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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

#261

Post by lebca »

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…

Just a reminder that our experience does not necessarily invalidate someone else's experience.

Eg, I was typing Alt-0151 and Alt-0150 (en-dash) on the reg in my middle school and high school essays along with in AIM. While some of my classmates were probably typing double hyphens, my group of friends were using the keyboard shortcuts, so I am now learning from this "detect an LLM" faze that there's a vocal group of people who do not share this experience or perspective of human communication. And that having a mother who worked in technical publishing who insisted I use the correct punctuation rather than two hyphens was not part of everyone's childhood.

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

#262

Post by GMoromisato »

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…

"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"

Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.

Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".

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

#263

Post by overfeed »

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.

Perhaps yet another American cultural artifact. One that - if I were to guess - originated from the Calvinist disdain for ostentiousness.

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

GMoromisato wrote: post #262
phantasmish wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version. Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/rep…

[deleted]

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

#265

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#266

Post by mr_00ff00 »

GMoromisato wrote: post #262
phantasmish wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version. Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/rep…

Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs every day writing.

I’m biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to someone else to illustrate a point.

When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even just letters, don’t use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just spell it out literally.

Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy just for the sake of seeming smart.

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

#268

Post by phantasmish »

GMoromisato wrote: post #262
phantasmish wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version. Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/rep…

My best guess is they lean so hard on “strode” because they are trying to convey “this character is confident” and aren’t very good at it. So you’ll get like ten “strodes” in a short novel. Everyone’s “strode”ing into every room they enter.

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

#269

Post by cibyr »

tptacek wrote: post #242
setsewerd wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes I wonder if the throat-clearing is an indispensable part of getting to the "good bits" that follow. Like, do those extra tokens give it more "room to think" even if they're basically meaningless in themselves?

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

#270

Post by thaumasiotes »

derefr wrote: post #244
notahacker wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pun…

> 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."

Those are spoken the same way, they read the same way, and they mean the same thing.

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