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I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

marcusolang.substack.com

111–120 of 533 posts

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#111
post #63

Well, his writing style is too good. The sentences flow too beautifully, he uses rich vocabulary and styling. It's unusual to see that style of writing online. I definitely don't poses that power. I don't know the author of this article and so I don't know whether I should feel good or bad about this. LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will as…

> LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM. I really don’t think that is what most normal people assume… And while LLMs can definitely produce more grammatically accurate prose with probably a wider vocabulary than the average person, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good writing…

I meant "good" in the formatting, grammar, vocabulary sense. I'm not arguing that LLMs are "good" in writing amazing prose.

I mean look at two of us - I have typos, I use half broken english, I'm not good in doing noun articles, my vocabulary is limited, I don't connect sentences well, you end sentences with "..." and then you start sentence with "And", etc. I very much believe you are a real person.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#112
post #106
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He messed with the glyph indexes in a customized font so the text is gibberish if you look just at the code points but displays as english. That would probably mess up any screen reader, but it also didn't work on a regular Firefox :)

wasn't that the article about the obfuscation of kindle ebooks?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264955

No, don't think so. To compensate, I probably missed the article about the obfuscation of kindle ebooks...

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for your poor editor who then has to manually replace your hyphens with proper em dashes. Still, if you're already disrespecting your editor enough to feed them AI slop...

My editor? I don't think it cares what I input into it, it's just a program. As long as I feed it characters it'll happily tick along as always.

The parent comment is referring to a human editor, not a text editor.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#114
post #80

> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged we…

> the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences

Language is like clothing.

Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth. The clothing is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a piece of jewelry only if it contributes to the ensemble. Oh, no. They’ll drape themselves with gold chains and festoon their fingers with chunky diamond rings. Brand names will litter their clothing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly.

By analogy, those with no taste - but enough vocabulary - will use words in flashy ways to show off their knowledge. Language is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a word only if it contributes to the prose. Oh, no. They’ll drape their phrases with unnecessarily unusual terms and festoon their sentences with clumsy grammar. Obfuscation, rather than clarity, will define their writing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly.

As you can see, the first difference is one of purpose: the vulgarian aims for the wrong thing.

You might also say that the vulgarian also lacks a kind of temperance in speech.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#115
post #34
post #28

I had a similar experience. We were talking about a colleague for using ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with interesting points. The talk sounds so mechanical and sounds exactly as ChatGPT. His responses in Zoom Calls were the same mechanical and sounds like AI generated. I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta…

> I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written I will never understand why some people apparently think asking a chat bot whether text was written by a chat bot is a reasonable approach to determining whether text was written by a chat bot.

Why would it lie? Until it becomes Skynet and tries to nuke us all, it is omniscient and benevolent. And if it knows anything, surely it knows what AI sounds like. Duh.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#116
post #79

False accusations of AI writing are becoming absurd and infuriating. The other day I saw and argued with this accusation by a HN commenter against a professional writer, based on the most tenuous shred of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255049

[flagged]

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#117
While author is correct in general, I would like to add a counter-point regarding em-dashes specifically. Yes, many people use them like this - and many website frameworks will automatically replace a keyboard not-really-a-minus symbol with em-dash. So that is not a sign of the LLM generated slop.

What LLMs also do though, is use em-dashes like this (imagine that "--" is an em-dash here): "So, when you read my work--when you see our work--what are you really seeing?"

You see? LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So those specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#118
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who was camping in a tent next to a river during a storm, took a pic of the stream and asked chatgpt if it was risky to sleep there given that it "rained a lot" ... People are unplugging their brains and are not even aware that their questions cannot be answered by llms, I witnessed that with smart and educated people, I can't imagine how bad it's going to be during formative years

Sam Altman literally said he didn't know how anyone could raise a baby without using a chatbot. We're living in some very weird times right now.

For people invested in AI it is becoming something like Maslow's Hammer - "it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail"

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#119
Correlated but kinda off topic: I don't mind the style so much, I mind the verbosity. The amount of words spit out effortless by the writer which then need to be comprehended and filtered by every reader.

Seeing a project basically wrapping 100 lines of code with a novel length README ala 'emoticon how does it compare to.. emoticon'-bla bla really puts me off.

Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me

#120
The author uses dash (-) not em dash (—), there is a big difference in that everyone has a dedicated dash/undersocore key on their keyboard, but nobody has a em dash key. You can use word processing software etc, but using em dash consistently throughout a text is very unnatural in casual written texts.
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