I (and several others) found switching to sans-serif as a way of marking LLM text didn’t really work as a marker; when I first saw it I mistakenly thought that only the paragraph with the LLM-name on it was LLM-generated, and I find alternate-font text inside of posts uncanny. I jokingly hypothesized that Habryka (its advocate) had serif-synaesthesia and that’s why it worked for him as a marker, and that’s the story of how the serif-synaesthesia test came to be.
As an additional datapoint on sans vs serif as a marker: I, completely independently of this post and late last year, experimented with exactly this idea for denoting editorial insertions in Gwern.net text (ie. stuff like “Bla bla [see Foo 1994] bla bla”, where I wanted to denote everything in the brackets was by an editor, such as myself). We implemented this, and I and Said Achmiz and everyone who looked at it agreed that Adobe Source Sans vs Serif Pro was a nice idea, but didn’t provide enough contrast and I had to admit that even I often didn’t notice consciously enough. This is despite the fact that switching font families inline would be the most visible way with the most glaring contrasts. We ultimately did put editorials into a different font, but went for a monospace, which we had added for poetry typesetting.
(This is also problematic downstream in places like Greater Wrong where users may get a different font by default. In fact, I’m writing this on GW now and I think the whole page is in sans!)
Yeah, I think fonts without starting and ending delimiters would definitely be too subtle. But I think fonts with starting and ending delimiters are fine.
FWIW, I had no clue where the AI block ended. Having read these comments, I can if I try hard notice the font shift and faint gray circle at the end.
I expect that I personally will probably be able to keep an eye out now that I’m aware, but presumably most readers won’t have read this comment section.
I’d personally favor something a lot less subtle (it’s very easy to tell when one comment ends and the next begins, for example).
I (and several others) found switching to sans-serif as a way of marking LLM text didn’t really work as a marker; when I first saw it I mistakenly thought that only the paragraph with the LLM-name on it was LLM-generated, and I find alternate-font text inside of posts uncanny. I jokingly hypothesized that Habryka (its advocate) had serif-synaesthesia and that’s why it worked for him as a marker, and that’s the story of how the serif-synaesthesia test came to be.
As an additional datapoint on sans vs serif as a marker: I, completely independently of this post and late last year, experimented with exactly this idea for denoting editorial insertions in Gwern.net text (ie. stuff like “Bla bla [see Foo 1994] bla bla”, where I wanted to denote everything in the brackets was by an editor, such as myself). We implemented this, and I and Said Achmiz and everyone who looked at it agreed that Adobe Source Sans vs Serif Pro was a nice idea, but didn’t provide enough contrast and I had to admit that even I often didn’t notice consciously enough. This is despite the fact that switching font families inline would be the most visible way with the most glaring contrasts. We ultimately did put editorials into a different font, but went for a monospace, which we had added for poetry typesetting.
(This is also problematic downstream in places like Greater Wrong where users may get a different font by default. In fact, I’m writing this on GW now and I think the whole page is in sans!)
Yeah, I think fonts without starting and ending delimiters would definitely be too subtle. But I think fonts with starting and ending delimiters are fine.
FWIW, I had no clue where the AI block ended. Having read these comments, I can if I try hard notice the font shift and faint gray circle at the end.
I expect that I personally will probably be able to keep an eye out now that I’m aware, but presumably most readers won’t have read this comment section.
I’d personally favor something a lot less subtle (it’s very easy to tell when one comment ends and the next begins, for example).
I am currently sold that the ending delimiter should become more obvious.