20 ms·

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

• lxgr 10mo ago
  Honestly, people assuming I'm using ChatGPT to communicate with them and liberally using that suspicion as a filter sounds like a great meta-filter.
• wccrawford 10mo ago
  It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI. I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
  • nottorp 10mo ago
    Actually it's public info that ChatGPT was originally trained by speakers of some african business english "dialect". https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt 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.
    • guerrilla 10mo ago
      > They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Nigeria and Kenya are two very different regions with different spheres of business. I don't know, but I wouldn't expect the English to overlap that much.
      • nottorp 10mo ago
        But The Guardian could have been wrong about the country, and I'm a stupid European so I just don't know. All we can hope is for a local to show up and explain.
      • neffy 10mo ago
        There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.
        • guerrilla 10mo ago
          That's not a very good argument, because then you could say the same for American, Canada, South Africa, Australia and so on. If recency is an issue, then here's a list of colonies that got their freedom around the same time: Cyprus, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Malta, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius, Eswatini (Swaziland). If what you're saying is right then you'd have to admit Jamaican and Barbados English are just the same as Kenyan or Nigerian... but they're not. They're radically different because they're radically different regions. Uganda and Kenya being similar is what I would expect, but not necessarily Nigeria...
          • Barrin92 10mo ago
            >They're radically different because they're radically different regions. They're radically different predominantly at the street level and everyday usage, but the kind of professional English of journalists, academics and writers that the author of the article was surrounded by is very recognizable. You can tell an American from an Australian on the beach but in a journal or article in a paper of record that's much more difficult. Higher ed English with its roots in a classical British education you can find all over the globe.
  • n4r9 10mo ago
    This may be true. I personally didn't get any hint of LLM usage from their writing. Even where they use em-dashes it's for stuff like this: > 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.
    • petesergeant 10mo ago
      ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
      • embedding-shape 10mo ago
        Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
        • oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
          Except for your poor editor who then has to manually replace your hyphens with proper em dashes. Still, if you're already disrespecting your editor enough to feed them AI slop...
          • embedding-shape 10mo ago
            My editor? I don't think it cares what I input into it, it's just a program. As long as I feed it characters it'll happily tick along as always.
            • jasonjmcghee 10mo ago
              The parent comment is referring to a human editor, not a text editor.
  • rich_sasha 10mo ago
    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.
    • bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
      "Every. Single. Time." has been a staple of American online humor for at least a decade. Commonly used, hence commonly used by ChatGPT.
    • the_af 10mo ago
      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.
      • esafak 10mo ago
        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.
    • dogleash 10mo ago
      It's the content mill blogspam voice. The machine generated slop looks a lot like the artisan hand crafted slop.
  • tete 10mo ago
    Depends on your definition of "well". I hate that writing style. It's the same writing style that people who want to sell you something use and it seems to be really good at tiring the reader out - or at least me. 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?
    • twoodfin 10mo ago
      Are Kenyans really taught to write that way? I’m highly skeptical. At one point the author tries to argue this local pedagogy is downstream of “The Queen’s English” & British imperial tradition, but modern LLM-speak is a couple orders of magnitude closer in the vector space to LinkedIn clout-chasing than anything from that world.
      • thevillagechief 10mo ago
        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 ChatGPT. I know know it was all silly, and I've spent a bunch of time learning to write simply. But then I've listen to too many tech podcasts, and now I find silicon valley tech-speak creeping in, and I hate it. The one that I hear everywhere now that I swear not to ever use is let's double-click on that point. Just why?
  • twoodfin 10mo ago
    ChatGPT does not “write well” unless your standard is some set of statistical distributions for vocabulary, sentence length, phrase structure, … 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.
    • xeonmc 10mo ago
      Good writers use words to make a point. LLMs use words to make a salad.
      • wongarsu 10mo ago
        But they will make the salad delicious, marvelous and intricate. It's not just a salad - it's a new way to talk like marketing copy (/s)
      • Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
        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 writing.
        • zdragnar 10mo ago
          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 properties and a few new defects without correcting the original mistake. The only code I would trust today's agents with is so simple I don't want or need an agent to write it.
  • woliveirajr 10mo ago
    And good students are getting in trouble (meaning "have to explain themselves") to lousy teachers just because they write well, articulate ideas and can summarize information from documents where other regular people would make mistakes.
  • killerstorm 10mo ago
    This reminds me of Idiocracy: "Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded" as a response to a normal speech.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes 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.
  • zjp 10mo ago
    LLMs don't even write as well as people do. If you talk to them long enough, you'll notice they produce the same errors careless people do. Sometimes they wrongly elide the article 'a'. They occasionally mess up 'a/an' vowel agreement. The most grating thing of all is that the fully-elided 'because' (as in 'because traffic') lives on in LLM output, even though you rarely see it anymore because people rightly got the sense it was unfair for a writer to offload semantic reconstruction to the reader. I have a confession to make: I didn't think lulcat speak was funny, even at the time. It's pretty annoying and once you catch them doing it, you can't stop.
  • OhioMan2943 10mo ago
    It writes well by the impression of the average person...
• dismantlethesun 10mo ago
  Ironically OpenAI used Kenyan workers[1] to train its AI and now we've come to the point where Kenyans are being excluded because they sound too much like the AI that they helped train. [1] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
  • tantalor 10mo ago
    It's not ironic
    • dismantlethesun 10mo ago
      I think it is. The irony is that the people you hired to help make your machine seem human are seen as mechanical because of their distinct and uniformly sophisticated tone. Thus we have a situation that’s contrary to expectations.
  • rcarmo 10mo ago
    I actually think that's a great endorsement of Kenyan education. I don't deal with English-speaking African countries that often (I'm Portuguese, so naturally we have ties to other bits of the continent), but I've often been impressed by how well they communicate regardless of the profession they're in--I don't mean that as a bias, but rather as it befitting the kind of conversation you'd have with an English major in the UK (to which I have a lot of exposure). 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.
• shlip 10mo ago
  This must be infuriating: > You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a machine built an ocean away calls you a fake. This is : > humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm And once you start noticing the 'threes', it's fun also.
  • philipwhiuk 10mo ago
    I mean, "to err is human" was written in the 1700s, by the enlightenment era author the essay writer is presumably reading. Humanity has always been about errors.
• p410n3 10mo ago
  I always thought the whole argument was about explicitly using em dash and / or en dash. Aka — and –. Because while people OBVIOUSLY use dashes in writing, humans usually fell back on using the (technically incorrect) hyphen aka the "minus symbol" - because thats whats available on the keyboards and basically no one will care. Seems like, in the biggest game of telephone called the internet, this has devolved into "using any form of dash = AI". Great.
  • embedding-shape 10mo ago
    The funniest thing I see are people who are harking "Eww, you used AI for this and it's bad because of that, I can tell because I used this other AI service who said what you wrote was 90% of AI", completely failing to grasp the irony.
  • foundddit 10mo ago
    Recently, many people do use the em dash. One big reason is that iOS and I think macOS auto converts a double - into an em dash.
  • vsl 10mo ago
    Yeah, the joys of mass ignorance. - 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.
  • oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
    > and basically no one will care Wow, you really do under/over estimate some of us :)
    • p410n3 10mo ago
      Fair. I was probably just projecting. I cant even figure out when to use a comma in my native language. So caring about which type of hyphen was used feels like overly sophisticated to me - because I dont care myself.
• lynx97 10mo ago
  Systemic discrimination, happens all the time. I am blind. I regularily fail the "tell computers and humans apart" test. You imagine, that feels very much like the dehumanisation it is. Big tech couldn't care less. After all, they need to protect themselves against spammers. Much like the guy who was on the HN frontpage just a few days ago, arguing that he is now trashing accessibility because he doesn't want to be web scraped. If you raise these issues with devs, all you get it pushback, no understanding at all. Thats the way it is. If you are amongst a minority small enough and without a rainbow coloured flag, you end up being ignored, stepped over, and pushed aside. If you are lucky. If you are unlucky, and you raise your voice, you will be critizied for pointing out the obvious.
  • nottorp 10mo ago
    > arguing that he is now trashing accessibility because he doesn't want to be web scraped 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?
    • lynx97 10mo ago
      I have to admit I only read the heading. I didn't want to read the article, that would have ruined my day.
      • nottorp 10mo ago
        He messed with the glyph indexes in a customized font so the text is gibberish if you look just at the code points but displays as english. That would probably mess up any screen reader, but it also didn't work on a regular Firefox :)
        • SSLy 10mo ago
          wasn't that the article about the obfuscation of kindle ebooks?
• elcapitan 10mo ago
  Ironically, mistakes and idiosyncrasies are becoming a sign of authenticity and trustworthiness, while polish and quality signal the opposite. Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post that started with a sentence that was obviously written by someone with a slavic background (most writers from other language families create certain grammatical patterns when writing in another language, e.g. German is also quite typical). My first thought was "great, this is most likely not written by a LLM".
  • throwaway613745 10mo ago
    Maybe for writing, but in digital art circles if anyone notices a mistake in your lines or perspective or any kind of technical error you will get the anti-AI cancel mob after you even if you didn’t use generative AI at all. I would not want to be an artist in the current environment, it’s total chaos.
    • embedding-shape 10mo ago
      I'm an artist in the current environment, it's not total chaos. Ignore what others are doing, do what you want with the tools you have available, and you'll be fine. There are huge echo-chambers on the internet, but once you get out in the real world, things are not as people on the internet paints it out to be.
    • raincole 10mo ago
      > artist Social media artists, gallery artists and artists in the industry (I mean people who work for big game/film studios, not industrial designers) are very different groups. Social media artists are having it the hardest.
    • renewiltord 10mo ago
      Social media artists appear to be bucket crabs. If any of them succeed, the remainder express reactor-grade envy and attempt to tear them down. Perhaps it's the relative poverty and the low stakes of the field that drive it to this end.
• bryanhogan 10mo ago
  AI / LLMs, including ChatGPT, can already be made to sound (almost) any way you want, just by telling it to. The usual tells that something was written or created by AI are changing monthly. Just recently I was amazed with how good text produced by Gemini 3 Pro in Thinking mode is. It feels like a big improvement, again. But we also have to honest and accept that nowadays using a certain kind of vocabulary or paragraph structure will make people think that that text was written by AI.
• Terretta 10mo ago
  Love this, everything about this - I still teach the foundation, 3 columns, roof, of the persuasive essay - except one bit: Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence, "The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor." No. No no no. The next word is "mat"!
  • sam-cop-vimes 10mo ago
    ha ha - I had the same thought!
  • bryanrasmussen 10mo ago
    rat. And its claws dug in its back. How do you like that, Mr. Rat Thought the Cat.
• embedding-shape 10mo ago
  The internet been the same for a long time, it's just the wording that changed. As someone who apparently thinks differently, the amount of time people just end up saying "Well, you're just a troll, no one actually believes something like that, so whatever" since I started frequenting the internet in the early 2000s is the same as always. But some people try to be trendy and accuse you of using AI for writing the replies instead, but it's the same sentiment. Besides, of course what people write will sound as LLMs, since LLMs are trained on what we've been writing on the internet... For us who've been lucky and written a lot and are more represented in the dataset, the writings of LLMs will be closer to how we already wrote, but then of course we get the blame for sounding like LLMs, because apparently people don't understand that LLMs were trained on texts written by humans...
• scandox 10mo ago
  Looking forward to the deliberately abstruse and illogical essays of the future. Everyone will have to write like a second-rate French philosopher.
  • PeterStuer 10mo ago
    "Rewrite this email paragraph in the style of a corporate ToS statement. Do NOT expose my orders and their implicit acceptance of them by the recipient pending a 24 hr deadline anywhere before page 18."
  • esafak 10mo ago
    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 ...
• xeonmc 10mo ago
  Funny how sci-fi always envisioned AI to speak in a rigid, hyper-rational terseness, whereas reality gave us AI which inherited the worst linguistic vices of "human" voices.
  • Kuinox 10mo ago
    You call writing in a structured fashion with formal words the "worst linguistic vices"
    • xeonmc 10mo ago
      The worst vices are the superfluous faux-eloquence that meanders without meaning. Employing linguistic devices for the sake of utilizing them without managing to actually make a point with its usage.
    • komali2 10mo ago
      I was trying to figure out why my SD card wasn't mounting and asked ChatGPT. It said: > Your kernel is actually being very polite here. It sees the USB reader, shakes its hand, reads its name tag… and then nothing further happens. That tells us something important. Let’s walk this like a methodical gremlin. It's so sickly sweet. I hate it. Some other quotes: > Let’s sketch a plan that treats your precious network bandwidth like a fragile desert flower and leans on ZFS to become your staging area. > But before that, a quick philosophical aside: ZFS is a magnificent beast, but it is also picky. > Ending thought: the database itself is probably tiny compared to your ebooks, and yet the logging machinery went full dragon-hoard. Once you tame binlogs, Booklore should stop trying to cosplay as a backup solution. > Nice, progress! Login working is half the battle; now we just have to convince the CSS goblins to show up. > Hyprland on Manjaro is a bit like running a spaceship engine in a treehouse: entirely possible, but the defaults are not tailored for you, so you have to wire a few things yourself. > The universe has gifted you one of those delightfully cryptic systemd messages: “Failed to enable… already exists.” Despite the ominous tone, this is usually systemd’s way of saying: “Friend, the thing you’re trying to enable is already enabled.”
      • 10mo ago
• checker659 10mo ago
  Bang on. The self proclaimed detectives have never had to take TOEFL where you'll get marks deducted for not using connectors like furthermore.
  • rcarmo 10mo ago
    Goodness, I forgot about TOEFL. That might indeed shape a lot of your early vocabulary choices if you need to get an English certificate (which I suppose would happen during college years, which is also when most of your personal writing style gels together).
• Timpy 10mo ago
  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-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...
  • m4rtink 10mo ago
    You are completely right dajou~ ^_^ !
    • delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
      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?”
  • erikig 10mo ago
    The Indian-born textbook author mentioned (Malkiat Singh [0]) had an inordinate influence on many Kenyan students because his textbooks were the de-facto standard for years. Its interesting how this influence extends as his students get to curate the LLMs on which the world has come to rely. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh
    • jojobas 10mo ago
      So twists of training data procurement bring us the best of doing the needful through Africa.
  • bakugo 10mo ago
    I guess it can't be helped.
• rukshn 10mo ago
  I had a similar experience. We were talking about a colleague for using ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with interesting points. The talk sounds so mechanical and sounds exactly as ChatGPT. His responses in Zoom Calls were the same mechanical and sounds like AI generated. I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written and gave points to why it believes this message was AI written. When I showed the response to the colleague he swore that he was not using ant AI to write his responses. I believe after he said to me it was not AI written. And now reading this I can imagine that it's not an isolated experience.
  • mort96 10mo ago
    > I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written 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.
    • Tepix 10mo ago
      Well, case in point: If you ask an AI to grade an essay, it will grade the essay highest that it wrote itself.
      • the_af 10mo ago
        Is this true though? I haven't done the experiment, but I can envision the LLM critiquing its own output (if it was created in a different session) and iteratively correcting it and always finding flaws in it. Are LLMs even primed to say "this is perfect and it needs no further improvements"? What I have seen is ChatGPT and Claude battling it out, always correcting and finding fault with each other's output (trying to solve the same problem). It's hilarious.
        • Tepix 10mo ago
• htrp 10mo ago
  the initial rlhf training evaluation was done by kenyans specifically
• mikigraf 10mo ago
  I’m having a similar problem. Spent way too much time on the internet starting in my preteens and it shaped the way I write - which not surprisingly - is a similar way to how an AI - trained on the online data - writes
• _Chief 10mo ago
  Also Kenyan, I once recently spent 10min explaining a technical topic via chat, and the response I got was "was this GPT?". I took a few minutes then just linked an article of how underpaid Kenyans trained ChatGPT for OpenAI [1] 1: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
  • BergAndCo 10mo ago
    [dead]
• dsign 10mo ago
  Actually, there's a sweet solution to the writing and art crisis we are inflicting ourselves with in our AI craze. I call it "the island". Just find a nice tiny islet somewhere, make a few houses, and rent them by the week to writers/artists. No internet in the place. Rent out sanctioned devices; glorified typewriters without Internet access nor GPU nor CPU fast enough to run an LLM. Bring a notary to certify stuff was purely human-made. Have fun with like-minded individuals.
• kome 10mo ago
  as a researcher, writing ended up being my job, and more specifically, writing in english. i never developed any sentimental link to the english language, to me it always felt bland, because i had to use it in bland environments, to write texts that had to be bland and manneristic. chatgpt revolutionized my work because it makes creating those bland texts so much easier and fast. it made my job more interesting because i don't have to care about writing as much as before. to those who complain about ai slop, i have nothing to say. english was slop before, even before ai, and not because of some conspiracy, but because the gatekeepers of journals and scientific production already wanted to be fed slop. for sure society will create others, totally idiosyncratic ways to generate distinction and an us vs others. that's natural. but, for now, let's enjoy this interregnum...
• clbrmbr 10mo ago
  Thank you for writing this. I too was a heavy user of the em-dash until ChatGPT came along. Though my solution has been to eschew the em-dash or at least replace with triple hyphens.
• dilap 10mo ago
  I read about 4 paragraphs of the blog post, it does not at all read like it was written by ChatGPT! Some people are perhaps overly focussed on superficial things like em-dashes. The real tells for ChatGPT writing are more subtle -- a tendency towards hyperboly (it's not A, it's [florid restatment of essentially A] B!), a certain kind of rhythym, and frequently a kind of hard to describe "emptiness" of claims. (LLMs can write in mang styles, but this is the sort of "kid filling out the essay word count" style you get in chatgpt etc by default.)
  • Sharlin 10mo ago
    It does not, but to many, many people who cannot tell the difference it does. Simply because it's well-written somewhat-formal-register English and not "internet speech" or similar casual register. As you probably know, there are many these days who take the mere use of em or en dashes as a reliable sign of LLM writing.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • ezoe 10mo ago
    Hey bro! This is the real English bro! No way we can write like that bro! What? - and ;? The words like "furthermore" or "moreever"? All my homies nver use the words like that bro! Look at you. You're using newline! You're using ChatGPT, right bro?
    • flowerthoughts 10mo ago
      Given the eloquently natural words in this post, I conclude you must be this thread's prompt engineer! Well done, my fellow Netizen. Reading your words was like smelling a rosebud in spring, just after the heavy snow fell. Now, please, divulge your secret--your verbal nectar, if you wish--so that I too can flower in your tounge!
• Tepix 10mo ago
  I don't mind the "normal" text so much, where you aren't sure if it was written by an AI or not. What's really getting annoying is the flood of bullet points and emoji that is flooding LinkedIn in particular. Super obnoxious!
• nout 10mo ago
  Well, his writing style is too good. The sentences flow too beautifully, he uses rich vocabulary and styling. It's unusual to see that style of writing online. I definitely don't poses that power. I don't know the author of this article and so I don't know whether I should feel good or bad about this. LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM. The ride in the closed horse carriage was so comfortable it felt like being in a car and so people assumed it was a car. Is that good? Is that bad? Also note that LLMs are now much more than just "one ML model to predict the next character" - LLMs are now large systems with many iterations, many calls to other systems, databases, etc.
  • stephen_g 10mo ago
    > LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that it's being produced by LLM. I really don’t think that is what most normal people assume… And while LLMs can definitely produce more grammatically accurate prose with probably a wider vocabulary than the average person, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good writing…
    • nout 10mo ago
      I meant "good" in the formatting, grammar, vocabulary sense. I'm not arguing that LLMs are "good" in writing amazing prose. I mean look at two of us - I have typos, I use half broken english, I'm not good in doing noun articles, my vocabulary is limited, I don't connect sentences well, you end sentences with "..." and then you start sentence with "And", etc. I very much believe you are a real person.
• pluc 10mo ago
  I can't wait until we reach the point of AI adoption where genuine content is suspicious. Wanna submit a proof in a criminal case? Better be ready to debunk whether this was made with AI. AI is going to fuck everything up for absolutely no reason other than profit and greed and I can't fucking wait
  • oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
    It's going to make accountability very, very difficult. We were nearly at the point in politics anyway, where people could just claim evidence was fake and get away with it. Now, it's an easy get-out. I am fully expecting that, if any particularly incriminating photos were to appear, say of powerful people engaging in activities with Jeffrey Epstein, that they will simply dismiss them as "fake news AI".
• azangru 10mo ago
  What was the "dead giveaway" referred to in the pasted tweet? Was it the dash, that people assume for some reason regular folks never use? Or was it something more interesting?
• codeflo 10mo ago
  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 frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country. And ChatGPT's "improvement": > This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country. Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.
  • Miraltar 10mo ago
    You're doing it the wrong way imo, if you ask gpt to improve a sentence that's already very polished it will only add grandiosity because what else it could do? For a proper comparison you'd have to give it the most raw form of the thought and see how it would phrase it. The main difference in the author's writing to LLM I see is that the flourish and the structure mentioned is used meaningfully, they circle around a bit too much for my taste but it's not nearly as boring as reading ai slop which usually stretch a simple idea over several paragraphs
    • rossant 10mo ago
      Why can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's already really good? Sometimes I wish the LLM would just tell me, "You asked me to improve this sentence, but it's already great and I don't see anything to change. Any 'improvement' would actually make it worse. Are you sure you want to continue?"
• tuetuopay 10mo ago
  I can only dream of writing english as well as OP. Kudos for mastering the language! The formal part resonates, because most non-native english speaker learnt it at school, which teaches you literary english rather than day-to-day english. And this holds for most foreign languages learnt in this context: you write prose, essays, three-part prose with an introduction and a conclusion. I've got the same kind of education in france, though years of working in IT gave me a more "american" english style: straight to the point and short, with a simpler vocabulary for everyday use. As for whether your writing is ChatGPT: it's definitely not. What those "AI bounty hunters" would miss in such an essay: there is no fluff. Yes, the sentences may use the "three points" classical method, but they don't stick out like a sore thumb - I would not have noticed should the author had not mentioned it. This does not feel like filling. Usually with AI articles, I find myself skipping more than half of each paragraph, due to the information density - just give me the prompt. This article got me reading every single word. Can we call this vibe reading?
• lapcat 10mo ago
  False accusations of AI writing are becoming absurd and infuriating. The other day I saw and argued with this accusation by a HN commenter against a professional writer, based on the most tenuous shred of evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255049
  • cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • twoodfin 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • lapcat 10mo ago
      > My friend We're not friends. > the article whose provenance you are defending is clearly LLM-“punched up” at a minimum. I'm not even going to ask for your evidence, because the previous argument I had was a frustrating waste of time that ended with insane reality denial by the other party: "Textbooks don't contain section headers every few paragraphs." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256470 I encourage you to read through the entire argument, though, and see how the AI accuser makes false empirical claims and generalizations at every step, constantly moving the goalposts whenever I presented disproof.
• komali2 10mo ago
  > 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 wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables. Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones. The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.
  • lo_zamoyski 10mo ago
    > the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences Language is like clothing. Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth. The clothing is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a piece of jewelry only if it contributes to the ensemble. Oh, no. They’ll drape themselves with gold chains and festoon their fingers with chunky diamond rings. Brand names will litter their clothing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly. By analogy, those with no taste - but enough vocabulary - will use words in flashy ways to show off their knowledge. Language is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a word only if it contributes to the prose. Oh, no. They’ll drape their phrases with unnecessarily unusual terms and festoon their sentences with clumsy grammar. Obfuscation, rather than clarity, will define their writing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly. As you can see, the first difference is one of purpose: the vulgarian aims for the wrong thing. You might also say that the vulgarian also lacks a kind of temperance in speech.
• moviet 10mo ago
  We shouldn't need to have people bearing false witness. Anyone who uses AI tools to produce published works should offer a clear disclaimer to their audience. I share the same concerns as the author: "Will my written work be used to say that I plagiarize off ChatGPT?" All the toil of word-smithing to receive such an ugly reward, convincing new readers that you are lazy. What a world we live in.
• mattbee 10mo ago
  I'm not sure I've read any of Marcus' previous writing, but there's no way that essay could have been written by an AI. It's personal and has a structure that follows human thought rather than a prompt. For sure he describes an education in English that seems misguided and showy. And I get the context - if you don't show off in your English, you'll never aspire to the status of an Englishman. But doggedly sticking to anyone's "rules of good writing" never results in good writing. And I don't think that's what the author is doing, if only because he is writing about the limitations of what he was taught! So idk maybe he does write like ChatGPT in other contexts? But not on this evidence. I have seen people use "you're using AI" as a lazy dismissal of someone else's writing, for whatever reasons. That usually tells you more about the person saying it than the writing though.
  • giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    I see people claiming real videos are AI, or even real photos. You can really tell it's not when there's 17 other videos from other angles. Maybe someday AI will get good at that level of faking a video, but at the time being, it is much harder to pull off.
• sombragris 10mo ago
  This resonates with me. LLM output in Spanish also has the tendency to "write like me", as in the linked article. On that regard, I have an anecdote not from me, but from a student of mine. One of the hats I wear is that of a seminary professor. I had a student who is now a young pastor, a very bright dude who is well read and is an articulate writer. "It is a truth universally acknowledged" (with apologies to Jane Austen) that theological polemics can sometimes be ugly. Well, I don't have time for that, but my student had the impetus (and naiveté) of youth, and he stepped into several ones during these years. He made Facebook posts which were authentic essays, well argued, with balanced prose which got better as the years passed by, and treating opponents graciously while firmly standing his own ground. He did so while he was a seminary student, and also after graduation. He would argue a point very well. Fast forward to 2025. The guy still has time for some Internet theological flamewars. In the latest one, he made (as usual) a well argued, long-form Facebook post, defending his viewpoint on some theological issue against people who have opposite beliefs on that particular question. One of those opponents, a particularly nasty fellow, retorted him with something like "you are cheating, you're just pasting some ChatGPT answer!", and pasted a screenshot of some AI detection tool that said that my student's writing was something like "70% AI Positive". Some other people pointed out that the opponent's writing also seemed like AI, and this opponent admitted that he used AI to "enrich" some of his writing. And this is infuriating. If that particular opponent had bothered himself to check my student's profile, he would have seen that same kind of "AI writing" going on back to at least 2018, when ChatGPT and the likes were just a speck in Sam Altman's eye. That's just the way my student writes, and he does in this way because the guy actually reads books, he's a bonafide theology nerd. Any resemblance of his writing to a LLM output is coincidence. In my particular case, this resonated with me because as I said, I also tend to write in a way that would resemble LLM output, with certain ways to structure paragraphs, liberal use of ordered and unordered lists, etc. Again, this is infuriating. First because people tend to assume one is unable to write at a certain level without cheating with AI; and second, because now everybody and their cousin can mimic something that took many of us years to master and believe they no longer need to do the hard work of learning to express themselves on an even remotely articulate way. Oh well, welcome to this brave new world...
• jagoff 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ghc 10mo ago
    Emdashes can also be part of beautiful writing, like this: https://poets.org/poem/feeling-first https://poets.org/poem/feeling-first
• zkmon 10mo ago
  If you used a calculator to do a calculation, would they say the answer looks like created by calculator and not done by-hand? I think the only solution to this is, people should simply not question AI usage. Pretence is everywhere. Face makeup, dress, the way you speak, your forced smile...
• kevin061 10mo ago
  Everyone thinks they are great at detecting AI slop, but they usually aren't. For art, there are certain giveaways, but for text? I regularly find myself avoiding the use of the em-dash now even though it is exactly what I should be writing there, for fear of people thinking I used ChatGPT. I wish it wasn't this way. Alas.
• radimm 10mo ago
  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 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
  • renewiltord 10mo ago
    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.
    • radimm 10mo ago
      Yes, I'm Czech.
• vintermann 10mo ago
  > 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 explanations and asides in parentheses, like this) which I don't think I've EVER seen an instruction-tuned chatbot do. I know I do it myself, but I'm aware it's a stylistic wart.
  • esafak 10mo ago
    > [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.
• Yizahi 10mo ago
  While author is correct in general, I would like to add a counter-point regarding em-dashes specifically. Yes, many people use them like this - and many website frameworks will automatically replace a keyboard not-really-a-minus symbol with em-dash. So that is not a sign of the LLM generated slop. What LLMs also do though, is use em-dashes like this (imagine that "--" is an em-dash here): "So, when you read my work--when you see our work--what are you really seeing?" You see? LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So those specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop.
  • Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
    It could also—hear me out here—be me just using compose + --- . (Not that I used n- or m- dash previously, I used commas, like this! ) But some people learn n- and m-dash, it turns out. Who knew!
  • brycewray 10mo ago
    > LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So those specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop. Evidently, you've never read text from anyone whose job requires writing, publishing, and/or otherwise communicating under rules established in (e.g.) the Chicago Manual of Style.
    • Yizahi 10mo ago
      Those people broadly fall under "the Oxford professor" catch-all phrase. Obviously. I was talking about 99.99% of random internet texts, which do not conform to any Manual of style and are not written by literature majors. If I see a text authored by some known figure or in a respectable journal/site, then I don't have a task of detecting LLM slop in the first place. But when I do want to know if the text is generated or not, it is usually written by less sophisticated crowd, or anonymous.
    • deleted 10mo ago
• maqnius 10mo ago
  Correlated but kinda off topic: I don't mind the style so much, I mind the verbosity. The amount of words spit out effortless by the writer which then need to be comprehended and filtered by every reader. Seeing a project basically wrapping 100 lines of code with a novel length README ala 'emoticon how does it compare to.. emoticon'-bla bla really puts me off.
  • rcarmo 10mo ago
    That's a hallmark of Claude. I stopped using Claude for documentation because it was overly... JavaScripty in feel (all the stuff it churned out felt like JavaScript framework docs of the 2010s, and I bet it would have added Neon Cat if it knew how). In comparison, I can sort of confidently ask GPT-5.1/2 to say "revise this but be terse and concise about it" and arrive at something that is more structured that what I input but preserves most of my writing style and doesn't bore the reader.
• yokoprime 10mo ago
  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.
  • BalinKing 10mo ago
    There is an easy shortcut for em dashes on macOS, Opt+Shift+-. This makes it really easy to use them, which I do all the time in casual settings (indeed, more often than in formal settings).
    • rcarmo 10mo ago
      Autocomplete does that for me (bilingual English/Portuguese).
    • creata 10mo ago
      And a very easy shortcut in Vim: Ctrl+K M -
      • pcthrowaway 10mo ago
        And a very easy shortcut in emacs: C-x M-c M-butterfly-dash
  • xigoi 10mo ago
    I do have an em dash key on the keyboard on my phone :)
  • elephanlemon 10mo ago
    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 :).
• synapsomorphy 10mo ago
  It's an arms race between human writers and AI. Writers want to sound less like AI and AI wants to sound more like writers, so no indicator is reliable for long. Today typos indicate a real writer, so tomorrow LLMs will inject them where appropriate. Yesterday em dashes indicated LLM, so now LLMs use them less. Beyond these surface level tells though, anyone who's read a lot of both AI-unassisted human writing as well as AI output should be able to pick up on the large amount of subtler cues that are present partly because they're harder to describe (so it's harder to RLHF LLMs in the human direction). But even today when it's not too hard to sniff out AI writing, it's quite scary to me how bad many (most?) people's chatbot detection senses are, as indicated by this article. Thinking that human writing is LLM is a false positive which is bad but not catastrophic, but the opposite seems much worse. The long term social impact, being "post-truth", seems poised to be what people have been raving / warning about for years w.r.t other tech like the internet. Today feels like the equivalent of WW1 for information warfare, society has been caught with its pants down by the speed of innovation.
  • cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • lapcat 10mo ago
    > society has been caught with its pants down by the speed of innovation. Or rather by the slowness of regulation and enforcement in the face of blatant copyright violation. We've seen this before, for example with YouTube, which became the go-to place for videos by allowing copyrighted material to be uploaded and hosted en masse, and then a company that was already a search engine monopoly was somehow allowed to acquire YouTube, thereby extending and reinforcing Google's monopolization of the web.
    • pixl97 10mo ago
      Innovation has always been faster when copyright is lax. The US was copying British and other European inventions during the industrial age left and right, and their economy took off because of it.
• rcarmo 10mo ago
  I feel this a bit, since I'm a voracious reader and a constant writer across a few languages (but mostly English), which over the decades has led to my converging on a certain (if imperfect) degree of polish. Plus my multiple concurrent and often fragmented simultaneous trains of thought while writing lead me to use parentheticals very often while drafting, which then means I often need go back and re-introduce structure. And guess what, when you revise something to be more structured and you do it in one sitting, your writing style naturally gravitates towards the stuff LLMs tend to churn out, even if with less bullet points and em dashes (which, incidentally, iOS/macOS adds for me automatically even if I am a double-dash person).
• 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  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, etc. Maybe they're just a regular person who feels insecure writing, and wants to use new technology to give them the confidence to write/comment more. Or, maybe they just talk like that. 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?! What is it you're doing by "calling them out" ? Winning internet points? Feeling superior? Fixing the world?
  • xigoi 10mo ago
    > 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.
    • 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
      But those are the same things
• romaniv 10mo ago
  The fact that everyone is now constantly forced to use (oftentimes faulty) personal heuristics to determine whether or not they read slop is the real problem here. AI companies and some of their product users relentlessly exploit the communication systems we've painstakingly built up since 1993. We (both readers and writers) shouldn't be required to individually adapt to this exploitation. We should simply stop it. And yes, I believe that the notion this exploitation is unstoppable and inevitable is just crude propaganda. This isn't all that different from the emergence of email spam. One way or the other this will eventually be resolved. What I don't know is whether this will be resolved in a way that actually benefits our society as a whole.
  • JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > fact that everyone is now constantly forced to use (oftentimes faulty) personal heuristics to determine whether or not they read slop is the real problem here It would be ironic and terrific if AI causes ordinary Americans to devote more time to evaluting their sources.
• vultour 10mo ago
  This post doesn't read anything like ChatGPT. Correct grammar does not indicate ChatGPT. Em-dashes don't indicate ChatGPT. Assessing whether something was generated using an LLM requires multiple signals, you can't simply decry a piece of text as AI-generated because you noticed an uncommon character. Unfortunately I think posts like this only seem to detract from valid criticisms. There is an actual ongoing epidemic of AI-generated content on the internet, and it is perfectly valid for people to be upset about this. I don't use the internet to be fed an endless stream of zero-effort slop that will make me feel good. I want real content produced by real people; yet posts like OP only serve to muddy the waters when it comes to these critiques. They latch onto opinions of random internet bottom-feeders (a dash now indicates ChatGPT? Seriously?), and try to minimise the broader skepticism against AI content. I wonder whether people like the Author will regret their stance once sufficient amount of people are indoctrinated and their content becomes irrelevant. Why would they read anything you have to say if the magic writing machine can keep shitting out content tailored for them 24/7?
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• elzbardico 10mo ago
  BS. ChatGPT writes in the sterile and boring manner of the average graduate of business, marketing or journalism: it is dull, safe, somewhat pompous but professional, the ideal style for corporate communication. Basically, for two reasons: 1) A giant portion of all internet text was written by those same folks. 2) Those folks are exactly the people anyone would hire to RLHF the models to have a safe, commercially desirable output style. I am pretty convinced the models could be more fluent, spontaneous and original, but then it could jeopardize the models' adoption in the corporate world, so, I think the labs intentionally fine-tuned this style to death.
• buyTheDip 10mo ago
  Excellent article. Insightful observation, expressed and written well. Just an opinion from a Canadian borne and American raised native English speaker.
• jinushaun 10mo ago
  I had a similar experience recently during code review. I was told to remove extra comments produced by Cursor. I was like, “I didn’t use Cursor for any of this PR…” I also love and use em-dashes regularly. ChatGPT writes like me.
• OutOfHere 10mo ago
  It is highly inappropriate to accuse anyone with the claim that their writing is AI generated. This often is used as an excuse to unfairly discredit the content of the message. Whether the content is or isn't AI generated can't be determined with any confidence, and even if it is, it is improper to ignore the message. If you're going to criticize a message, do so on the basis of its actual content, not its alleged authorship.
• sapphirebreeze 10mo ago
  [dead]
• nitwit005 10mo ago
  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.
  • leoc 10mo ago
    I doubt it’s affecting his work, but my impression is that if anyone is owed money from the use of their personal likeness in AI image generators (as a source for generic figures, not as someone specifically requested by the prompt) then Pierce Brosnan is likely near the front of the queue.
  • Uehreka 10mo ago
    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 suppose I don’t mind people using AI voices if they have a thick accent or are shy about their voice, but if I’m watching a video and clock the voice as AI (usually because the tone is professional but has no expression and then the speaker mispronounces a common word or acronym) it does make me start to wonder if the script is AI. There are a lot of people churning out tutorials that seem useful at first but turn out to have no content (“draw the rest of the owl” type stuff) because they asked AI to create a tutorial for something and didn’t edit or reprompt based on the output. The video essay world is also starting to get hit pretty hard, to the point that I’m less willing than ever to watch content unless I already know the creator’s work. [0] Shameless plug: https://youtu.be/PGiTkkMOfiw https://youtu.be/PGiTkkMOfiw
    • 6SixTy 10mo ago
      I remember a video where the only thing that stuck with me was that the guy was working on his English skills, and used an AI voice. That's not abnormal by any stretch of the imagination nor memorable, but how he edited the AI voice made it about as natural as a normal voice.
• jdkee 10mo ago
  ""The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor."" The models mostly say "mat".
• j45 10mo ago
  ChatGPT definitely writes like it's trainers (like Kenya). Kenya writes like the British taught before they left, and necessarily they didn't speak or write how they did.
• WalterBright 10mo ago
  The article was obviously generated by ChatGPT.
• alexeestec 10mo ago
  [dead]
• unsupp0rted 10mo ago
  I use semi-colons and em-dashes liberally too. But I tend to do a second pass to avoid redundancy. e.g. > [...] and there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and insidious slant to it Let's leave it at "insidious" and "in my opinion". Or drop "in my opinion" entirely, since it goes without saying. Just take one dip and end it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfprRZQxWps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfprRZQxWps)
• didibus 10mo ago
  Even more so, I think most of the curated data for the fine tuning phase is hand crafted from people from countries like Kenya if I recall.
• ChosenEnd 10mo ago
  > Human touch. Human touch. I’ll give you human touch, you— > TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES PLEASE STAND BY This actually made me pee myself out loud!
• zephyrthenoble 10mo ago
  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 that had em-dashes where I needed to subtract numbers and got errors, probably from younger me writing code in something other than an IDE. Em-dashes always seem very out of place to me. Some things I've learned/realized from this thread: 1. You can make an em-dash on Macs using -- or a keyboard shortcut 2. On Windows you can do something like Alt + 0151 which shows why I have never done it on purpose... (my first ever —) 3. Other people might have em-dashes on their keyboard? I still think it's a relatively good marker for ChatGPT-generated-text iff you are looking at text that probably doesn't apply to the above situations (give me more if you think of them), but I will keep in mind in the future that it's not a guarantee and that people do not have the exact same computer setup as me. Always good to remember that. I still do the double space after the end of a sentence after all.
  • ryeights 10mo ago
    Shift+Win/Option+-. And holding - gives you en/em dash on iOS and Android. Personally I love using em dashes so this whole AI thing is a real disaster for me.
  • Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
    Well, (some) people on HN definitely used them before ChatGPT. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderboard.html https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo... (And as #9 on the leaderboard, I feel the need to defend myself!)
    • wink 10mo ago
      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.
• cadamsdotcom 10mo ago
  It is a shame that the author has to change to keep up, and I feel their pain but .. it’s also the price of progress. We all do things to keep up when change comes for our work and skill sets. LLMs - like all tools - reduce redundant & repetitive work. In the case of LLMs it’s now easy to generate cookie cutter prose. Which raises the bar for truly saying something original. To say something original now, you must also put in the work to say it in an original way. In particular by cutting words and rephrasing even more aggressively, which saves your reader time and can take their thinking in new directions. Change is a constant, and good changes tend to gain mass adoption. Our ancestors survived because they adapted.
  • xandrius 10mo ago
    I think you say that so easily because it doesn't actually impact you. It'd be absolutely pissed off if I had to constantly watch out how I naturally write because otherwise people will shame me for thinking I had used AI.
    • cadamsdotcom 10mo ago
      Put a tpyo in — that’ll keep them guessing.
• ChosenEnd 10mo ago
  TIL Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda, not Kenya
• kouru225 10mo ago
  Actors have known this for decades: self-expression isn’t only a stage problem. It’s a life problem. Most people fail to express themselves on an hourly basis. Being good at expressing yourself is unnatural. Having clarity of what “yourself” even is is unnatural. The truth is that we’re all making comments, jokes, deciding what’s important and what not using old programming in our brains… programming that was given to us by our childhood and our education. Very few people can consistently have the luxury of being/ability to be creative with that old programming, and even those that can often have to plan ahead of time/rigidly control the environment in order to achieve a creative result. The exact same problem exists with writing. In fact, this problem seems to exist across all fields: science, for example, is filled with people who have never done a groundbreaking study, presented a new idea, or solved an unsolved problem. These people and their jobs are so common that the education system orients itself to teach to them rather than anyone else. In the same way, an education in literature focused on the more likely traits you’ll need to get a job: hitting deadlines, following the expected story structure, etc etc. Having confined ourselves to a tiny little box, can we really be surprised that we’re so easy to imitate?
• RIMR 10mo ago
  I have a degree in Journalism and now work in customer support. Occasionally, people accuse me of being an AI because of my writing style. Thankfully, no one I report to internally wants me to simplify my English to prevent LLM accusations. The work I do requires deliberate use of language.
• rdtsc 10mo ago
  > I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. We will all soon write and talk like ChatGPT. Kids growing up asking ChatGPT for homework help, people use it for therapy, to resumes, for CVs, for their imaginary romantic "friends", asking every day questions from the search engine they'll get some LLM response. After some time you'll find yourself chatting with your relative or a coworker over coffee and instead of hearing, "lol, Jim, that's bullshit" you'll hear something like "you're absolutely right, here let me show you a bulleted list why this is the case...". Even more scarier, you'll soon hear yourself say that to someone, as well.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • username223 10mo ago
    (star-eyes emoji) You are absolutely correct, Jim! (check-mark emoji) Add more emoji — humans love them! (red x emoji) Avoid negative words like "bullshit" and "scarier." (thumbs-up emoji) Before long you'll get past the human feedback of reinforcement learning! (smiley-face)
  • OhioMan2943 10mo ago
    Yep will kill myself if it gets to this stage
• Animats 10mo ago
  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 it is eliminated. - The relative pronoun 'that' is used about three times superfluously to the one time that it helps the sense. - Do not write 'this city' when you mean Chicago.
  • zahlman 10mo ago
    For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very" today.
    • Animats 10mo ago
      "Very unique" has its own problem.[1] It started appearing online around 2007, according to Google Trends. Sometimes in the description of NFTs. As an absolute adjective, "unique" should not be modified.[1] But now, "very unique" has joined the vocabulary of meaningless marketing phrases. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-unique-and-absolute-adjectives https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-unique-and-abso...
  • koakuma-chan 10mo ago
    Americans have no idea what evening is. It's always night for them.
    • esafak 10mo ago
      We work past the evening without noticing :)
• iainctduncan 10mo ago
  This essay is effin' brilliant, and beautifully written. I'm not Kenyan, but I was raised in a Canadian family of academics, where mastering thoughtful – but slightly archaic – writing was expected of me. I grew up surrounded by books that would now be training material, and who's prose would likely now be flagged as ChatGPT. Just another reason to hate all this shit.
• iLemming 10mo ago
  It could be also because, we foreigners learn to write English prose through our reading comprehension, not via our listening circuitry. The text probably feels "normal" to me when I read it back to myself, but there's no "proper" feedback loop from the native speakers - I have zero idea how my written shit sounds to a native ear when they try to read it. I still do agree though, it feels so friggin' annoying these days to have to deliberately butcher some words and make sure there's a typo somehwere in your text, just to convince people that tis indeed a crap straight from my "head to the paper", not a slop.
• ChuckMcM 10mo ago
  On social media I've been accused of being AI twice now :-). I suspect it is a vocabulary thing but still it is always amusing.
• gcanyon 10mo ago
  > You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. ‘Striding’ is ‘purposeful’; ‘trudging’ expresses ‘weariness’; ‘ambling’ implies ‘nonchalance’. Good verb choice reduces adverb dependence.
• behringer 10mo ago
  The tell isn't the emdash alone, it's the emdash character being used in place of a dash.
• userbinator 10mo ago
  If you are "average", you will sound like an AI, because an AI is the average of its training data. I don't think it's only Kenyans; I've seen the same distinctive "dialect" from many others.
  • creata 10mo ago
    The "voice" of chatbots comes from the stuff after the main training, which is very different to the average human voice. Even the main training would give you something like "average on the internet" voice, which is quite different to the average human voice.
• blitz_skull 10mo ago
  It actually really bothers me that somehow the long dash has become such a "giveaway" that now I have to consider how I write. I actually used the long dash a lot in my normal writing, but now that everyone considers it some sort of "giveaway," it's like a tic that I can't help but notice. It feels very natural to me. But if everyone and their mother considers it a "giveaway", I'd be a fool not to consider it. * sigh *
• ern 10mo ago
  I firmly believe that the heuristics that teachers/lecturers/instructors worldwide use to avoid engaging with reams of mundane text have been successfully by LLMs, and that's why they were so hostile to them initially. They have to actually read material, and not just use the structure as a proxy for ability.
• OG_BME 10mo ago
  Pangram, the best AI-detector I know of, flagged this as 100% AI generated. That's just sad. I really feel for this author.
• theLegionWithin 10mo ago
  ai slop
• Halan 10mo ago
  If you think about societies still in English colonial hangover and ChatGPT you might find that they have similar reasons to speak the way they speak. Both aim at using an English that is safe, controlled and policed for fear of negative evaluation.
• ropable 10mo ago
  This author writes in ESL better than 99% of the people I've worked with in an English-native country, including myself. It's fascinating to read just how much more emphasis good-quality written English seems to have in Kenya than it does here in Australia (at least in the public education system where I have experience). I suppose that it's understandable, given that it gates access to higher-level education opportunities. I don't really understand the aversion some people have to the use of LLMs to generate or refine written communication. It seems trigger the "that's cheating!" outrage impulse.
  • normie3000 10mo ago
    I don't think the author mentioned that English is their second language. English is an official language of Kenya, and there's a reasonable chance it's the author's home language.
• danielodievich 10mo ago
  In russian there is a saying that translates "try to prove that you are not a camel" which describes the impossibility of proving what is obviously not true to an unwilling and/or obtuse party. According to russian language wikipedia (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%B9,_%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE_%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%BD%D0%B5_%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%BB%D1%8E%D0%B4 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7...) the original tale go out to famous Persian poet Rumi from XII century, which just makes me tickled pink about how awesome language is.
• protocolture 10mo ago
  What gets me these days is sort of this structure. X isnt just Y its a <description> Z!
  • esafak 10mo ago
    It's even on computer-narrated Youtube videos now. It is infuriating.
• delifue 10mo ago
  I put some article content to Pangram. Pangram says it's AI https://www.pangram.com/history/282d7e59-ab4b-417c-9862-10d6331a9dfd/?ucc=OXMb3WyfwOn https://www.pangram.com/history/282d7e59-ab4b-417c-9862-10d6... The author's writing style is really similar to AI. AI already somehow passed Turing test. The AI detectors are not that trustworthy (but still useful).
• grayxu 10mo ago
  same for chinese students
• delis-thumbs-7e 10mo ago
  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.
• aryan1silver 10mo ago
  This is so true, and I say this myself coming from an Indian education system that my vocabulary has gone through an objective optimization function similar to that of these LLMs XD
• liyul 10mo ago
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• liyul 10mo ago
  [dead]
• joshstrange 10mo ago
  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.
• cryptonector 10mo ago
  I'm getting tired of the em-dash thing. If you use a mobile device like an iPhone then `--` turns into em-dash automatically, so all you have to do is like -short asides- and -- longer asides here -- see?
• Cpoll 10mo ago
  Ironically, the article is using hyphens (-) instead of em-dashes (—). An em-dash should be one em (the height of the font) wide.