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

marcusolang.substack.com

31–40 of 533 posts

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

#31

It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI. I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.

Depends on your definition of "well". I hate that writing style. It's the same writing style that people who want to sell you something use and it seems to be really good at tiring the reader out - or at least me.

It gives a vibe like a car salesman and I really dislike it and personally I consider it a very bad writing style for this very reason.

I do very much prefer LLMs that don't appear to be trained on such data or try to word questions a lot more to have more sane writing styles.

That being said it also reminds me of journalistic articles that feel like the person just tried to reach some quota using up a lot of grand words to say nothing. In my country of residence the biggest medium (a public one) has certain sections that are written exactly like that. Luckily these are labeled. It's the section that is a bit more general, not just news and a bit more "artsy" and I know that their content is largely meaningless and untrue. Usually it's enough to click on the source link or find the source yourself to see it says something completely different. Or it's a topic that one knows about. So there even are multiple layers to being "like LLMs".

The fact that people are taught to write that way outside of marketing or something surprises me.

That being said, this is just my general genuine dislike of this writing style. How an LLM writes is up to a lot of things, also how you engage with it. To some degree they copy your own style, because of how they work. But for generic things there is always that "marketing talk" which I always assumed is simply because the internet/social media is littered with ads.

Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?

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

#32
post #6

This must be infuriating: > You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a machine built an ocean away calls you a fake. This is : > humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm And once you start noticing the 'threes', it's fun also.

I mean, "to err is human" was written in the 1700s, by the enlightenment era author the essay writer is presumably reading.

Humanity has always been about errors.

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

#33
post #8

Systemic discrimination, happens all the time. I am blind. I regularily fail the "tell computers and humans apart" test. You imagine, that feels very much like the dehumanisation it is. Big tech couldn't care less. After all, they need to protect themselves against spammers. Much like the guy who was on the HN frontpage just a few days ago, arguing that he is now trashing accessibility because he doesn't want to be w…

I agree anti-bot vigilantes as well as corporate anti-ddos middle-wares have had a detrimental impact on accessibility. I'm afraid they consider your use case as acceptable collateral damage if they consider it at all.

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

#34
post #28

I had a similar experience. We were talking about a colleague for using ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with interesting points. The talk sounds so mechanical and sounds exactly as ChatGPT. His responses in Zoom Calls were the same mechanical and sounds like AI generated. 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…

> 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.

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

#35

It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI. I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.

ChatGPT does not “write well” unless your standard is some set of statistical distributions for vocabulary, sentence length, phrase structure, …

Writing well is about communicating ideas effectively to other humans. To be fair, throughout linguistic history it was easier to appeal to an audience’s innate sense of authority by “sounding smart”. Actually being smart in using the written word to hone the sharpness of a penetrating idea is not particularly evident in LLM’s to date.

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

#36
post #20

Funny how sci-fi always envisioned AI to speak in a rigid, hyper-rational terseness, whereas reality gave us AI which inherited the worst linguistic vices of "human" voices.

You call writing in a structured fashion with formal words the "worst linguistic vices"

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

#37

Love this, everything about this - I still teach the foundation, 3 columns, roof, of the persuasive essay - except one bit: Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor." No. No no no. The next word is "mat"!

rat. And its claws dug in its back.

How do you like that, Mr. Rat

Thought the Cat.

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

#38
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true. I personally didn't get any hint of LLM usage from their writing. Even where they use em-dashes it's for stuff like this: > there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and insidious slant to it That feels too authentic and personal to be any of the current generation of LLMs.

ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen

And many of us human writers would have done so, too, since we've had to learn the—not very obscure—keyboard shortcut to insert an emdash.

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

#39
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's public info that ChatGPT was originally trained by speakers of some african business english "dialect". https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape... They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Maybe the article author will chip in. > ChatGPT is designed to write well If you define well as overly verbose, avoiding anything that could be consid…

> They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Nigeria and Kenya are two very different regions with different spheres of business. I don't know, but I wouldn't expect the English to overlap that much.

But The Guardian could have been wrong about the country, and I'm a stupid European so I just don't know.

All we can hope is for a local to show up and explain.

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