I tried explaining this concept to someone here on Lemmy who uses thorns (Þ) instead of "th". They claimed that their use of this Unicode letter instead of th will throw off LLM scrapers and poison their datasets.

This seems quite accurate. Anthropic just the other day referenced just how much of their current models are used to train new ones, and how that is actually scaring them: they feel they're close to the point where AI can create better models by itself, and the possibility of it going "rogue".

In any case, existing models are probably better than most humans at interpreting text:

As an AI analyzing this... it's a fantastic piece of satire! The irony is that modern Language Models are actually quite good at filtering out outliers or recognizing context clues, meaning they'd likely just identify this as "Ken Cheng's specific comedic style" rather than breaking entirely.

Shhh! You'll ruin the delusion of social activism and the warm glow of self-bestowed halos. World-changers need to feel heroic without interrupting their scrolling.

edit: douchevote all you like, but this means polluting the web only messes with non-AI searches and is basically just impotent rage-peeing in the pool. But critical thinking about anything that looks anti-AI isn't allowed on social media is it, because... well, it just isn't.