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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

#241

Post by dgan »

phantasmish wrote: post #212
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 nuan…

I consider myself fluent in English, I watch technical talks and casual youtubers on English daily, and this is the first time I encounter this word lol.

The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array

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

#242

Post by tptacek »

setsewerd wrote: post #218
tptacek wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, it is currently incapable of providing a straight answer without clearing it's throat selling the answer. It reminds me of those recipe blogs that just can't get to the fucking recipe. It's bad writing! But it's not bad technically, in a style-guide kind of way.

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

#243

Post by cadamsdotcom »

It is a shame that the author has to change to keep up, and I feel their pain but .. it’s also the price of progress. We all do things to keep up when change comes for our work and skill sets.

LLMs - like all tools - reduce redundant & repetitive work. In the case of LLMs it’s now easy to generate cookie cutter prose. Which raises the bar for truly saying something original. To say something original now, you must also put in the work to say it in an original way. In particular by cutting words and rephrasing even more aggressively, which saves your reader time and can take their thinking in new directions.

Change is a constant, and good changes tend to gain mass adoption. Our ancestors survived because they adapted.

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

#244

Post by derefr »

notahacker wrote: post #214
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.

It certainly over uses 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 easi…

> MASSIVE EM DASH

Tangent: the thing I find most annoying about ChatGPT's use of em-dashes is that it never even uses them for the one thing they're best suited for. ChatGPT's em-dashes could almost always be replaced with a colon or a comma.

But the true non-redundant-syntax use of em-dashes in English prose, is in the embedding into a sentence of self-interruptive 'joiner' sub-sentences that can themselves bear punctuated sub-clauses. "X—or Y, maybe—but never Z" sorta sentences.

These things are spoken entirely differently than — and on the page, they read entirely differently to — regular parenthetical-bearing sentences.

No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."

Different cadence; different pacing; possibly a different shade of meaning (insofar as the emotional state of the author/speaker is part of the conveyed message.)

But, for some reason, ChatGPT just never constructs these kinds of self-interruptive sentences. I'm not sure it even knows how.

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

#246

Post by engineer_22 »

echelon_musk wrote: post #217
OptionOfT wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

intentional typo to throw off the clankers :)

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

#247

Post by ryeights »

zephyrthenoble wrote: post #238

Always interesting (in an informative way) to see people "defending" em-dashes from my personal perspective. Before you get mad, let me explain: before ChatGPT, I only ever saw em-dashes when MS Word would sometimes turn a dash into a "longer dash" as I always thought of it. I have NEVER typed an em-dash, and I don't know how to do it on Windows or Android. I actually remember having issues with running a program tha…

Shift+Win/Option+-. And holding - gives you en/em dash on iOS and Android. Personally I love using em dashes so this whole AI thing is a real disaster for me.

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

#248

Post by Wowfunhappy »

zephyrthenoble wrote: post #238

Always interesting (in an informative way) to see people "defending" em-dashes from my personal perspective. Before you get mad, let me explain: before ChatGPT, I only ever saw em-dashes when MS Word would sometimes turn a dash into a "longer dash" as I always thought of it. I have NEVER typed an em-dash, and I don't know how to do it on Windows or Android. I actually remember having issues with running a program tha…

Well, (some) people on HN definitely used them before ChatGPT. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

(And as #9 on the leaderboard, I feel the need to defend myself!)

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

#249

Post by engineer_22 »

phantasmish wrote: post #240
echelon_musk wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking. Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is marked by this sort of fake-fancy language. The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.

someone starts using business english and my bullshit meter pegs.

my significant other loves the "real life mormon housewives" and "lovingly blind" reality shows, and when they use business english (a weird thing to do when talking about relationships, but hey, what do I know I'm an engineer) it's a tell that they're lying.

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

#250

Post by OptionOfT »

echelon_musk wrote: post #217
OptionOfT wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yea. I've been in the States for 8 years, yet sometimes my brain thinks about a word and writes it down phonetically.

But hey, at least you know I didn't use ChatGPT to conjure that comment.

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