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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

#501

Post by nonameiguess »

dgan wrote: post #241
phantasmish wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 was a hurdler in high school and mastering stride length was almost the entire point of practicing. It's equally weird to me to see someone claiming to be fluent in English who has never heard the word. Maybe a reminder that we're not as knowledgeable as we think we are and what we choose to consume on YouTube is a tiny smittance of human experience. Running is a fairly universal and important thing for nearly any land animal, hardly a niche thing to talk about, but if you had ever talked to or listened to runners speaking English, you'd have definitely heard them talking about their strides.

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

#502

Post by twoodfin »

thevillagechief wrote: post #486
twoodfin wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. But I will die on the hill that ChatGPT (today, at least) is a bad writer, and makes prompted writing worse in a way that isn't anything like the way schematic style or vocabulary rules might for an over-eager student.

For whatever combination of prompt and context, ChatGPT 5.2 did some writing for me the other day that didn't have any of the surface style I find so abrasive. But it could still only express its purported insights in the same "A & ~B" structure and other GPT-isms beneath the surface. Truly effective writers are adept with a much broader set of rhetorical and structural tools.

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

#503

Post by tourmalinetaco »

pksebben wrote: post #495
dragonwriter wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

It’s not even really a problem of the Internet necessarily; it’s rather a symptom of the growing political divide in Western society. Things are “simple” now because we’ve reached the point where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you can be jailed for going against the Accepted Opinions™, and we’re seeing a rise in politically motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to emotionally backed rhetoric like we’ve seen with the Turtle Island terrorists; you can’t debate ethics with someone who wants you dead.

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

#504

Post by D-Machine »

xwolfi wrote: post #450
D-Machine wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 !

This is subjective, lots of people think they sound smart / better by avoiding moral phrases like "bad" or "evil", but often this is just pointless class signaling, limp-wristed relativism, or simple cowardice / excessive agreeableness.

To counter that kind of nonsense is why we have phrases like "X is bad and you should feel bad for supporting it", and "X is bad, actually", as they don't beat around the bush and simply make one's moral statements clear. Maybe I should have said "repetitive, unpleasant to read, and just bad" to make this usage clearer, but, hey, one can only spend so much time crafting quick comments on HN.

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

#505

Post by M_bara »

komali2 wrote: post #315
phantasmish wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He scrambled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" "He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'" [edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!

Maneuvered, marched, slid over to, snuck up on/to, rolled on up to, ambled, thread his way through the crowd to, slithered, slunk. Pimp walked. Danced over to. Hopped over to. Sprinted! Jogged! Charged!

Sashay…

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

#506

Post by Forgeties79 »

the_af wrote: post #485
Forgeties79 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Ahhh ok thank you for clarifying that for me!

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

#508

Post by cryptonector »

figassis wrote: post #427
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…

Focus on short sentences and simplicity is an American trait. It is a bit different with UK English. As a native Portugese speaker, I spent my time before the US doing exactly the same as the author, I could write well structured prose by the time I was in 5th grade. I grew up with a dictionary. My mother would come back from work and ask me for the list of "difficult words". The expectation was that I spent time rea…

In British English there is a different approach to making up new words. Words like 'carpark' make me wince -- sure, it's more efficient than parking lot (though in Minnesota it's 'ramp', which is even more efficient). Not a fan.

> Then I went to an Engineering College, and it teaches us to distill everything into it's simpler fundamental components. I like it, and I now want people to be as direct as possible.

I've not quite yet gotten to the "and now I want people to be as direct as possible stage", but occasionally I've had to deal with exceedingly elliptical writing (and speech!) and then -yes- I feel exactly that.

English is my third language, and my first two are Romance languages. Over in Europe and parts of LatAm florid language is prized, as you know. I had to unlearn that stuff.

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

#509

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

xigoi wrote: post #257
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #131

It's pretty rude to "accuse" someone of using AI. Would you yell "Dictionary!", "Grammarly!", "Reference manual!", "Newspaper quote!" at them? Maybe "Harvard!" or "Tutored!" ? You don't know who they are or what their life is like. Maybe they're blind and using it as an assisted device. Maybe their hand is injured and they use it to output information faster. Maybe they're old, infirm, a non-native English speaker, e…

> Let's say you happen to be lucky, don't accuse someone unfairly, and they are using ChatGPT to write what they said. Who cares?! People who want to read thoughts of other people and not meaningless slop.

But those are the same things

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

#510

Post by hammock »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #472
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the correct answer the LLM should give is "if you have to ask, definitely don't do that". Or... it can start asking diagnostic questions, expert-system style. But yeah, I can imagine a multi-modal model actually might have more information and common sense than a human in a (for them) novel situation. If only to say "don't be an idiot", "pick higher ground" . Or even just as a rubber duck!

I uploaded a simple spreadsheet that was 8 rows and 12 columns. Not even 100 full cells. They were filled with plain text numbers and names, and a few dozen had green blocks, otherwise no other info/styling and no formulas. I asked ChatGPT “how many cells are green.” It told me 13 (there were over 30). I uploaded a photo. Still couldn’t do it. I understand there are things a typical LLM can do and things that it cann…

If you pay for the llm and turn thinking up to max , it succeeds at many tasks that it normally fails on free version
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