Thanks for the detailed reply, I see that I did indeed misunderstand what he was saying. I’m an R&D engineer so I guess my knee jerk response to character level mischief is exactly what you said, it can’t see them anyway, I already knew that so I dismissed that possible interpretation in my mind straight out the gate. Maybe I should assume zero knowledge of internal AI workings reading commentary in the wild.

Edit: Actually just thought of a good analogy for this. Say I play a sound and then ask you what it is of. You might reply “it sounds like a bell”, but if I asked exactly the composition of frequencies that made the sound, you might not be able to say. Similarly the AI sees a group of letters as a definite “thing” (token) but it doesn’t know what actually went into that because its “ears”(tokenizer) already reduced it to a simpler signal.