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

marcusolang.substack.com

161–170 of 533 posts

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

#161

It'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.

ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like "the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single. Time." And so on.

It's the content mill blogspam voice. The machine generated slop looks a lot like the artisan hand crafted slop.

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

#162

Ironically 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. [1] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

It's not ironic

I think it is. The irony is that the people you hired to help make your machine seem human are seen as mechanical because of their distinct and uniformly sophisticated tone. Thus we have a situation that’s contrary to expectations.

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

#163
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…

This is like programming, you start with simple code because you don't know anything else.

Then you start learning more & more abstraction (classes, patterns, monads...).

In the end you strive to write simple code, just like at the beginning.

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

#164
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'm definitely in the "ChatGPT writes like me" experience. I am a big fan of lists, and of using formatting to make it all legible on a short skim. I'm a big fan of dyslexia-friendly writing too, even though I am not dyslexic myslef.

I can't blame others though- I was looking at notes I wrote in 2019 and even that gave me a flavor of looking like a ChatGPT wrote it. I use the word "delve" and "not just X but also Y often, according to my Obsidian. I've taken to inserting the occasional spelling mistake or Unorthodox Patterns of Writing(tm), even when I would not otherwise.

It's a lot easier to get LLMs to adhere to good writing guides than it is to get them to create something informative and useful. I like to think my notes and writing are informative and useful.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously not, computers are the true programmable computers. But I'd still think it's accurate to say they're like programmable computers that are sometimes inaccurate, for most intents and purposes it's a fine mental model unless you really wanna get into the weeds.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He didn’t say “how could anyone”. His words: "I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT. Clearly, people did it for a long time, no problem." Basically he didn’t know much about newborn and relied on ChatGPT for answers. That was a self deprecating attempt on a late night show. Like every other freaking guests would do, no matter how cliché. With a marketing slant of course. He clearly said…

Kinda ironic how the rest of the replies treat it as the truth without checking!

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

#167

The fact that everyone is now constantly forced to use (oftentimes faulty) personal heuristics to determine whether or not they read slop is the real problem here. AI companies and some of their product users relentlessly exploit the communication systems we've painstakingly built up since 1993. We (both readers and writers) shouldn't be required to individually adapt to this exploitation. We should simply stop it. A…

> fact that everyone is now constantly forced to use (oftentimes faulty) personal heuristics to determine whether or not they read slop is the real problem here

It would be ironic and terrific if AI causes ordinary Americans to devote more time to evaluting their sources.

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

#169
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…

Genuine question, what would you write instead of "proceeded to"? To me, as a non native English speaker, it seems reasonable to use this expression, and it would not even stick out to me tbh
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