Excellent article. Insightful observation, expressed and written well. Just an opinion from a Canadian borne and American raised native English speaker.
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
#152> 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 :)
> classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly
Huh, apparently 'proceeded' was used more commonly in 19th-century writing [1].
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Proceeded&year...
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#153It'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…
> society has been caught with its pants down by the speed of innovation.
Or rather by the slowness of regulation and enforcement in the face of blatant copyright violation.
We've seen this before, for example with YouTube, which became the go-to place for videos by allowing copyrighted material to be uploaded and hosted en masse, and then a company that was already a search engine monopoly was somehow allowed to acquire YouTube, thereby extending and reinforcing Google's monopolization of the web.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#154It'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.
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Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parent comment is referring to a human editor, not a text editor.
Huge assumption on their side then, isn't the context "humans writing for other humans"? Not sure how "publication editors" entered the conversation nor from where.
I was referring to a human editor, which I thought was obvious enough from context. I assumed the reply was in jest. My original comment was light-hearted, so I don't think it needs to be rigorously analysed, but plenty of humans write for other humans but still have an editor involved in the process.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#156A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ね" or "でしょう", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of every message. [0] https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...
You are completely right dajou~ ^_^ !
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
They're really not programmable computers! (Bad mental model is bad.)
But yes the current commercial ones are somewhat controllable, much of the time.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#158Earlier 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.
Depends what you ask the LLM to do!
If you're using it to write in programming language, you often actually get something that runs (provided your specifications are good - or your instructions for writing the specifications are specific enough!) .
If you're asking for natural language output ... yeah... you need to watch it like a hawk by hand - sure. It'd be nice if there was some way to test-suite natural language writing.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#159It'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.
> they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes
Outrage mills mill outrage. If it wasn't this, it would be something else. The fact that the charge resonated is notable. But the fact that it exists is not.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#160Earlier 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.
Wow, that's profoundly dangerous. Personally, I don't see how anyone could raise a kid without having a nurse in the family. I wouldn't trust AI to determine if something were really a medical issue or not, and would definitely have been at the doctors far, far more often otherwise.