I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like Chatgpt, Chatgpt Writes Like Me

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...

They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Maybe the article author will chip in.

> ChatGPT is designed to write well

If you define well as overly verbose, avoiding anything that could be considered controversial, and generally sycophantic but bland soulless corporate speak, yes.

> there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and insidious slant to it

That feels too authentic and personal to be any of the current generation of LLMs.

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 data or try to word questions a lot more to have more sane writing styles.

That being said it also reminds me of journalistic articles that feel like the person just tried to reach some quota using up a lot of grand words to say nothing. In my country of residence the biggest medium (a public one) has certain sections that are written exactly like that. Luckily these are labeled. It's the section that is a bit more general, not just news and a bit more "artsy" and I know that their content is largely meaningless and untrue. Usually it's enough to click on the source link or find the source yourself to see it says something completely different. Or it's a topic that one knows about. So there even are multiple layers to being "like LLMs".

The fact that people are taught to write that way outside of marketing or something surprises me.

That being said, this is just my general genuine dislike of this writing style. How an LLM writes is up to a lot of things, also how you engage with it. To some degree they copy your own style, because of how they work. But for generic things there is always that "marketing talk" which I always assumed is simply because the internet/social media is littered with ads.

Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?

Writing well is about communicating ideas effectively to other humans. To be fair, throughout linguistic history it was easier to appeal to an audience’s innate sense of authority by “sounding smart”. Actually being smart in using the written word to hone the sharpness of a penetrating idea is not particularly evident in LLM’s to date.

Outrage mills mill outrage. If it wasn't this, it would be something else. The fact that the charge resonated is notable. But the fact that it exists is not.

Is it? Like genuinely, were there experts on literature involved?

Perhaps the US-centric "optimization" of English is to blame here, since it is so obvious in regular US media we all consume across the planet, and is likely the contrasting style.

Humanity has always been about errors.

Wow, you really do under/over estimate some of us :)

- Barely literate native English speakers not comprehending even minimally sophisticated grammatical constructs.

- Windows-centric people not understanding that you can trivially type em-dash (well, en-dash, but people don’t understand the difference either) on Mac by typing - twice.

Interesting, because he failed me too just because I use Firefox. Have you been told about the article or it actually worked with your screen reader software?

I would not want to be an artist in the current environment, it’s total chaos.

Omitting articles? To me, that has always signaled "this will be an interesting and enlightening read, although terse and in need of careful thought." I've found sites from that part of the Internet to be very useful for highly technical and obscure topics.

But yeah, I definitely find mild grammatical quirks expected from English as a foreign language speakers a positive these days, because the writing appears to reflects their actual thoughts and actual fluency.

How do you like that, Mr. Rat

Thought the Cat.

ChatGPT :|

ChatGPT (japan) XD

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 can't blame others though- I was looking at notes I wrote in 2019 and even that gave me a flavor of looking like a ChatGPT wrote it. I use the word "delve" and "not just X but also Y often, according to my Obsidian. I've taken to inserting the occasional spelling mistake or Unorthodox Patterns of Writing(tm), even when I would not otherwise.

It's a lot easier to get LLMs to adhere to good writing guides than it is to get them to create something informative and useful. I like to think my notes and writing are informative and useful.