grammarly the power to write for you and b) makes your writing lose any sense of rhythm or intent.

Grammarly's review of this section has flagged 27 examples of text I should change to avoid the accusation that I am a machine. For example, Grammarly identified the above phrase – "automated language production" – as 11 times more likely to be AI. It suggests that a human would be "against mechanized language synthesis" instead. The simple two-word combo, "align with" was flagged as 43x more likely to be AI-generated. Real humans say "corresponds." These are small suggestions that add up until the result resembles nothing I chose. The human voice replaced by a machine trying to sound human.

As a result, I just paid Pangram – another AI-detection company – $20 to verify that a recently submitted journal article wasn't AI-generated before submission. It wasn't, and I knew it wasn't. It agreed. That's what I paid for: not to learn whether I wrote it, but to be told it wouldn't flag me. Because if Pangram's AI system found me guilty, that's the end of my career. That's literally extortion.

And if it had flagged it, then what? It would give me a score (four valuations: high, very likely, somewhat likely, human) to assign my integrity a category. In the ecosystem we're all building, I'd have to use Grammarly to rephrase everything: using a machine to write for me to prove that I didn't use a different machine to write for me.

A Culture Hostile to Reason

Our instinct in making sense of these machines is to examine the training data. That training data is no longer "just the Web." The web is the raw meat, but this sausage is heavily pre- and post-processed. Post-training optimizes the model for whatever it's designed to do. This includes techniques such as RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback) and RLVR (reinforcement learning through verified rewards). RLHF has humans rank replies, then the system emphasizes those kinds of replies.

RLVR is weirder, and I suspect it's why we see "It's not X, it's Y" so often. Dismissing negative parallelism as lazy gets in the way of understanding why it's showing up everywhere. This type of language is such a powerful framework for thinking that we mistake it for a model's capacity for thought. We credit computation for the work that's done by language.

Weird Dogs

RLVR isn't a structure that watches for words and triggers some sub-process. Instead, you train a model, like you would any model. When that model is done, it predicts tokens. Lots of people are still in denial about this. Token prediction involves producing a list of candidates based on their mathematical distribution in the training data, ranking them by their likelihood given the previous words in the prompt or sequence.

RLVR intervenes by having the model solve math problems by writing their way to a solution, reproducing the language we would use when thinking out loud about how to solve it. When the model arrives at the correct answer, the language it used most often to get there is then emphasized in the finished model. This is (partly) what the industry calls reasoning.

What day was it that we saw that weird dog?

So, think of it like this: You are sitting with a friend. Your phones are dead. Your friend asks: what day was it that we saw that weird dog? You start by saying, "It was Thursday." Your friend says: "No, it wasn't Thursday, because Thursday I was out of town." So you say that's right, so it must have been Wednesday, because Wednesday was your mutual friend's birthday, and you both went to the party, and you saw the dog on the way to the party. Your friend says: "That's right, except, Wednesday was our friend's birthday but the party was on Friday. So we must have seen the dog on Friday."

The two of you have articulated your way to the answer, a verifiable one: you could pop on your phones and check your photos and see that yes, the weird dog picture was taken on Friday. In dehumanizing terms, your gut instinct ("it's Thursday") is what a model might spit out at first guess, and that's where models used to stop.

But you didn't. Your friend countered: "It wasn't [Thursday], it was [Wednesday]." There are more words, which narrow the window of possible answers, and then you arrive, through "its-not-x-its-y-ing," at the correct date. The two of you had actual memories and visceral experiences to work with. Language was the vessel through which these experiences were communicated and conflicts were resolved. The model, by contrast, extends language in longer and longer bursts, replicating the pattern of reasoning you two just engaged in. These longer runs re-enact that deliberation within language rather than through it.

Other high-entropy states get filled by words like "suppose..." which triggers longer speculative passages. "Because," "consider," "alternatively," even "wait" can occupy these positions. These are words that lead to language that brings contrast, exceptions, and abstraction along for the ride. If they get to a correct answer on a math problem, they get pushed to occur more often.

The Reason We Reason

When we talk about a weird dog or have conversations like it, the point of the question was not to identify the date on the calendar when the dog was encountered. It was an opening for a reminiscence. It was posed to reconstruct the memory, to revel in its surrounding context, and to deepen a connection between friends through a shared experience.

Defining reasoning this way assumes that the point of asking a question is to get an answer, that answers can be verified, and that nothing is lost in immediate closure.

Defining reasoning the way it has been used in LLMs assumes that the point of asking a question is to get an answer, that answers can be verified, and that nothing is lost in immediate closure. This has real effects on writing, and the openness to doubt is something we lose in the rapid prototyping of thought that occurs with a language model. Ambiguity, doubt, and uncertainty matter more to some ways of thinking than any immediate answer. The inner life grows in the spaces between the industrial complexes that harness every remnant of our externalized thought.

Nonetheless, the language we use in these states is the same. When AI detectors flag text as AI-generated, is it because it follows a certain structural pattern of that reasoning? Pangram and reasoning models both detect structural patterns based on how humans reason when writing. Pangram's model is trained on pre-2021 data; it then inserts AI-generated versions of the same text into its training.

So, if we publicly shame people whose text looks like it might have been written by a machine – because it mimics the language used for human reasoning – and people stop writing in ways that they internalize as "AI writing" out of fear of false detection, it sends a signal that your language for reasoning must be policed, or you too could be held up to public scrutiny.

In the end, shaming people for writing that gets flagged as AI can lead people to sidestep structures the model has learned from us: structures that are effective tools for argumentation. We take the tools of critical thinking out of the kit at the time we most need them.

For Good Measure

There's another angle to this. An AI-based essay assessment tool was tested in the UK against human graders. The system rewarded writing structures that I can't help notice look a lot like RLVR-based reasoning: "giving out higher marks based on essay length, vocabulary range and sentence complexity, which are often unrelated to academic standards," all of which are hallmarks of AI reasoning.

In other words, the LLM grades humans based on the criteria engineers use to assess the LLM.

The LLM grades humans based on the criteria engineers use to assess the LLM.

There's this old adage from economics called Goodhart's law. The econo-nese version of it is that "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." Or: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It could be tweaked to apply to large language models: "when the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language."

There is danger in evaluating for language patterns over its content, and both generation and detection incentivize this. Automated grading is somewhere between the two: rewarding students for employing the form of reason over the act of reasoning will only make them more tempting and more common. And yet, punishing the form risks punishing reason. Ultimately, we have to think critically in all cases, instead of deferring to the judgments of machines.

Against Automatic Thinking

I'm not convinced by the old "if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about" line. I've seen 99.8% cited as a measure of accuracy in automated surveillance systems since 2018. As Arvind Narayanan has noted, that is on a per-paper basis, which compounds every time we use it. So up to 10% of college students could be falsely accused. If we collectively run every bit of text through an AI model to check whether it is AI-generated, we will generate false positives on an even larger scale.

These models concentrate real authority; companies promise they will reason on our behalf. We normalize something dangerous when we run every two-line phrase through an AI interpreter, post the result online, and say "see? They're plagiarists!"

We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought.

Monthly, for the Second Week in a Row.

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