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

marcusolang.substack.com

121–130 of 533 posts

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

#121
It's an arms race between human writers and AI. Writers want to sound less like AI and AI wants to sound more like writers, so no indicator is reliable for long. Today typos indicate a real writer, so tomorrow LLMs will inject them where appropriate. Yesterday em dashes indicated LLM, so now LLMs use them less.

Beyond these surface level tells though, anyone who's read a lot of both AI-unassisted human writing as well as AI output should be able to pick up on the large amount of subtler cues that are present partly because they're harder to describe (so it's harder to RLHF LLMs in the human direction).

But even today when it's not too hard to sniff out AI writing, it's quite scary to me how bad many (most?) people's chatbot detection senses are, as indicated by this article. Thinking that human writing is LLM is a false positive which is bad but not catastrophic, but the opposite seems much worse. The long term social impact, being "post-truth", seems poised to be what people have been raving / warning about for years w.r.t other tech like the internet.

Today feels like the equivalent of WW1 for information warfare, society has been caught with its pants down by the speed of innovation.

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

#122
I feel this a bit, since I'm a voracious reader and a constant writer across a few languages (but mostly English), which over the decades has led to my converging on a certain (if imperfect) degree of polish. Plus my multiple concurrent and often fragmented simultaneous trains of thought while writing lead me to use parentheticals very often while drafting, which then means I often need go back and re-introduce structure.

And guess what, when you revise something to be more structured and you do it in one sitting, your writing style naturally gravitates towards the stuff LLMs tend to churn out, even if with less bullet points and em dashes (which, incidentally, iOS/macOS adds for me automatically even if I am a double-dash person).

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

#123
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…

I'm bilingual (so not fully native by most criteria) and I read enough classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly, as well as multiple other more established means of conveying my intended meaning :)

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

#124

It's an arms race between human writers and AI. Writers want to sound less like AI and AI wants to sound more like writers, so no indicator is reliable for long. Today typos indicate a real writer, so tomorrow LLMs will inject them where appropriate. Yesterday em dashes indicated LLM, so now LLMs use them less. Beyond these surface level tells though, anyone who's read a lot of both AI-unassisted human writing as wel…

[dead]

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

#125
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen

I would use an actual em dash if there were a keyboard key for it. On my macbook, I have an an action script set up on the touchbar for emdash and a few other unicodey glyphs, but the (virtual) buttons are like 2 inches wide each so I can't fit more than 5 or 6 across it. Sucks.

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

#126
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226

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

#127
post #20

Funny how sci-fi always envisioned AI to speak in a rigid, hyper-rational terseness, whereas reality gave us AI which inherited the worst linguistic vices of "human" voices.

That's because there were only so many lines of Spock's dialogue to train an LLM on, they needed more and so trained them on reddit comments instead.

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

#128

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.

That's a hallmark of Claude. I stopped using Claude for documentation because it was overly... JavaScripty in feel (all the stuff it churned out felt like JavaScript framework docs of the 2010s, and I bet it would have added Neon Cat if it knew how).

In comparison, I can sort of confidently ask GPT-5.1/2 to say "revise this but be terse and concise about it" and arrive at something that is more structured that what I input but preserves most of my writing style and doesn't bore the reader.

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

#129
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT does not “write well” unless your standard is some set of statistical distributions for vocabulary, sentence length, phrase structure, … Writing well is about communicating ideas effectively to other humans. To be fair, throughout linguistic history it was easier to appeal to an audience’s innate sense of authority by “sounding smart”. Actually being smart in using the written word to hone the sharpness of a…

Good writers use words to make a point. LLMs use words to make a salad.

But they will make the salad delicious, marvelous and intricate. It's not just a salad - it's a new way to talk like marketing copy (/s)

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

#130

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.

There is an easy shortcut for em dashes on macOS, Opt+Shift+-. This makes it really easy to use them, which I do all the time in casual settings (indeed, more often than in formal settings).
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