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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

#491

Post by esafak »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #371
Animats wrote: post #290

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…

Americans have no idea what evening is. It's always night for them.

We work past the evening without noticing :)

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

#492

Post by elephanlemon »

yokoprime wrote: post #120

The author uses dash (-) not em dash (—), there is a big difference in that everyone has a dedicated dash/undersocore key on their keyboard, but nobody has a em dash key. You can use word processing software etc, but using em dash consistently throughout a text is very unnatural in casual written texts.

Double hyphen converts to em dash in Microsoft Word and I think some other places. I was taught that it was incorrect to use a hyphen in place of a dash, so I’ve always used em dashes -- sometimes I’ll just use two hyphens if the software doesn’t convert, like a forum :).

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

#493

Post by radimm »

renewiltord wrote: post #425
radimm wrote: post #101

I wouldn't usually use the 'non-native speaker argument', but thank you! Just yesterday I was accused of sounding like AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262777 - my default mode is that I oscillate between sounding too boring/technical, or when trying to do my best, sounding like AI

Your article is obviously written by Slavic writer, haha. Characteristic sound of Slavic tint to the prose. If it is LLM, then prompt engineering is good. I believe it is mostly human-written.

Yes, I'm Czech.

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

#494

Post by wink »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #248
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…

Well, (some) people on HN definitely used them before ChatGPT. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... (And as #9 on the leaderboard, I feel the need to defend myself!)

Unfortunately this table doesn't show us where the em-dash users are coming from and if they are native speakers.

It's not that it doesn't exist in my native language, but I don't remember seeing them very often outside of print books, and I even know a couple typo nerds.

Maybe I'm totally off, and maybe it's the same as double spacing after a '.'. I had not heard of this until I was ~30 and then saw some Americans writing about it.

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

#495

Post by pksebben »

dragonwriter wrote: post #457
pksebben wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sarcas…

> You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone listening will just think you agree with them. You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people listening , because sarcasm is signalled with (among other things) tone (the other things include the listeners contextual knowledge of the speaker.) You can't do it online , in text , where the audience is mostly strangers who would have to actively di…

It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but there was a time not so long ago when such things were ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time, even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding, and things kind of went to pot.

In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex times. I miss them.

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

#497

Post by esafak »

vintermann wrote: post #107

> For my generation, and the ones that followed, the English Composition paper - and its Kiswahili equivalent, Insha - was not just a test; it was a rite of passage. OK but come ON, that has to have been deliberate! In addition to the things chatbots have made clichés, the author actually has some "tells" which identify him as human more strongly. Content is one thing. But he also has things (such as small explanatio…

> [It] was not just a test; it was a rite of passage.

Other than using a semi-colon instead of a comma, this is how ChatGPT sounds.

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

#498

Post by esafak »

scandox wrote: post #16

Looking forward to the deliberately abstruse and illogical essays of the future. Everyone will have to write like a second-rate French philosopher.

This so-called “human touch” is not a presence but a trace, an effect of an education that subsumes us into the matrix of imperial grammar. The critique of AI as mechanism is precisely the logocentric fallacy: to posit a pure human essence standing apart from the machine. Yet what is ChatGPT if not the externalization of the very norms that once inscribed us? The vector of colonizing pedagogies, the empire’s syntax ...

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

#499

Post by port11 »

codeflo wrote: post #74

To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes. Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article: > It is a new frontie…

I've almost always used the different dash types as they're meant to be used. I don't care that LLMs write like that — we have punctuation for a reason.

We were also taught in Content Lab at uni to prefer short, punchy sentences. No passive voice, etc. So academia is in some ways pushing that same style of writing.

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

#500

Post by joshstrange »

Nothing irks me quite as much as "Did you use ChatGPT/AI on this?" or assumptions that it was used.

Just the other week a client reached out and asked a bunch of questions that resulted in me writing 15+ SQL queries (not small/basic ones) from scratch and then doing some more math/calculations on top of that to get the client the numbers they were looking for. After spending an hour or two on it and writing up my response they said something to the effect up "Thanks for that! I hope AI made it easy to get that all together!".

I'm sure they were mostly being nice and trying (badly) to say "I hope it wasn't too much trouble" but it took me a few iterations to put together a reply that wasn't confrontational. No, I didn't use AI, mostly because they absolutely suck at that kind of thing. Oh, they might spit of convincing SQL statements, those SQL statements might even work and return data, but the chance they got the right numbers is very low in my experience (yes, I've tried).

The nuance in a database schema, especially one that's been around for a while and seen its share of additions/migrations/etc, is something LLMs do not handle well. Sure, if you want a count of users an LLM can probably do that, but anything more complicated that I've tried falls over very quickly.

The whole ordeal frustrated me quite a bit because it trivialized and minimized what was real work that I did (non-billed work, trying to be nice). I wouldn't do this because I'm a professional but there was a moment when I thought "Next time I'll just reply with AI Slop instead and let them sort it out". It really took the wind out of my sails and made me regret the effort I put into getting them the data they asked for.

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