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Reddit bans AI art model user for too many parentheses

reddit.com

So it turns out that the triple-parenthesis thing can get you banned from reddit even for benign nonsense. Some context: in some open source AI image models, you can use parentheses to emphasize terms that you want the model to pay more attention to. In this case, the author wrote "(((detailed face)))" and some other terms in their image prompt.

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Interesting to note that we're mentioned in the comments:

A large-ish subreddit (/r/themotte) went offsite. From the announcement

Reddit has become increasingly hostile - we just had a comment removed for discussing the meaning of various types of parenthesis, I'm not making that up, I'm not exaggerating, that's a thing that happened - and if the community is to survive, we need to disengage from Reddit.

More detailed explanation from the comments:

Hmm, maybe I’ll get a comment removed for talking about the people talking about the parentheses.

Our resident Russian made a comment using «these» Russian quote marks. Someone accused him of using them to hint at another unusual punctuation: the triple parentheses, which actually do see use by Nazis.

A third commenter jumped in to ask what the cuss was going on. When a fourth guy tried to explain the Nazi connotation, his comment was deleted by higher powers. His wording is lost to the void, but my guess is that an algorithm or a human pattern-matched it to Nazi apologetics.

As Zorba said, this isn’t coordinated action—it’s that the site tends to assume the worst when anything triggers their detectors.

Also the comment (removed), and archive

Nazis do (((this)))

But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet

I guess I’m proud that my explanation was chosen to explain this. And also that I didn’t get banned for touching the subject.