Also Kenyan, I once recently spent 10min explaining a technical topic via chat, and the response I got was "was this GPT?". I took a few minutes then just linked an article of how underpaid Kenyans trained ChatGPT for OpenAI [1]
I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
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Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#42Actually, there's a sweet solution to the writing and art crisis we are inflicting ourselves with in our AI craze. I call it "the island". Just find a nice tiny islet somewhere, make a few houses, and rent them by the week to writers/artists. No internet in the place. Rent out sanctioned devices; glorified typewriters without Internet access nor GPU nor CPU fast enough to run an LLM. Bring a notary to certify stuff was purely human-made. Have fun with like-minded individuals.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#43Funny 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"
The worst vices are the superfluous faux-eloquence that meanders without meaning. Employing linguistic devices for the sake of utilizing them without managing to actually make a point with its usage.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
Except for your poor editor who then has to manually replace your hyphens with proper em dashes. Still, if you're already disrespecting your editor enough to feed them AI slop...
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#45as a researcher, writing ended up being my job, and more specifically, writing in english. i never developed any sentimental link to the english language, to me it always felt bland, because i had to use it in bland environments, to write texts that had to be bland and manneristic.
chatgpt revolutionized my work because it makes creating those bland texts so much easier and fast. it made my job more interesting because i don't have to care about writing as much as before.
to those who complain about ai slop, i have nothing to say. english was slop before, even before ai, and not because of some conspiracy, but because the gatekeepers of journals and scientific production already wanted to be fed slop.
for sure society will create others, totally idiosyncratic ways to generate distinction and an us vs others. that's natural. but, for now, let's enjoy this interregnum...
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#46It'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.
And good students are getting in trouble (meaning "have to explain themselves") to lousy teachers just because they write well, articulate ideas and can summarize information from documents where other regular people would make mistakes.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#47I 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.
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
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#48Funny 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.
Probably because we're discussing the chatbot form of AI rather than a more general one.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#49It'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 dat…
Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?
I’m highly skeptical. At one point the author tries to argue this local pedagogy is downstream of “The Queen’s English” & British imperial tradition, but modern LLM-speak is a couple orders of magnitude closer in the vector space to LinkedIn clout-chasing than anything from that world.
Re: I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
#50Looking forward to the deliberately abstruse and illogical essays of the future. Everyone will have to write like a second-rate French philosopher.
"Rewrite this email paragraph in the style of a corporate ToS statement. Do NOT expose my orders and their implicit acceptance of them by the recipient pending a 24 hr deadline anywhere before page 18."