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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

#211

Post by jay_kyburz »

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…

I have two kids in high school. It's frustrating to me that the teachers spend so much of their time encouraging kids to make their writing more interesting, and less direct, and padded to meet word length criteria.

They'll then spend the first few years of their career unlearning this and attempting to write as directly and clearly as possible with as few words as possible.

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

#212

Post by phantasmish »

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…

Obsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English prose. It’s not been terrible because most people aren’t aided by such guidance (most are) but because the same people who can’t be trusted to wield a quill without the bumper-lanes installed see a sentence longer than ten words, or a semicolon, or god forbid literate and appropriate nuanced and expressive word choice and dismiss it as bad. This stunts their growth as both readers and writers.

… though, yes, in average hands a “proceeded to”, and most of the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.

> strode purposefully

My wife (a writer) has noticed that fanfic and (many, anyway—plus, I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone “strides” everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and it’s always “strode”. It’s a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.

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

#213

Post by miltonlost »

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…

> Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.

I'm the complete opposite. Hemingway ruined writing styles (and I have a pet theory that his, and Plain English, short sentences also helped reduce literacy in the long run in a similar way TikTok ruins attention spans). I'm a 19th century reader at heart. Give me Melville, Eliot, Hawthorne, though keep your Dickens.

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

#214

Post by notahacker »

tptacek wrote: post #187
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…

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.

It certainly overuses some techniques which might be valid in smaller doses, like negation. Not negation with some clarifying point to it MASSIVE EM DASH but negation as a rhetorical trick to use fifteen words instead of five and add a veneer of profundity to something utterly banal. It doesn't just use it one time per paragraph, but three. These aren't particularly long or convoluted sentences; they just could easily convey the same thing with fewer words.

tbh I kind of prefer it that way: it's an AI wrote this flag. If a human can't write about their day without constructs like "Not a short commute, but a voyage from the suburbs to the heart of the city. I don't just casually pop in to the office; I travel to the hub of $company's development" they need to get better at writing too

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

#215

Post by iammattmurphy »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #176
psunavy03 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Armies of idiots hunt down em dashes because they're too stupid to understand the proper use of them.

They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.

I one of the reasons I love macOS: it is if you hold option.

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

#216

Post by jay_kyburz »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #176
psunavy03 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Armies of idiots hunt down em dashes because they're too stupid to understand the proper use of them.

They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.

Yeah, this is what I don't understand, surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately. I assumed MS word was just inserting them automatically when the user used a minus symbol between two words. Kind of like angled quotes.

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

#217

Post by echelon_musk »

OptionOfT wrote: post #184
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…

I worked at one of the Big Three, and to me ChatGPT writes exactly as we were thought to write. Reading though my old self-reviews it basically is exactly like your examples. Making sentences longer just to make your story more interesting. Because at the end your promotion wasn't about what you achieved. It was about your story and how 7 people you didn't know voted on it.

> thought to write

Taught?

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

#218

Post by setsewerd »

tptacek wrote: post #200
gowld wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It already bugs me when ChatGPT describes how it is going to answer before answering, but it's 10x more annoying when I'm asking for a concise response without filler etc.

As an aside, I've noticed the self-description happens even more often when extended thinking mode is being used. My unverified intuition is that it references my custom instructions and memory more than once during the thinking process, as it then seems more primed than usual to mimic vocabulary from any saved text like that.

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

#219

Post by monster_truck »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #208
xboxnolifes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each one of these has slightly different readings in my eyes.

Not different enough to make it worth using anything but the simplest one.

I'm of the notion that my certainty is not sufficiently concrete to discover myself in the realm of agreement

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

#220

Post by erikig »

Timpy wrote: post #25

A 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...

The Indian-born textbook author mentioned (Malkiat Singh [0]) had an inordinate influence on many Kenyan students because his textbooks were the de-facto standard for years. Its interesting how this influence extends as his students get to curate the LLMs on which the world has come to rely.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh

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