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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

#221

Post by echelon_musk »

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…

Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ.

I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.

This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write.

The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my life.

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

#224

Post by pixl97 »

lapcat wrote: post #153
synapsomorphy wrote: post #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 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 acq…

Innovation has always been faster when copyright is lax. The US was copying British and other European inventions during the industrial age left and right, and their economy took off because of it.

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

#225

Post by unsupp0rted »

I use semi-colons and em-dashes liberally too. But I tend to do a second pass to avoid redundancy.

e.g. > [...] and there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and insidious slant to it

Let's leave it at "insidious" and "in my opinion". Or drop "in my opinion" entirely, since it goes without saying.

Just take one dip and end it.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfprRZQxWps)

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

#226

Post by oasisbob »

echelon_musk wrote: post #221
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…

Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ. I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking. This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write. The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my l…

As a US student, clarity and simplicity was always emphasized when I was being taught to write.

Never thought of Strunk & White as being distinctly American, but I guess you have a point.

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

#227

Post by whimsicalism »

echelon_musk wrote: post #221
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…

Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ. I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking. This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write. The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my l…

I think it has much more to do with porting the vernacular vs. formal register distinction common in other languages into english than how english people actually used to speak and write.

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

#228

Post by whimsicalism »

lm28469 wrote: post #47
mort96 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 AI also agreed that it's AI written I will never understand why some people apparently think asking a chat bot whether text was written by a chat bot is a reasonable approach to determining whether text was written by a chat bot.

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

seems like an unrelated anecdote, but thanks for sharing.

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

#229

Post by phantasmish »

miltonlost wrote: post #213
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…

I entirely bounced off Dickens in high school, but over a decade later read and loved Oliver Twist.

I tend to struggle with art when I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m finding it funny (I’ve been very slow to warm up to hip-hop for this reason, and metal remains inaccessible to me because of it). Something clicked on that second approach and I just got that yes, it’s pretty much all supposed to be funny, down to every word, even when it seems serious—until, perhaps, he blind-sides you with something actually deeply affecting and human (I think about the fire-fighting sequence from that book all the time).

Dickens is an all-dessert meal, except sometimes he sneaks a damn delicious steak right in the middle. Like, word-for-word, I’d say he leans harder into humor, by a long shot, than someone like Vonnegut, even. But almost all of it’s dead-pan, and some of it’s the sort of humor you get when someone who knows better does poorly on purpose, in calculated ways. If you ever think you’re laughing at him, not with… I reckon you’re probably wrong.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about this turn-around is that I usually don’t enjoy comedic novels, but once I figured Dickens out, he works for me.

(To your broader point—yeah, agreed that this sucks, good advice for bad writers becoming how most judge all writers has been harmful)

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

#230

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

codeflo wrote: post #74

To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes. Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article: > It is a new frontie…

The telltale is using lots of words to say nothing at all. LLMs excel at this sort of puffery and some humans do the same.
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