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

marcusolang.substack.com

441–450 of 533 posts

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

#441
post #25

A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ね" or "でしょう", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of every message. [0] https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...

You are completely right dajou~ ^_^ !

Maybe we all should start writing Japanglish to show our authenticity? Or rather, ”Maybe we all should start writing the Japanglish, so that peoples can feel our real soul, you know?”

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you ask the LLM to do! If you're using it to write in programming language, you often actually get something that runs (provided your specifications are good - or your instructions for writing the specifications are specific enough!) . If you're asking for natural language output ... yeah... you need to watch it like a hawk by hand - sure. It'd be nice if there was some way to test-suite natural language…

The last time I asked it to write something in a programming language, it put together a class that seemed reasonable at first blush, but after review found it did not do what it was supposed to do. The tests were even worse. They exercised the code, tossed the result, then essentially asserted that true was equal to true. When I told it what was wrong and how to fix it, it instead introduced some superfluous public…

Like most other tools, it can take some experience to become good at using them. What you’re describing suggests a lack of that, assuming you used a good coding model or reasonably recent frontier model.

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

#443
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder if you've heard the expression "hitting your stride". (native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in mind)

Nope, never heard!

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

#444
I think the biggest problem in LLM-generated text is that it is semantically empty - ie. void of meaning. Most people do not realise how it is them, not some ”artificial intelligence”, who provides meaning to what is essentially very sophisticated word salad with RAG-sourced pieces of information dribbled between as the protein. Just search for Weizenbaum’s ELIZA.

If you read some English public school essay by a pupil who has not read their homework, effect is very similar: a lot of complex sentences peppered with non-Celtic words, but utterly without meaning. In simple terms, the writer does not know what the hell they are talking about, although they know how to superficially string words together into a structured and coherent text. Even professional writers do this, when they have a deadline and not a single original idea what to write about.

But we do not write just to fart language on paper or screen, we write to convey a meaning, a message. To communicate. One can of course find meaning from tea leaves and whatnot, but truly it is a communal experience to write with an intention and to desperately try to pass one’s ideas and emotions forward to one’s common enby.

This is what lacks in the million of GPT-generated Linkedin-posts, hecause in the end they are just structure without content, empty shells. Sometimes of course one can get something genuinely good by accident, but it is fairly rare. Usually it is just flexing of syntax in a way both tepid and without heart. And it is unlikely that LLM’s can overcome this hurdle, since people writing without intent cannot either. They are just statistical models guessing words after all.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices. It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super cool hearing about it from native speakers. We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded i…

In English the word is “connotation.”

you know, I feel like we don't actually do that so much these days. It's simply too likely that the receiving party is going to take you at face value or make up their own deeper meaning.

Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them.

It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you by Not The Onion(tm).

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I recently had a terrible experience with a developer who only communicates this way, and it's terrible.

Every single sentence is way too complicated, vague, deferring, or hand-wavy, and I can't know if they're being honest or just bullshitting me.

Half of the terms are incorrectly or are exaggerations when I probe: "Coupled" means "the code is confusing to me". "Monolith" means "the architecture is complicated to me". "Refactoring" means "adjusting the style". "We need a new abstraction" means "we need a new idea".

The team already had some issues with misunderstandings because of the above.

It's someone so eager to be part of the "big boys club" and trying to push their way to the top.

It's also infuriating.

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

#447
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 have a confession to make.

I hope ChatGPT starts writing only short sentences.

Punchy one-liners.

One thought per line.

So marketers finally realize this does not work.

And stop sending me junk emails written like this.

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

#448

This is also happening to artists, people who make YouTube shorts, and similar. Everyone gets accused of being AI if the feel happens to match. I'm sure there's some voice actor out there who can't get work because they sound too similar to the generated voices that appear in TikTok videos.

I did a video a couple years ago about a thing I did in Factorio[0] and got a couple comments who didn’t ask if I had used an AI voice, they just straight up told me that the AI voice I used was off putting. I didn’t use an AI voice, in fact I appeared on camera at the end of the video in part so that people wouldn’t have to guess, but I guess people who thought I was AI didn’t feel like watching the whole video. I s…

Off topic but I really enjoyed that video, thanks!

The voice... idk, I don't hear a lot of voices where I think or know of was generated so I'm not qualified to say but it didn't give me generated vibes. There's no glitches or mispronounciations that I'd expect to pop up at least a few times across 15 minutes of material

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sam Altman literally said he didn't know how anyone could raise a baby without using a chatbot. We're living in some very weird times right now.

Wow, that's profoundly dangerous. Personally, I don't see how anyone could raise a kid without having a nurse in the family. I wouldn't trust AI to determine if something were really a medical issue or not, and would definitely have been at the doctors far, far more often otherwise.

You don't need nurses -_-, just your own parents or someone who had kids before and some random books for theoretical questions.

Raising a kid is really very natural and instinctive, it's just like how to make it sleep, what to feed it when, and how to wash it. I felt no terror myself and just read my book or asked my parents when I had some stupid doubt.

They feel like slightly more noisy cats, until they can talk. Then they become little devils you need to tame back to virtue.

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

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your writing is overly verbose, bad, and unpleasant to consume Was this written by AI? Because right there we've got "three adjectives where one will do", and failing your own advice on "avoid being overly verbose"

It is up to the reader to judge whether my style is verbose, or if I could have used less adjectives here. The adjectives all in fact have different meanings, only "bad" is lazy, IMO (EDIT: and "bad" is meant to be obvious moralizing - something AI in fact almost never does). Don't think that I don't hold myself to the same standards I am pushing here, verbosity has always been a problem for me, and AI verbosity is a…

Frankly, using "bad" was a mistake, because it encompasses the two other adjectives. "Your chatgpt-like style is vomit-inducing, bad and boring" I think if you want to sound less like an AI, you should cut cut cut, and maybe write a bit more like speech, with sort of slangish structures etc, people won't doubt you anymore.

Good luck !

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