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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

#281

Post by wcfrobert »

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 there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.

(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.

(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.

Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:

> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.

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

#282

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

Its output has the aesthetic of "good" writing, or at least professional writing you typically find online.

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

#283

Post by shadow28 »

OptionOfT wrote: post #250
echelon_musk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sorry for the pedantry, but "thought" and "taught" are actually phonetically different (/θɑːt/ vs /tɑːt/).

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

#284

Post by Barrin92 »

guerrilla wrote: post #136
neffy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.

That's not a very good argument, because then you could say the same for American, Canada, South Africa, Australia and so on. If recency is an issue, then here's a list of colonies that got their freedom around the same time: Cyprus, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Malta, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius, Eswatini (Swaz…

>They're radically different because they're radically different regions.

They're radically different predominantly at the street level and everyday usage, but the kind of professional English of journalists, academics and writers that the author of the article was surrounded by is very recognizable.

You can tell an American from an Australian on the beach but in a journal or article in a paper of record that's much more difficult. Higher ed English with its roots in a classical British education you can find all over the globe.

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

#285

Post by unsupp0rted »

overfeed wrote: post #263
unsupp0rted wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes yes, anybody who prefers plain, easily parsed wording is American.

Wording? Don't you mean diction?

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

#286

Post by Yizahi »

brycewray wrote: post #185
Yizahi wrote: post #117

While author is correct in general, I would like to add a counter-point regarding em-dashes specifically. Yes, many people use them like this - and many website frameworks will automatically replace a keyboard not-really-a-minus symbol with em-dash. So that is not a sign of the LLM generated slop. What LLMs also do though, is use em-dashes like this (imagine that "--" is an em-dash here): "So, when you read my work--…

> LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So those specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop. Evidently, you've never read text from anyone whose job requires writing, publishing, and/or otherwise communicating under rules established in (e.g.) the Chicag…

Those people broadly fall under "the Oxford professor" catch-all phrase. Obviously. I was talking about 99.99% of random internet texts, which do not conform to any Manual of style and are not written by literature majors. If I see a text authored by some known figure or in a respectable journal/site, then I don't have a task of detecting LLM slop in the first place. But when I do want to know if the text is generated or not, it is usually written by less sophisticated crowd, or anonymous.

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

#287

Post by biophysboy »

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 also wonder if these unspoken rules were inherited from their more recent orality norms. Condensing an idea into a pithy, rhyming, statement w/ lots of colorful adjectives is a great way to preserve and transmit information w/o data loss in a pre-literate world.

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

#288

Post by spankibalt »

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'm the complete opposite."

Very much the same; many a US writer's prose is terribly tedious, it comes across just as clinical as their HOA-approved suburban hellscapes. Somebody once told me a writer's job is also to expand language. It wasn't a US citizen.

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

#289

Post by patrickmay »

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.

I worked at Amazon and we were taught exactly the opposite. Say what you want about the company, but the writing culture there is superb. I wish other large firms valued clarity and precision as much.

"No weasel words!"

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

#290

Post by Animats »

I was just reading the 1897 style guide of the City News Bureau (Chicago), in the book "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!". Some highlights:

- Do not confuse 'night' with 'evening'.

- This office spells it 'programme'.

- Hotels are 'kept', not 'run'.

- Dead men do not leave 'wives', but they may leave 'widows'.

- 'Very' is a word often used without discrimination. It is not difficult to express the same meaning when it is eliminated.

- The relative pronoun 'that' is used about three times superfluously to the one time that it helps the sense.

- Do not write 'this city' when you mean Chicago.

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