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

marcusolang.substack.com

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

#191

Post by stackghost »

bookworm123 wrote: post #169
komali2 wrote: 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

You can usually use "then" or "went".

>I proceeded to open the fridge

>I went to open the fridge

or

>I proceeded to flush the toilet

>I then flushed the toilet

There's nothing wrong with "proceeded", it's just one of those things that's overused by bad writers.

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

#192

Post by zdragnar »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #158
xeonmc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The last time I asked it to write something in a programming language, it put together a class that seemed reasonable at first blush, but after review found it did not do what it was supposed to do.

The tests were even worse. They exercised the code, tossed the result, then essentially asserted that true was equal to true.

When I told it what was wrong and how to fix it, it instead introduced some superfluous public properties and a few new defects without correcting the original mistake.

The only code I would trust today's agents with is so simple I don't want or need an agent to write it.

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

#193

Post by nitwit005 »

This is also happening to artists, people who make YouTube shorts, and similar. Everyone gets accused of being AI if the feel happens to match.

I'm sure there's some voice actor out there who can't get work because they sound too similar to the generated voices that appear in TikTok videos.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

p410n3 wrote: post #7

I 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 "u…

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by thevillagechief »

twoodfin wrote: post #49
tete wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of "well". I hate that writing style. It's the same writing style that people who want to sell you something use and it seems to be really good at tiring the reader out - or at least me. It gives a vibe like a car salesman and I really dislike it and personally I consider it a very bad writing style for this very reason. I do very much prefer LLMs that don't appear to be trained on such dat…

Are Kenyans really taught to write that way? I’m highly skeptical. At one point the author tries to argue this local pedagogy is downstream of “The Queen’s English” & British imperial tradition, but modern LLM-speak is a couple orders of magnitude closer in the vector space to LinkedIn clout-chasing than anything from that world.

Yes they are, or rather, we were when I was in primary school. My essays (we called them composition) were filled with these these red check marks for every esoteric word, proverb, metaphor or simile you used. The more you had the higher you'd score. So I did my homework with a dictionary open. I remember writing some document at work in the US and everyone commenting on how Queen's English it was. This was before ChatGPT. I know know it was all silly, and I've spent a bunch of time learning to write simply. But then I've listen to too many tech podcasts, and now I find silicon valley tech-speak creeping in, and I hate it. The one that I hear everywhere now that I swear not to ever use is let's double-click on that point. Just why?

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

#196

Post by gowld »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #125
petesergeant wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On Mac emdash is option-shift-hypen (aka shift-endash, aka capital endash)

In Menlo font (Chrome on Mac's default monospace font, used for HN comments) em-dash(—) and en-dash (–) use the same glyph, though.

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

#197

Post by zjp »

wccrawford wrote: post #2

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.

LLMs don't even write as well as people do. If you talk to them long enough, you'll notice they produce the same errors careless people do. Sometimes they wrongly elide the article 'a'. They occasionally mess up 'a/an' vowel agreement. The most grating thing of all is that the fully-elided 'because' (as in 'because traffic') lives on in LLM output, even though you rarely see it anymore because people rightly got the sense it was unfair for a writer to offload semantic reconstruction to the reader.

I have a confession to make: I didn't think lulcat speak was funny, even at the time.

It's pretty annoying and once you catch them doing it, you can't stop.

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

#198

Post by al_borland »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #163
komali2 wrote: 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.

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." ― Pablo Picasso

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

#200

Post by tptacek »

gowld wrote: post #189
tptacek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT writing uses varied sentence lengths, deliberate rhythm, lots of full breaks, and few needless words. It also tends to read as if intended for a William Shatner performance. I don't think the annoying bits about GPT's writing are structural. It probably writes technically better than most of us do in our second drafts.

Are you saying that needless sentences don't count as needless words? As GPT would say, "You've hit upon a crucial point underlying the entire situtation!"

I mean, it's usually wrong in its rhetoric, and the writing isn't "good", but it's technically well constructed and it's well constructed in a way that "Hemingway" doesn't reject.

Like, if I ask GPT5 to convert 75f to celsius, it will say "OK, here's the tight answer. No fluff. Just the actual result you need to know." and then in a new graf say "It's 23.8c." (or whatever).

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