this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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I keep seeing NSFW posts about "araffe women" and I have no idea what that means. Google has no idea either.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 7 months ago (5 children)

I searched through Lemmy posts with that word. Half of them have people asking the exact same question, and based on the answers, I'm going to conclude that no one knows.

One guess that seems plausible is that it's an AI hallucinated word that's showing up a lot because they're using AI to generate the captions.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Next step is for people to also start using it and we'll experience the beginning of AI generated slang

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

That's plausible. Araffe comment, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ive asked the same question, the conclusion that I came to is it is a foreign word that doesnt mean anything in the context and is a give away to AI generated images.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago

and is a give away to AI generated images

Username: MyPornViewingAccount

Everything checks out.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Googling the word with quotes brings up a Lemmy thread first, I thought that was interesting.

Is this question specific to Lemmy somehow? I haven't heard of the term before this thread either

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

We, ve made it Lemmy ! We created a Word and brought it to Google front page

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

I think it's this. I looked into it recently and there was a paper on AI and they noted "araffe" coming up as a caption when it was AI generated. They didn't have an explanation, said it was something to look into.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

This is the very definition of Model Collapse.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It seems to me to be a word that image description generators (and potentially image generators, too) "believe" to exist. If that's correct that was likely caused by parsing chunks of actual words, such as "arabesque", "Arabic", "coffee", "giraffe", as if ara+ffe were two actual morphemes (units of meaning).

For reference, this site claims that [I think?]diffusion models think that a similar word, "arafed", exists; and that's basically going slow, taking one's time, leisurely.

It isn't necessarily NSFW by the way.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Araf is also slow in Welsh.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I mentioned in another comment chain, but: even if we claim that "araffe" is ultimately from Welsh "araf", we're still left with the double consonant and the ending -e to explain - those don't even appear in the conjugation of "arafu".

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There's some AI model that used it. Its meaning is related to "relaxed and lounging around". I think it appears in automated posts. BLIP can interrogate an image and produce a text description. I suspect that's what happening.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Maybe it's a misspelling? "Giraffe Women". Yo! Nice neck!!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I was thinking Arab but I like your idea better

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

New fetish unlocked.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

I think, based on responses indicating AI influence, that this is a a worthwhile filter/exclude keyword. I have only encountered the word while viewing /all and it is normally in the /garterbelt forum. Perhaps there is a bot a play?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Whatever/whoever posts these captions used to often use the word "lingers" to describe lingerie. Ex: "Women in lingers on a bed."

One day, some guy responded to a post and said he couldn't take it anymore and to stop saying it. It actually stopped. Hasn't used that word since as far as I've seen.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Araff is highest in Arabic. A misspelling perhaps?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This sounds like it might be something similar to a 'noken', or maybe just a regular token which represents a word fragment, a concept I picked up from this article. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c6uTNm5erRrmyJvvD/mapping-the-semantic-void-strange-goings-on-in-gpt-embedding

"TL;DR: GPT-J token embeddings inhabit a zone in their 4096-dimensional embedding space formed by the intersection of two hyperspherical shells. This is described, and then the remaining expanse of the embedding space is explored by using simple prompts to elicit definitions for non-token custom embedding vectors (so-called "nokens"). The embedding space is found to naturally stratify into hyperspherical shells around the mean token embedding (centroid), with noken definitions depending on distance-from-centroid and at various distance ranges involving a relatively small number of seemingly arbitrary topics (holes, small flat yellowish-white things, people who aren't Jews or members of the British royal family, ...) in a way which suggests a crude, and rather bizarre, ontology. Evidence that this phenomenon extends to GPT-3 embedding space is presented. No explanation for it is provided, instead suggestions are invited."

In particular I was reminded of the list of tokens near the beginning of the article, and how it contains not just words, but also fragments of words, prefixes, and things like that. I'm also reminded of another article (which I can't find right now) about people finding ways to bypass word filters by utilizing nonsense words that the LLM has mistakenly associate with some meaning. From what others have said in this thread, 'araffe' sounds like it might be something like that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Found the other paper I was thinking of: 'Discovering the Hidden Vocabulary of DALLE-2' https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00169

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Welsh interference is possible, specially given the meaning, but I don't think that it explains alone what's going on. The Welsh word is araf; there's also the associated verb arafu "to slow down", but none of those forms show ⟨ff⟩, or ends with ⟨e⟩.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Someone offered a definition here: https://lemmy.world/comment/8529913

From the discussion, that definition may also be a hallucination, though.