I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
marcusolang.substack.com
I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
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Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#2It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI.
I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#3It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI. I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
Actually it's public info that ChatGPT was originally trained by speakers of some african business english "dialect".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...
They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Maybe the article author will chip in.
> ChatGPT is designed to write well
If you define well as overly verbose, avoiding anything that could be considered controversial, and generally sycophantic but bland soulless corporate speak, yes.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#4It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI. I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
This may be true. I personally didn't get any hint of LLM usage from their writing. Even where they use em-dashes it's for stuff like this:
> there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and insidious slant to it
That feels too authentic and personal to be any of the current generation of LLMs.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#5Ironically OpenAI used Kenyan workers[1] to train its AI and now we've come to the point where Kenyans are being excluded because they sound too much like the AI that they helped train.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#6This must be infuriating:
> You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a machine built an ocean away calls you a fake.
This is :
> humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm
And once you start noticing the 'threes', it's fun also.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#7I always thought the whole argument was about explicitly using em dash and / or en dash. Aka — and –.
Because while people OBVIOUSLY use dashes in writing, humans usually fell back on using the (technically incorrect) hyphen aka the "minus symbol" - because thats whats available on the keyboards and basically no one will care.
Seems like, in the biggest game of telephone called the internet, this has devolved into "using any form of dash = AI".
Great.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#8Systemic discrimination, happens all the time. I am blind. I regularily fail the "tell computers and humans apart" test. You imagine, that feels very much like the dehumanisation it is. Big tech couldn't care less. After all, they need to protect themselves against spammers. Much like the guy who was on the HN frontpage just a few days ago, arguing that he is now trashing accessibility because he doesn't want to be web scraped. If you raise these issues with devs, all you get it pushback, no understanding at all. Thats the way it is. If you are amongst a minority small enough and without a rainbow coloured flag, you end up being ignored, stepped over, and pushed aside. If you are lucky. If you are unlucky, and you raise your voice, you will be critizied for pointing out the obvious.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#9Ironically, mistakes and idiosyncrasies are becoming a sign of authenticity and trustworthiness, while polish and quality signal the opposite.
Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post that started with a sentence that was obviously written by someone with a slavic background (most writers from other language families create certain grammatical patterns when writing in another language, e.g. German is also quite typical). My first thought was "great, this is most likely not written by a LLM".
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#10AI / LLMs, including ChatGPT, can already be made to sound (almost) any way you want, just by telling it to. The usual tells that something was written or created by AI are changing monthly.
Just recently I was amazed with how good text produced by Gemini 3 Pro in Thinking mode is. It feels like a big improvement, again.
But we also have to honest and accept that nowadays using a certain kind of vocabulary or paragraph structure will make people think that that text was written by AI.