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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

#481

Post by whstl »

acuozzo wrote: post #296
jay_kyburz wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is what I don't understand, surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately. I assumed MS word was just inserting them automatically when the user used a minus symbol between two words. Kind of like angled quotes.

> surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately I've had a "trigger finger" for Alt+0151 on Windows since 2010 at least.

When I worked in company that did content marketing and had a lot of writers, one of the coffee mugs they gave to us had Alt+0151 in it!

Em-Dash was really popular with professional writers.

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

#482

Post by FireBeyond »

GMoromisato wrote: post #366
strken wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you know everything I'm about to write, but I read a lot of dubious quality fiction. It needs to be made clear that if the butler "strides" up to Helen, then I, the reader, am expecting him to eject her from the party, tell her that her car is on fire, or something equally dramatic. The writer can subvert this expectation, but must at least acknowledge that it exists. The butler can stride up to Helen with a s…

Yes, that's a great way of explaining it, and I 100% agree. People shouldn't use "strides" just because "walked" is boring. They should use "strides" when it's meaningful in the context of the story.

I remember as a younger teen my parents got me a workshop seminar with maybe 10 other kids with a fairly acclaimed author.

"You probably remember your English teacher saying 'the word 'said' is boring, use something different. Yes, find something else, if it makes more sense. But the word 'said' is a perfectly good word."

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

#485

Post by the_af »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #471
the_af wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I wasn't defending Altman!

I was mostly responding to the section about how those people should not be parents but I must’ve misread tone/missed something.

I was mostly arguing that Altman's statements, if taken at face value, show him to be unfit to be a parent. I stand by this, but mostly because I think people like him -- Altman, Musk, I tend to conflate -- are robots masquerading as human beings.

That said, of course Altman is being cynical about this. He's just marketing his product, ChatGPT. I don't believe for a minute he really outsources his baby's well-being to an LLM.

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

#486

Post by thevillagechief »

twoodfin wrote: post #255
thevillagechief wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are, or rather, we were when I was in primary school. My essays (we called them composition) were filled with these these red check marks for every esoteric word, proverb, metaphor or simile you used. The more you had the higher you'd score. So I did my homework with a dictionary open. I remember writing some document at work in the US and everyone commenting on how Queen's English it was. This was before Ch…

Sure, I believe that completely. But that's not how ChatGPT writes! Here are some random examples from one of the (at least) half-dozen LLM-co-written posts that rose high on the front page over the weekend: https://blog.canoozie.net/disks-lie-building-a-wal-that-actu... You write a record to disk before applying it to your in-memory state. If you crash, you replay the log and recover. Done. Except your disk is lying…

I agree. I think the point here was the self-appointed AI detectives, who will declare any writing style unfamiliar to them a product of ChatGPT. You might remember the Paul Graham "delve-gate" controversy on twitter last year. It was exactly this.

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

#487

Post by komali2 »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #334
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'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university [...] As a native English speaker who studied writing at university, do you think "who" should be used with people while "that" should only be used with things or the other way round. Or should I just not care? Edit: missing things

> Or should I just not care?

This, unless you're being tested on it. Maybe the safest bet is to avoid it. "As a native English speaker that studied..." oh wait shit lol, it's actually quite hard to avoid.

"I'm a native English speaker, and I studied writing in university. This experience has led me to..." There. English, what an uncomplicated, uncluttered language!

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

#488

Post by komali2 »

chistev wrote: post #419
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…

" Proceeded to" is wrong?

Probably not, I just find it annoying. Maybe because cops use it a lot.

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

#489

Post by esafak »

the_af wrote: post #86
rich_sasha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like "the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single. Time." And so on.

I saw this described as LLMs writing "punched up" paragraphs, and every paragraph must be maximally impacting. Where a human would acknowledge some paragraphs are simply filler, a way to reach some point, to "default" LLMs every paragraph must have maximum effect, like a mic drop.

The silver lining is that this style has been carpet bombed by LLMs. Nobody will be able to write like this without being ridiculed ever again.

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

#490

Post by elephanlemon »

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…

In Microsoft Word, double hyphens convert to em dashes. Seems to be the case on the iOS keyboard as well.
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