You're likely to come across plenty of words you're not familiar with throughout your life if you read enough. It still happens to me with decent regularity at the age of 36. Hardly a reason to immediately assume something is AI-generated.

He does it twice though. Maybe you're right and I just haven't read enough or I was lazy when I previously encountered that word and didn't look it up. Is it a common enough word in Europe such that it doesn't stick out there? I see that the author is named "Iain" and the site isn't exclusively catered to Americans.

Also, "epically unpleasant Iliad process to cancel subscriptions" seems equally clunky. Does "Iliad" even fit in that context?

The Register has a quirky sense of humor.

They're comparing the process of cancelling subscriptions to The Iliad, i.e. a long winded Greek epic.

Ah, first time at el Reg? Think we’ve all been there.

EDIT: Speaking of AI, yes, it turns out that ChatGPT can do a halfway decent impression of The Register… No uses of the word ‘souk’ though

@dang can we can A ban or at least make the this feels AI generated comments heavily unfavoured?

They add zero substance and are nearly on every single article these days.

Now, if it's an AI article, sure. Or if it's low quality. But my God we do not need these comments polluting every discussion for the next few years

I assumed souk has much more common usage in the UK given the source. It's not a word I've ever heard used by an American speaker.

fun fact: souq.com was Amazon's biggest competitor in the Middle East. They were acquired by Amazon a few years back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souq_(company)

I would think if it were AI generated it would use common words. You know, like from its training dataset...

Tokens consist text both larger and smaller than whole words.

The tokens that make up rare words would still likely be just as rare as the words.

And yet GPT-4 has no problem crafting new words from whole cloth. If you're making new words rare tokens are useful and the model knows this.

It's from the Hebrew "שוק" which today means "street market"

https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=iw&text=Street%20mark...