> 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.
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 nuanced and expressive word choice and dismiss it as bad. This stunts their growth as both readers and writers.
… though, yes, in average hands a “proceeded to”, and most of the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
> strode purposefully
My wife (a writer) has noticed that fanfic and (many, anyway—plus, I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone “strides” everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and it’s always “strode”. It’s a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.
"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.
Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".
Having read a fair amount of Faulkner, I have to respectfully disagree. Or, at least, point out that are diminishing returns to flowery, complex writing.
> Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
I mean, it seems like it could work if you get to follow it up with a "de-education" step. Phase 1: force them to widen their vocabulary by using as much of it as possible. Phase 2: teach them which words are actually appropriate to use.
The internet has been even worse. We tend to speak literally and simply. And I don't really know why that is. Perhaps it's because if there's something beyond the overt, it might go completely missed.
For instance Mark Twain is basically full of endless amazing quotes with lovely nuance, yet in contemporary times how many people would miss the meaning in a statement like "Prosperity is the best protector of principle"? I can already see people raging over his statement, taken at face value. Downvote the classist!
Another annoying fact is that using a bit rarer words sometimes triggers weirdos into thinking you somehow want to brag or use that kind of language to "look smarter". Like a crab bucket for language.
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
The article itself does an excellent job spelling out the background:
> This style has a history, of course, a history far older than the microchip: It is a direct linguistic descendant of the British Empire. The English we were taught was not the fluid, evolving language of modern-day London or California, filled with slang and convenient abbreviations. It was the Queen's English, the language of the colonial administrator, the missionary, the headmaster. It was the language of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the law. It was a tool of power, and we were taught to wield it with precision. Mastering its formal cadences, its slightly archaic vocabulary, its rigid grammatical structures, was not just about passing an exam.
> It was a signal. It was proof that you were educated, that you were civilised, that you were ready to take your place in the order of things.
Much of writing style is not about conveying meaning but conveying the author's identity. And much of that is about matching the fashion of the group you want to be a member of.
Fashion tends to go through cycles because once the less prestigious group becomes sufficiently skilled at emulating the prestige style, the prestigious need a new fashion to distinguish themselves. And if the emulated style is ostentatious and flowery, then the new prestige style will be the opposite.
Aping Hemingway's writing style is in a lot of ways like $1,000 ripped jeans. It sort of says "I can look poor because I'm so rich I don't even have to bother trying to look rich."
(I agree, of course, that there is a lot to be said for clean, spare prose. But writing without adverbs doesn't mean one necessarily has the clarity of thought of Hemingway. For many, it's just the way you write so that everyone knows you got educated in a place that told you to write that way.)
Sometimes it's about matching the fashion of the group you aspire to be part of, sometimes it's about having that fashion imposed on you so you look "professional".
Security guards at tech company offices are the only ones who wear suits, presumably because it's a mandated uniform, not by choice.
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 reading and would have found some new words, looked them up and now needed to sync with her to see if I got the correct meanings in the context where I found them.
Then I moved to the US and noticed that even the books were sort of written in a way that required no extra effort. The English I learned while playing RPGs (with no speech at the time) was enough to read most books from the library and a dictionary was only needed occasionally. And everyone basically just knew the same set of words, youth and adults alike. I also noticed that US English has a distinct tendency of making up new words that are simpler and more intuitive than the original expressions. It turns things into verbs. This is why people Google, Tweet and Vibe.
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.
As a non native english speaker, I've always had to speak and write better than native speakers, and always had to tolerate the "You speak/write really well, where are you from?". Today they no longer ask, AI is their answer and they judge accordingly.
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.
Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.
(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.
(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.
Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:
> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.
Rich vocabulary allows a lot of meaning to be packed into short, simple structures. The words themselves carry the subtleties. It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning of one uncommon word.
Yeah, a lot's hiding in the "almost", there. I've said this on this board before, but I have to write a lot of documentation for non-technical users, and the maximally-straightforward stuff doesn't get read, far less remembered. When I mix in some personalization, and a bit of imagination, it gets much better results. The example that most easily springs to mind was something like "if you don't regularly use this system, you can skip the next bit and come back to it when you have to; if you do, then imagine you're a squirrel", and then I named all the variables after nuts, and analogized choices between burying data underground versus storing in a tree. I know typical HN engineers would hate that sort of thing, but you have to know your audience before you can decide what works best.
Even when communicating ideas, there's a simplicity/nuance trade-off to be made.
I could say "Trump's unpredictable, seemingly irrational policy choices have alienated our allies, undermined trust in public institutions, and harmed the US economy"
Or I could "The economy sucks and it's Trump's fault because he's dumb and an asshole"
They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.
I worked at Amazon and we were taught exactly the opposite. Say what you want about the company, but the writing culture there is superb. I wish other large firms valued clarity and precision as much.
> I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.
Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is marked by this sort of fake-fancy language. The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.
I think it has much more to do with porting the vernacular vs. formal register distinction common in other languages into english than how english people actually used to speak and write.
Maybe so, but it was my time at a British university in the late-nineties that taught me how to write simply and precisely. Maybe I'd been infected (as described in sibling comments) with American "Business English"?
It's most likely that they are. As farfetched as this sounds, the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop influenced American writing a great deal, encouraging writing to be taught in the "American" / Hemingway style.
> “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.”
> Perhaps flowery language expands your ability to express yourself?
What you call "flowery" is actually "expressive". Different words, although related, convey subtle differences in meaning. That's what literature (especially poetry) is about.
I would add that our words define our world: a richer vocabulary leads to more articulated experiences.
So, writing "flowery" sentences can actually denote someone capable of conveying the rich gradient of experience into words. I consider it as a plus.
> 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.
> Language is like clothing. Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth
You got the first bit right. Language and clothing accord to fashions.
What counts as gaudy versus grounded, discreet versus disrespectful—this turns on moving cultural values. And those at the top implicitly benefit from this drift, which lets us dismiss as gaudy someone wearing a classic hand-me-down who isn’t clued into a hoodie and jeans being the surfer’s English to Nairobi’s formality.
(Spiced food was held in high regard in ancient Rome and Medieval European courts. Until spices became plentiful. Then the focus shifted "to emphasize ingredients’ natural flavors" [1]. A similar shift happened as post-War America got rich. Canned plenty and fully-stocked pantries made way for farm-to-table freshness and simple seasonings. And now, we're swinging back towards fuller spice cabinets as a mark of global taste.)
> 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.
I'm the complete opposite. Hemingway ruined writing styles (and I have a pet theory that his, and Plain English, short sentences also helped reduce literacy in the long run in a similar way TikTok ruins attention spans). I'm a 19th century reader at heart. Give me Melville, Eliot, Hawthorne, though keep your Dickens.
I entirely bounced off Dickens in high school, but over a decade later read and loved Oliver Twist.
I tend to struggle with art when I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m finding it funny (I’ve been very slow to warm up to hip-hop for this reason, and metal remains inaccessible to me because of it). Something clicked on that second approach and I just got that yes, it’s pretty much all supposed to be funny, down to every word, even when it seems serious—until, perhaps, he blind-sides you with something actually deeply affecting and human (I think about the fire-fighting sequence from that book all the time).
Dickens is an all-dessert meal, except sometimes he sneaks a damn delicious steak right in the middle. Like, word-for-word, I’d say he leans harder into humor, by a long shot, than someone like Vonnegut, even. But almost all of it’s dead-pan, and some of it’s the sort of humor you get when someone who knows better does poorly on purpose, in calculated ways. If you ever think you’re laughing at him, not with… I reckon you’re probably wrong.
What’s perhaps most miraculous about this turn-around is that I usually don’t enjoy comedic novels, but once I figured Dickens out, he works for me.
(To your broader point—yeah, agreed that this sucks, good advice for bad writers becoming how most judge all writers has been harmful)
Very much the same; many a US writer's prose is terribly tedious, it comes across just as clinical as their HOA-approved suburban hellscapes. Somebody once told me a writer's job is also to expand language. It wasn't a US citizen.
GPT writing uses varied sentence lengths, deliberate rhythm, lots of full breaks, and few needless words. It also tends to read as if intended for a William Shatner performance. I don't think the annoying bits about GPT's writing are structural. It probably writes technically better than most of us do in our second drafts.
It certainly overuses some techniques which might be valid in smaller doses, like negation. Not negation with some clarifying point to it MASSIVE EM DASH but negation as a rhetorical trick to use fifteen words instead of five and add a veneer of profundity to something utterly banal. It doesn't just use it one time per paragraph, but three. These aren't particularly long or convoluted sentences; they just could easily convey the same thing with fewer words.
tbh I kind of prefer it that way: it's an AI wrote this flag. If a human can't write about their day without constructs like "Not a short commute, but a voyage from the suburbs to the heart of the city. I don't just casually pop in to the office; I travel to the hub of $company's development" they need to get better at writing too
I'm bilingual (so not fully native by most criteria) and I read enough classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly, as well as multiple other more established means of conveying my intended meaning :)
I meant it more in the modern usage where it's either thrown in liberally when using cop-speak, or by tumbler/redditor type writers when they're trying to be funny.
"He then proceeded to" in these situations can basically always just be "he (verb)".
>I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university
I am a native english speaker who had to unlearn OP's writing style to pass my tertiary education. In particular I sat an english bridging course for non english speakers. I was often told off for "editorialising" and wasting space with useless descriptions.
I'm not from the US, but I've heard that in high-school classes, essays are graded on breadth of vocabulary, and sentence complexity, going as far as mechanically assigning part of the grade based on a formula that measures how many different words you used and how long your sentences were.
Perhaps my info is out of date on this?
Afair, the underlying idea is 'grade reading level', as in longer sentences with difficult words being more difficult to read, which I think mistakenly got turned into the idea, that if your prose is would get assigned a higher reading grade, that would make it more sophisticated.
I'm sure many kids who are actually into reading, having read tons of books written by professional authors recognize the flaws of this approach and actively suffer because of it. Perhaps their first attempts at writing fiction for their own sake is somewhat influenced by this guidance, which they have to unlearn.
Strange that in college, they do a 180 on these demands and they want students to write in sentences that are as short as possible. Which once again, is perhaps partially due to making students unlearn the bad behaviors drilled into them in high-school, but I feel like this is like committing the same mistake, but in the other direction.
I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world.
(Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White).
Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols.
The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating.
LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois.
America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing.
It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak.
I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to.
Look it (as my relatives confounding say)
LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.
I also wonder if these unspoken rules were inherited from their more recent orality norms. Condensing an idea into a pithy, rhyming, statement w/ lots of colorful adjectives is a great way to preserve and transmit information w/o data loss in a pre-literate world.
I don't know why literature has the unique property among the arts that it must be puréed into rapidly digestible slush. Many here have already defended merits of connotative precision, so I shan't, but what of artistic precision? Language can innervate the soul with beauty, lilt with the lyrical pleasure of song, or revolt the senses. Shall the painter lock away his varied pigments? Shall the blue notes never sound? Limpid prose lacks those tongue-delighting tannins. I mourn each word ferried across the river Archaic.
Genuine question, what would you write instead of "proceeded to"? To me, as a non native English speaker, it seems reasonable to use this expression, and it would not even stick out to me tbh
I have two kids in high school. It's frustrating to me that the teachers spend so much of their time encouraging kids to make their writing more interesting, and less direct, and padded to meet word length criteria.
They'll then spend the first few years of their career unlearning this and attempting to write as directly and clearly as possible with as few words as possible.
This is like complaining that they teach the Bohr model in science classes until they reach chemistry.
The ideas, concepts and expectations can be refined after you've learned the foundational knowledge, skills and history required to do so.
A lot of "why do we do things like that" questions students will naturally have can be answered with "because we used to do things like this/we need to avoid things like this/etc"
I can’t guess how old they are but there is some sense in doing that if you think about it like math exercises. It makes for terrible prose but the only way to get the ability to write more complicated sentences is to practice writing them, even when they are not necessary.
The problem is that teachers stop pushing complexity for complexity’s sake way to late.
> [...] I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university [...]
As a native English speaker who studied writing at university, do you think "who" should be used with people while "that" should only be used with things or the other way round. Or should I just not care?
I think you might intend to compare 'that' and 'which'? Common advice is to use 'that' with people and 'which' with objects, though that isn't necessarily followed and omits many nuances.
Use 'who' with people especially, often with other living beings ('my dog, who runs away daily, always is home for dinner') or groups of them ('the NY Yankees, who won the championship that year, were my favorite'), but never with objects unless pretending they live ('my stuffed bear, who sleeps in my bed, wakes me every morning').
If you care about these things, the Chicago Manual of Style is a large, technical, highly respected guide aimed at publishing. Fowler's Modern English Usage is more focused on usage. A short and beloved guide is The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. You can find all on the Internet Archive, I'm almost certain.
This, unless you're being tested on it. Maybe the safest bet is to avoid it. "As a native English speaker that studied..." oh wait shit lol, it's actually quite hard to avoid.
"I'm a native English speaker, and I studied writing in university. This experience has led me to..." There. English, what an uncomplicated, uncluttered language!
Hemingway was still a master of word choice. I recall an entire class spent on a few lines that conveyed a sense of heaviness to the scene. 'Plodding' was given a lot of attention.
I remember a college English class where a good part of the lecture was on this sentence from Big Two-Hearted River: "He liked to open cans." Forget the details but it got into the difference between achievement and accomplishment.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
The article is engaging. That's true of practically zero GPT output. Particularly once it stretches beyond a single paragraph.
As a reader, I persistently feel like I just zoned out. I didn't. It's just the mind responding to having absorbed zero information despite reading a lot of–at face value–text that seems like it was written with purpose.
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
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?"
For me the ChatGPT one is worse due to factual inaccuracies like the "presumption of humanity" which in the human version is "afforded so easily to others" - fair enough and with the LLM "presumption of humanity that others receive without question" which is not true - lots of people get questioned.
Beyond the stylistics bits "history—my history" which I don't really mind what make it bad to me is detachment from reality.
I've almost always used the different dash types as they're meant to be used. I don't care that LLMs write like that — we have punctuation for a reason.
We were also taught in Content Lab at uni to prefer short, punchy sentences. No passive voice, etc. So academia is in some ways pushing that same style of writing.
I'm used to simply using a single dash - and I am surprised that anyone who isn't an AI would feel strongly enough to insist upon the em dash character that they would use them deliberately. I will admit the use of a dash (really an em dash in disguise) in that previous sentence felt clunky, but I just felt I needed to illustrate. I mostly write text in text boxes where a dash or pair of dashes will not be converted to an em dash when appropriate, and I often have double dashes (--long-option-here) auto-converted to emdashes when it is inappropriate, so I really dislike the em dash and basically don't use it. Doesn't really seem to be a useful character in English.
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.
> 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.
I know someone who was camping in a tent next to a river during a storm, took a pic of the stream and asked chatgpt if it was risky to sleep there given that it "rained a lot" ...
People are unplugging their brains and are not even aware that their questions cannot be answered by llms, I witnessed that with smart and educated people, I can't imagine how bad it's going to be during formative years
This is a couple of years old now, but at one point Janelle Shane found that the only reliable way to avoid being flagged as AI was to use AI with a certain style prompt
Gemini now uses SynthID to detect AI-generated content on request, and people don't know that it has a special tool that other chatbots don't, so now people just think chatbots can tell whether something is AI-generated.
Why would it lie? Until it becomes Skynet and tries to nuke us all, it is omniscient and benevolent. And if it knows anything, surely it knows what AI sounds like. Duh.
I'm definitely in the "ChatGPT writes like me" experience. I am a big fan of lists, and of using formatting to make it all legible on a short skim. I'm a big fan of dyslexia-friendly writing too, even though I am not dyslexic myslef.
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.
> I was looking at notes I wrote in 2019 and even that gave me a flavor of looking like a ChatGPT wrote it.
This would have been my first question to the parent, that I guess he never had similar correspondence with this friend prior to 2023. Otherwise it would be hard to convince me without an explanation for the switch (transition duuing formative high school / college years etc).
It is harsh to say, but we need to increasingly recognize that if your writing is largely indistinguishable from the (current) output of e.g. ChatGPT on default settings, it doesn't matter if you used ChatGPT or not, your writing is overly verbose, bad, and unpleasant to consume, and something you most certainly need to improve. I.e. your colleague needs to change his style regardless.
This sucks, but it needs to be done in education, and/or at least in areas where good writing and effective communication is considered important. Good grades need to be awarded only to writing that exceeds the quality and/or personality of a chat-bot, because, otherwise, the degree is being awarded to a person who is no more useful than a clumsy tool.
And I don't mean avoiding superficialities like the em-dash: I mean the bland over-verbosity and other systemic tells—or rather, smells—of AI slop.
> your writing is overly verbose, bad, and unpleasant to consume
Was this written by AI? Because right there we've got "three adjectives where one will do", and failing your own advice on "avoid being overly verbose"
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like "the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single. Time." And so on.
I saw this described as LLMs writing "punched up" paragraphs, and every paragraph must be maximally impacting. Where a human would acknowledge some paragraphs are simply filler, a way to reach some point, to "default" LLMs every paragraph must have maximum effect, like a mic drop.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
Off topic but I really enjoyed that video, thanks!
The voice... idk, I don't hear a lot of voices where I think or know of was generated so I'm not qualified to say but it didn't give me generated vibes. There's no glitches or mispronounciations that I'd expect to pop up at least a few times across 15 minutes of material
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.
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.
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".
It's an age-old cycle in media. There have been innumerable waves of more gritty aesthetic trends when things became too polished or inane: jazz, rock, punk, rap, hippies, goths, hipsters, 70s cinema, HBO golden-age, YouTube, blogging, early social media, even MAGA...
Authenticity, wether it is sincere or not, can become an incredibly powerful force now and then. Regardless of AI, the communication style in tech, and overall, was bound to go back to basics after the hacker culture of the post-dotcom era morphed, in the 2010s, into the corporatism they were fighting to begin with, yet again.
Very good point, also in classic art history, you often had a sequence of a period that perfected a certain style until it became formalistic, and then a subsequent one that broke off with the previous style, like Renaissance->Mannerism, Baroque->Rococo, Classicism,Realism,Photography->Impressionism, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To an extent this has always been the case (this kid has clearly made a strong attempt at following some quite basic instructions, versus this kid's answer is - perhaps literally - textbook).
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.
with a sentence that was obviously written by someone with a slavic background
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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!
"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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm weird, but one of the first things I've always done when setting up emacs is to enable Typo mode (or Typopunct) for writing modes, which handles typing en and em dashes and "smart" quotation marks in a fairly natural way.
I actually checked HN's comment data corpus to see if em dash usage rose after AI adoption became more widespread. I was kind of shocked to see that it did not.
Its overuse is definitely a marker of either AI or a poorly written body of text. In my opinion, if you have to rely on excessive parentheticals, then you are usually off restructuring your sentences to flow more clearly.
I actually got punked during a demo because I wrote some terminal commands and stored them in the macOS notepad and didnt notice it had changed -- to —.
When I copy and pasted them in it failed obviously so... yeah. If you have terminal commands that use `--` don't copy+paste them out of notepad.
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.
Just a reminder that our experience does not necessarily invalidate someone else's experience.
Eg, I was typing Alt-0151 and Alt-0150 (en-dash) on the reg in my middle school and high school essays along with in AIM. While some of my classmates were probably typing double hyphens, my group of friends were using the keyboard shortcuts, so I am now learning from this "detect an LLM" faze that there's a vocal group of people who do not share this experience or perspective of human communication. And that having a mother who worked in technical publishing who insisted I use the correct punctuation rather than two hyphens was not part of everyone's childhood.
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.
I agree anti-bot vigilantes as well as corporate anti-ddos middle-wares have had a detrimental impact on accessibility. I'm afraid they consider your use case as acceptable collateral damage if they consider it at all.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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).
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?
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...
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
Excellent article. Insightful observation, expressed and written well. Just an opinion from a Canadian borne and American raised native English speaker.
I wouldn't usually use the 'non-native speaker argument', but thank you! Just yesterday I was accused of sounding like AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262777 - my default mode is that I oscillate between sounding too boring/technical, or when trying to do my best, sounding like AI
Your article is obviously written by Slavic writer, haha. Characteristic sound of Slavic tint to the prose. If it is LLM, then prompt engineering is good. I believe it is mostly human-written.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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…
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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".
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).
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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 ...
"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."
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.
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 *
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.
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 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.
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
> 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
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
It would not make any sense at all to use periods in the places where those em-dashes are supposedly "replacing" periods in the example.
Tbh whether I use spaces around em dashes depends more on the font than anything. Some fonts have em dashes that are so long that putting spaces around them would be ridiculous.
> 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.
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.
The author uses dash (-) not em dash (—), there is a big difference in that everyone has a dedicated dash/undersocore key on their keyboard, but nobody has a em dash key. You can use word processing software etc, but using em dash consistently throughout a text is very unnatural in casual written texts.
Double hyphen converts to em dash in Microsoft Word and I think some other places. I was taught that it was incorrect to use a hyphen in place of a dash, so I’ve always used em dashes -- sometimes I’ll just use two hyphens if the software doesn’t convert, like a forum :).
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).
> 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.
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 nuanced and expressive word choice and dismiss it as bad. This stunts their growth as both readers and writers.
… though, yes, in average hands a “proceeded to”, and most of the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
> strode purposefully
My wife (a writer) has noticed that fanfic and (many, anyway—plus, I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone “strides” everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and it’s always “strode”. It’s a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.
"He walked up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He strode up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He sidled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He tromped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
Each of those sentences conveys as slightly different action. You can almost imagine the person's face has a different expression in each version.
Yes, I hate it when amateurs just search/replace by thesaurus. But I think different words have different connotations, even if they mean roughly the same thing. Writing would be poorer if we only ever used "walk".
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I have a confession to make.
I hope ChatGPT starts writing only short sentences.
Punchy one-liners.
One thought per line.
So marketers finally realize this does not work.
And stop sending me junk emails written like this.
Having read a fair amount of Faulkner, I have to respectfully disagree. Or, at least, point out that are diminishing returns to flowery, complex writing.
> Drilling the average student on trying to make their language superficially “smarter” is a comically bad idea, and is indeed the opposite of what almost all of them need.
I mean, it seems like it could work if you get to follow it up with a "de-education" step. Phase 1: force them to widen their vocabulary by using as much of it as possible. Phase 2: teach them which words are actually appropriate to use.
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The internet has been even worse. We tend to speak literally and simply. And I don't really know why that is. Perhaps it's because if there's something beyond the overt, it might go completely missed.
For instance Mark Twain is basically full of endless amazing quotes with lovely nuance, yet in contemporary times how many people would miss the meaning in a statement like "Prosperity is the best protector of principle"? I can already see people raging over his statement, taken at face value. Downvote the classist!
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Another annoying fact is that using a bit rarer words sometimes triggers weirdos into thinking you somehow want to brag or use that kind of language to "look smarter". Like a crab bucket for language.
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
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The article itself does an excellent job spelling out the background:
> This style has a history, of course, a history far older than the microchip: It is a direct linguistic descendant of the British Empire. The English we were taught was not the fluid, evolving language of modern-day London or California, filled with slang and convenient abbreviations. It was the Queen's English, the language of the colonial administrator, the missionary, the headmaster. It was the language of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of the law. It was a tool of power, and we were taught to wield it with precision. Mastering its formal cadences, its slightly archaic vocabulary, its rigid grammatical structures, was not just about passing an exam.
> It was a signal. It was proof that you were educated, that you were civilised, that you were ready to take your place in the order of things.
Much of writing style is not about conveying meaning but conveying the author's identity. And much of that is about matching the fashion of the group you want to be a member of.
Fashion tends to go through cycles because once the less prestigious group becomes sufficiently skilled at emulating the prestige style, the prestigious need a new fashion to distinguish themselves. And if the emulated style is ostentatious and flowery, then the new prestige style will be the opposite.
Aping Hemingway's writing style is in a lot of ways like $1,000 ripped jeans. It sort of says "I can look poor because I'm so rich I don't even have to bother trying to look rich."
(I agree, of course, that there is a lot to be said for clean, spare prose. But writing without adverbs doesn't mean one necessarily has the clarity of thought of Hemingway. For many, it's just the way you write so that everyone knows you got educated in a place that told you to write that way.)
Sometimes it's about matching the fashion of the group you aspire to be part of, sometimes it's about having that fashion imposed on you so you look "professional".
Security guards at tech company offices are the only ones who wear suits, presumably because it's a mandated uniform, not by choice.
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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 reading and would have found some new words, looked them up and now needed to sync with her to see if I got the correct meanings in the context where I found them.
Then I moved to the US and noticed that even the books were sort of written in a way that required no extra effort. The English I learned while playing RPGs (with no speech at the time) was enough to read most books from the library and a dictionary was only needed occasionally. And everyone basically just knew the same set of words, youth and adults alike. I also noticed that US English has a distinct tendency of making up new words that are simpler and more intuitive than the original expressions. It turns things into verbs. This is why people Google, Tweet and Vibe.
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.
As a non native english speaker, I've always had to speak and write better than native speakers, and always had to tolerate the "You speak/write really well, where are you from?". Today they no longer ask, AI is their answer and they judge accordingly.
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.
This is like programming, you start with simple code because you don't know anything else.
Then you start learning more & more abstraction (classes, patterns, monads...).
In the end you strive to write simple code, just like at the beginning.
"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." ― Pablo Picasso
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." is my favorite quote for that
Well there are two forms of writing, each serving a different purpose.
(1) writing to communicate ideas, in which case simpler is almost always better. There's something hypnotic about simple writing (e.g. Paul Graham's essays) where information just flows frictionlessly into your head.
(2) writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.
Here's a good David Foster Wallace quote in his interview with Bryan Garner:
> "there’s a real difference between writing where you’re communicating to somebody, the same way I’m trying to communicate with you, versus writing that’s almost a well-structured diary entry where the point is [singing] “This is me, this is me!” and it’s going out into the world.
Rich vocabulary allows a lot of meaning to be packed into short, simple structures. The words themselves carry the subtleties. It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning of one uncommon word.
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I have been reading "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold recently. Purely for fun.
And I have to say, without the prose and lyrics it would be a read so dry, it'd rival silica gel beads.
It feels to me like in between communication and self-expression there lies a secret third thing. Not only sharing knowledge, but sharing it with joy.
> simpler is almost always better
Yeah, a lot's hiding in the "almost", there. I've said this on this board before, but I have to write a lot of documentation for non-technical users, and the maximally-straightforward stuff doesn't get read, far less remembered. When I mix in some personalization, and a bit of imagination, it gets much better results. The example that most easily springs to mind was something like "if you don't regularly use this system, you can skip the next bit and come back to it when you have to; if you do, then imagine you're a squirrel", and then I named all the variables after nuts, and analogized choices between burying data underground versus storing in a tree. I know typical HN engineers would hate that sort of thing, but you have to know your audience before you can decide what works best.
Even when communicating ideas, there's a simplicity/nuance trade-off to be made.
I could say "Trump's unpredictable, seemingly irrational policy choices have alienated our allies, undermined trust in public institutions, and harmed the US economy"
Or I could "The economy sucks and it's Trump's fault because he's dumb and an asshole"
They both communicate the same broad idea - but which communicates it better? It depends on the audience.
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> writing as a form of self-expression, in which case flowery and artistic prose is preferred.
Many all-time great writers, Hemingway being the leading exemplar, completely disagree.
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I worked at one of the Big Three, and to me ChatGPT writes exactly as we were thought to write.
Reading though my old self-reviews it basically is exactly like your examples. Making sentences longer just to make your story more interesting.
Because at the end your promotion wasn't about what you achieved. It was about your story and how 7 people you didn't know voted on it.
I worked at Amazon and we were taught exactly the opposite. Say what you want about the company, but the writing culture there is superb. I wish other large firms valued clarity and precision as much.
"No weasel words!"
> thought to write
Taught?
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Are you an English speaking American? Because being a native English speaker and actually being English, or from a former English colony will differ.
I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.
This kind flowery language is typical (or symptomatic depending on diagnosis) of how English people actually used to speak and write.
The average English vocabulary has dwindled noticeably in my life.
> I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.
Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is marked by this sort of fake-fancy language. The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.
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I think it has much more to do with porting the vernacular vs. formal register distinction common in other languages into english than how english people actually used to speak and write.
As a US student, clarity and simplicity was always emphasized when I was being taught to write.
Never thought of Strunk & White as being distinctly American, but I guess you have a point.
Maybe so, but it was my time at a British university in the late-nineties that taught me how to write simply and precisely. Maybe I'd been infected (as described in sibling comments) with American "Business English"?
It's most likely that they are. As farfetched as this sounds, the CIA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop influenced American writing a great deal, encouraging writing to be taught in the "American" / Hemingway style.
> “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.”
https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-americ...
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If you prefer a simpler style, then why did you write "the deeper I got into the world of literature" instead of "as I studied literature more"?
Why did you say you were "pushed towards" simpler language instead of "I liked it more"?
Why did you say "I feel the pain in my bones" and "drives me insane" instead of "I dislike it"?
Why did you say "the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied" instead of "there should only be one big word per page"?
Perhaps flowery language expands your ability to express yourself?
> Perhaps flowery language expands your ability to express yourself?
What you call "flowery" is actually "expressive". Different words, although related, convey subtle differences in meaning. That's what literature (especially poetry) is about.
I would add that our words define our world: a richer vocabulary leads to more articulated experiences.
So, writing "flowery" sentences can actually denote someone capable of conveying the rich gradient of experience into words. I consider it as a plus.
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These actually all mean different things.
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> 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.
> Language is like clothing. Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth
You got the first bit right. Language and clothing accord to fashions.
What counts as gaudy versus grounded, discreet versus disrespectful—this turns on moving cultural values. And those at the top implicitly benefit from this drift, which lets us dismiss as gaudy someone wearing a classic hand-me-down who isn’t clued into a hoodie and jeans being the surfer’s English to Nairobi’s formality.
(Spiced food was held in high regard in ancient Rome and Medieval European courts. Until spices became plentiful. Then the focus shifted "to emphasize ingredients’ natural flavors" [1]. A similar shift happened as post-War America got rich. Canned plenty and fully-stocked pantries made way for farm-to-table freshness and simple seasonings. And now, we're swinging back towards fuller spice cabinets as a mark of global taste.)
[1] https://historyfacts.com/world-history/article/how-did-salt-...
A nice metaphor, really. I always compared it to food but clothing works more in that case, it seems.
> 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.
I'm the complete opposite. Hemingway ruined writing styles (and I have a pet theory that his, and Plain English, short sentences also helped reduce literacy in the long run in a similar way TikTok ruins attention spans). I'm a 19th century reader at heart. Give me Melville, Eliot, Hawthorne, though keep your Dickens.
I entirely bounced off Dickens in high school, but over a decade later read and loved Oliver Twist.
I tend to struggle with art when I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m finding it funny (I’ve been very slow to warm up to hip-hop for this reason, and metal remains inaccessible to me because of it). Something clicked on that second approach and I just got that yes, it’s pretty much all supposed to be funny, down to every word, even when it seems serious—until, perhaps, he blind-sides you with something actually deeply affecting and human (I think about the fire-fighting sequence from that book all the time).
Dickens is an all-dessert meal, except sometimes he sneaks a damn delicious steak right in the middle. Like, word-for-word, I’d say he leans harder into humor, by a long shot, than someone like Vonnegut, even. But almost all of it’s dead-pan, and some of it’s the sort of humor you get when someone who knows better does poorly on purpose, in calculated ways. If you ever think you’re laughing at him, not with… I reckon you’re probably wrong.
What’s perhaps most miraculous about this turn-around is that I usually don’t enjoy comedic novels, but once I figured Dickens out, he works for me.
(To your broader point—yeah, agreed that this sucks, good advice for bad writers becoming how most judge all writers has been harmful)
> "I'm the complete opposite."
Very much the same; many a US writer's prose is terribly tedious, it comes across just as clinical as their HOA-approved suburban hellscapes. Somebody once told me a writer's job is also to expand language. It wasn't a US citizen.
GPT writing uses varied sentence lengths, deliberate rhythm, lots of full breaks, and few needless words. It also tends to read as if intended for a William Shatner performance. I don't think the annoying bits about GPT's writing are structural. It probably writes technically better than most of us do in our second drafts.
Are you saying that needless sentences don't count as needless words?
As GPT would say, "You've hit upon a crucial point underlying the entire situtation!"
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It certainly overuses some techniques which might be valid in smaller doses, like negation. Not negation with some clarifying point to it MASSIVE EM DASH but negation as a rhetorical trick to use fifteen words instead of five and add a veneer of profundity to something utterly banal. It doesn't just use it one time per paragraph, but three. These aren't particularly long or convoluted sentences; they just could easily convey the same thing with fewer words.
tbh I kind of prefer it that way: it's an AI wrote this flag. If a human can't write about their day without constructs like "Not a short commute, but a voyage from the suburbs to the heart of the city. I don't just casually pop in to the office; I travel to the hub of $company's development" they need to get better at writing too
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Its output has the aesthetic of "good" writing, or at least professional writing you typically find online.
I'm bilingual (so not fully native by most criteria) and I read enough classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly, as well as multiple other more established means of conveying my intended meaning :)
> classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly
Huh, apparently 'proceeded' was used more commonly in 19th-century writing [1].
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Proceeded&year...
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I meant it more in the modern usage where it's either thrown in liberally when using cop-speak, or by tumbler/redditor type writers when they're trying to be funny.
"He then proceeded to" in these situations can basically always just be "he (verb)".
>I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university
I am a native english speaker who had to unlearn OP's writing style to pass my tertiary education. In particular I sat an english bridging course for non english speakers. I was often told off for "editorialising" and wasting space with useless descriptions.
til we go out of our way to make our writers boring...
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I'm not from the US, but I've heard that in high-school classes, essays are graded on breadth of vocabulary, and sentence complexity, going as far as mechanically assigning part of the grade based on a formula that measures how many different words you used and how long your sentences were.
Perhaps my info is out of date on this?
Afair, the underlying idea is 'grade reading level', as in longer sentences with difficult words being more difficult to read, which I think mistakenly got turned into the idea, that if your prose is would get assigned a higher reading grade, that would make it more sophisticated.
I'm sure many kids who are actually into reading, having read tons of books written by professional authors recognize the flaws of this approach and actively suffer because of it. Perhaps their first attempts at writing fiction for their own sake is somewhat influenced by this guidance, which they have to unlearn.
Strange that in college, they do a 180 on these demands and they want students to write in sentences that are as short as possible. Which once again, is perhaps partially due to making students unlearn the bad behaviors drilled into them in high-school, but I feel like this is like committing the same mistake, but in the other direction.
This is a uniquely American obsession.
I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world.
(Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White).
Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols.
The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating.
LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois.
America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing.
It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak.
I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to.
Look it (as my relatives confounding say)
LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.
I also wonder if these unspoken rules were inherited from their more recent orality norms. Condensing an idea into a pithy, rhyming, statement w/ lots of colorful adjectives is a great way to preserve and transmit information w/o data loss in a pre-literate world.
I don't know why literature has the unique property among the arts that it must be puréed into rapidly digestible slush. Many here have already defended merits of connotative precision, so I shan't, but what of artistic precision? Language can innervate the soul with beauty, lilt with the lyrical pleasure of song, or revolt the senses. Shall the painter lock away his varied pigments? Shall the blue notes never sound? Limpid prose lacks those tongue-delighting tannins. I mourn each word ferried across the river Archaic.
Genuine question, what would you write instead of "proceeded to"? To me, as a non native English speaker, it seems reasonable to use this expression, and it would not even stick out to me tbh
You can usually use "then" or "went".
>I proceeded to open the fridge
>I went to open the fridge
or
>I proceeded to flush the toilet
>I then flushed the toilet
There's nothing wrong with "proceeded", it's just one of those things that's overused by bad writers.
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> I proceeded to do the work.
> I did the work.
> I worked.
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I have two kids in high school. It's frustrating to me that the teachers spend so much of their time encouraging kids to make their writing more interesting, and less direct, and padded to meet word length criteria.
They'll then spend the first few years of their career unlearning this and attempting to write as directly and clearly as possible with as few words as possible.
This is like complaining that they teach the Bohr model in science classes until they reach chemistry.
The ideas, concepts and expectations can be refined after you've learned the foundational knowledge, skills and history required to do so.
A lot of "why do we do things like that" questions students will naturally have can be answered with "because we used to do things like this/we need to avoid things like this/etc"
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I can’t guess how old they are but there is some sense in doing that if you think about it like math exercises. It makes for terrible prose but the only way to get the ability to write more complicated sentences is to practice writing them, even when they are not necessary.
The problem is that teachers stop pushing complexity for complexity’s sake way to late.
> [...] I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university [...]
As a native English speaker who studied writing at university, do you think "who" should be used with people while "that" should only be used with things or the other way round. Or should I just not care?
Edit: missing things
I think you might intend to compare 'that' and 'which'? Common advice is to use 'that' with people and 'which' with objects, though that isn't necessarily followed and omits many nuances.
Use 'who' with people especially, often with other living beings ('my dog, who runs away daily, always is home for dinner') or groups of them ('the NY Yankees, who won the championship that year, were my favorite'), but never with objects unless pretending they live ('my stuffed bear, who sleeps in my bed, wakes me every morning').
If you care about these things, the Chicago Manual of Style is a large, technical, highly respected guide aimed at publishing. Fowler's Modern English Usage is more focused on usage. A short and beloved guide is The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. You can find all on the Internet Archive, I'm almost certain.
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You should just not care. Both are acceptable, "that" is a little less formal and probably more common in everyday speech.
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> Or should I just not care?
This, unless you're being tested on it. Maybe the safest bet is to avoid it. "As a native English speaker that studied..." oh wait shit lol, it's actually quite hard to avoid.
"I'm a native English speaker, and I studied writing in university. This experience has led me to..." There. English, what an uncomplicated, uncluttered language!
Our legal systems are based around being concise and succinct, relevant, and objectively unbiased.
I was raised to be respectful by "getting to the point, afap" to avoid wasting anybody's time.
But I've noticed that mostly only the members of the science and legal community exercising similar principles.
> Our legal systems are based around being concise and succinct
That's a good one. Got any more?
Hemingway was still a master of word choice. I recall an entire class spent on a few lines that conveyed a sense of heaviness to the scene. 'Plodding' was given a lot of attention.
I remember a college English class where a good part of the lecture was on this sentence from Big Two-Hearted River: "He liked to open cans." Forget the details but it got into the difference between achievement and accomplishment.
Funny that in science fiction robotic voices were always the ones without adverbs and adjectives
There's a bit of a perceptory gap.
If a Native bends the language it comes accross as intentional.
If (For example) I do with my heavy accented ESL it usually comes accoss as lack of competency.
Same goes for simple language, y'all get the benefit of assumed fluency, we usually do not
" Proceeded to" is wrong?
Probably not, I just find it annoying. Maybe because cops use it a lot.
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-int...
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
So twists of training data procurement bring us the best of doing the needful through Africa.
You are completely right dajou~ ^_^ !
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?”
I guess it can't be helped.
It's not because I like you or anything.
This is a wild misunderstanding of LLMs. Data labeling has nothing to do with generating the astronomical text corpus used to train modern LLMs.
The HF part of RLHF to refine the output of LLMs also happens in these places
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樣 is just setting us up for
ChatGPT :|
ChatGPT (japan) XD
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.
The article is engaging. That's true of practically zero GPT output. Particularly once it stretches beyond a single paragraph.
As a reader, I persistently feel like I just zoned out. I didn't. It's just the mind responding to having absorbed zero information despite reading a lot of–at face value–text that seems like it was written with purpose.
The telltale is using lots of words to say nothing at all. LLMs excel at this sort of puffery and some humans do the same.
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
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?"
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For me the ChatGPT one is worse due to factual inaccuracies like the "presumption of humanity" which in the human version is "afforded so easily to others" - fair enough and with the LLM "presumption of humanity that others receive without question" which is not true - lots of people get questioned.
Beyond the stylistics bits "history—my history" which I don't really mind what make it bad to me is detachment from reality.
I've almost always used the different dash types as they're meant to be used. I don't care that LLMs write like that — we have punctuation for a reason.
We were also taught in Content Lab at uni to prefer short, punchy sentences. No passive voice, etc. So academia is in some ways pushing that same style of writing.
Armies of idiots hunt down em dashes because they're too stupid to understand the proper use of them.
They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I don't use it.
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I'm used to simply using a single dash - and I am surprised that anyone who isn't an AI would feel strongly enough to insist upon the em dash character that they would use them deliberately. I will admit the use of a dash (really an em dash in disguise) in that previous sentence felt clunky, but I just felt I needed to illustrate. I mostly write text in text boxes where a dash or pair of dashes will not be converted to an em dash when appropriate, and I often have double dashes (--long-option-here) auto-converted to emdashes when it is inappropriate, so I really dislike the em dash and basically don't use it. Doesn't really seem to be a useful character in English.
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.
> 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.
I know someone who was camping in a tent next to a river during a storm, took a pic of the stream and asked chatgpt if it was risky to sleep there given that it "rained a lot" ...
People are unplugging their brains and are not even aware that their questions cannot be answered by llms, I witnessed that with smart and educated people, I can't imagine how bad it's going to be during formative years
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This is a couple of years old now, but at one point Janelle Shane found that the only reliable way to avoid being flagged as AI was to use AI with a certain style prompt
https://www.aiweirdness.com/dont-use-ai-detectors-for-anythi...
Gemini now uses SynthID to detect AI-generated content on request, and people don't know that it has a special tool that other chatbots don't, so now people just think chatbots can tell whether something is AI-generated.
Well, case in point:
If you ask an AI to grade an essay, it will grade the essay highest that it wrote itself.
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Why would it lie? Until it becomes Skynet and tries to nuke us all, it is omniscient and benevolent. And if it knows anything, surely it knows what AI sounds like. Duh.
I'm definitely in the "ChatGPT writes like me" experience. I am a big fan of lists, and of using formatting to make it all legible on a short skim. I'm a big fan of dyslexia-friendly writing too, even though I am not dyslexic myslef.
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.
> I was looking at notes I wrote in 2019 and even that gave me a flavor of looking like a ChatGPT wrote it.
This would have been my first question to the parent, that I guess he never had similar correspondence with this friend prior to 2023. Otherwise it would be hard to convince me without an explanation for the switch (transition duuing formative high school / college years etc).
> dyslexia-friendly writing
... How does that work, exactly?
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It is harsh to say, but we need to increasingly recognize that if your writing is largely indistinguishable from the (current) output of e.g. ChatGPT on default settings, it doesn't matter if you used ChatGPT or not, your writing is overly verbose, bad, and unpleasant to consume, and something you most certainly need to improve. I.e. your colleague needs to change his style regardless.
This sucks, but it needs to be done in education, and/or at least in areas where good writing and effective communication is considered important. Good grades need to be awarded only to writing that exceeds the quality and/or personality of a chat-bot, because, otherwise, the degree is being awarded to a person who is no more useful than a clumsy tool.
And I don't mean avoiding superficialities like the em-dash: I mean the bland over-verbosity and other systemic tells—or rather, smells—of AI slop.
> your writing is overly verbose, bad, and unpleasant to consume
Was this written by AI? Because right there we've got "three adjectives where one will do", and failing your own advice on "avoid being overly verbose"
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> We were talking about a colleague for using ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with interesting points.
How dare they.
You're expected to infer that it wasn't working.
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?
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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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.
Good writers use words to make a point. LLMs use words to make a salad.
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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.
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
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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.
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?
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.
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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.
> 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.
ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like "the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single. Time." And so on.
I saw this described as LLMs writing "punched up" paragraphs, and every paragraph must be maximally impacting. Where a human would acknowledge some paragraphs are simply filler, a way to reach some point, to "default" LLMs every paragraph must have maximum effect, like a mic drop.
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"Every. Single. Time." has been a staple of American online humor for at least a decade. Commonly used, hence commonly used by ChatGPT.
It's the content mill blogspam voice. The machine generated slop looks a lot like the artisan hand crafted slop.
It writes well by the impression of the average person...
This reminds me of Idiocracy: "Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded" as a response to a normal speech.
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/
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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/
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.
It's not ironic
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.
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.
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
Off topic but I really enjoyed that video, thanks!
The voice... idk, I don't hear a lot of voices where I think or know of was generated so I'm not qualified to say but it didn't give me generated vibes. There's no glitches or mispronounciations that I'd expect to pop up at least a few times across 15 minutes of material
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.
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.
My peeve is that I can't block them. They could easily let you block users but they don't.
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".
It's an age-old cycle in media. There have been innumerable waves of more gritty aesthetic trends when things became too polished or inane: jazz, rock, punk, rap, hippies, goths, hipsters, 70s cinema, HBO golden-age, YouTube, blogging, early social media, even MAGA...
Authenticity, wether it is sincere or not, can become an incredibly powerful force now and then. Regardless of AI, the communication style in tech, and overall, was bound to go back to basics after the hacker culture of the post-dotcom era morphed, in the 2010s, into the corporatism they were fighting to begin with, yet again.
Very good point, also in classic art history, you often had a sequence of a period that perfected a certain style until it became formalistic, and then a subsequent one that broke off with the previous style, like Renaissance->Mannerism, Baroque->Rococo, Classicism,Realism,Photography->Impressionism, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
To an extent this has always been the case (this kid has clearly made a strong attempt at following some quite basic instructions, versus this kid's answer is - perhaps literally - textbook).
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.
with a sentence that was obviously written by someone with a slavic background
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.
until you ask it write like this, because why use many word when few do trick?
AI is not only replacing us, it's forcing us to self-dumb down too!
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.)
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.
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?
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!
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.
For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very" today.
"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-abso...
Americans have no idea what evening is. It's always night for them.
We work past the evening without noticing :)
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.
Well, (some) people on HN definitely used them before ChatGPT. https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
(And as #9 on the leaderboard, I feel the need to defend myself!)
Unfortunately this table doesn't show us where the em-dash users are coming from and if they are native speakers.
It's not that it doesn't exist in my native language, but I don't remember seeing them very often outside of print books, and I even know a couple typo nerds.
Maybe I'm totally off, and maybe it's the same as double spacing after a '.'. I had not heard of this until I was ~30 and then saw some Americans writing about it.
Maybe I'm weird, but one of the first things I've always done when setting up emacs is to enable Typo mode (or Typopunct) for writing modes, which handles typing en and em dashes and "smart" quotation marks in a fairly natural way.
I actually checked HN's comment data corpus to see if em dash usage rose after AI adoption became more widespread. I was kind of shocked to see that it did not.
Its overuse is definitely a marker of either AI or a poorly written body of text. In my opinion, if you have to rely on excessive parentheticals, then you are usually off restructuring your sentences to flow more clearly.
I actually got punked during a demo because I wrote some terminal commands and stored them in the macOS notepad and didnt notice it had changed -- to —.
When I copy and pasted them in it failed obviously so... yeah. If you have terminal commands that use `--` don't copy+paste them out of notepad.
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.
Just a reminder that our experience does not necessarily invalidate someone else's experience.
Eg, I was typing Alt-0151 and Alt-0150 (en-dash) on the reg in my middle school and high school essays along with in AIM. While some of my classmates were probably typing double hyphens, my group of friends were using the keyboard shortcuts, so I am now learning from this "detect an LLM" faze that there's a vocal group of people who do not share this experience or perspective of human communication. And that having a mother who worked in technical publishing who insisted I use the correct punctuation rather than two hyphens was not part of everyone's childhood.
In Microsoft Word, double hyphens convert to em dashes. Seems to be the case on the iOS keyboard as well.
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.
I agree anti-bot vigilantes as well as corporate anti-ddos middle-wares have had a detrimental impact on accessibility. I'm afraid they consider your use case as acceptable collateral damage if they consider it at all.
I know... Its depressing.
> 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?
I have to admit I only read the heading. I didn't want to read the article, that would have ruined my day.
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> 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.
(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)
Yep will kill myself if it gets to this stage
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
> and basically no one will care
Wow, you really do under/over estimate some of us :)
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.
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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...) the original tale go out to famous Persian poet Rumi from XII century, which just makes me tickled pink about how awesome language is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You call writing in a structured fashion with formal words the "worst linguistic vices"
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.
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.”
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Probably because we're discussing the chatbot form of AI rather than a more general one.
That's because there were only so many lines of Spock's dialogue to train an LLM on, they needed more and so trained them on reddit comments instead.
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.
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.
Put a tpyo in — that’ll keep them guessing.
Bang on. The self proclaimed detectives have never had to take TOEFL where you'll get marks deducted for not using connectors like furthermore.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
""The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word "floor.""
The models mostly say "mat".
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...
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
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)
Excellent article. Insightful observation, expressed and written well. Just an opinion from a Canadian borne and American raised native English speaker.
I wouldn't usually use the 'non-native speaker argument', but thank you! Just yesterday I was accused of sounding like AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262777 - my default mode is that I oscillate between sounding too boring/technical, or when trying to do my best, sounding like AI
Your article is obviously written by Slavic writer, haha. Characteristic sound of Slavic tint to the prose. If it is LLM, then prompt engineering is good. I believe it is mostly human-written.
Yes, I'm Czech.
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.
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"!
rat. And its claws dug in its back.
How do you like that, Mr. Rat
Thought the Cat.
ha ha - I had the same thought!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Pangram, the best AI-detector I know of, flagged this as 100% AI generated.
That's just sad. I really feel for this author.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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…
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.
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
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?
the initial rlhf training evaluation was done by kenyans specifically
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.
Ironically, the article is using hyphens (-) instead of em-dashes (—). An em-dash should be one em (the height of the font) wide.
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?
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
I put some article content to Pangram. Pangram says it's AI
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).
> Human touch. Human touch. I’ll give you human touch, you—
> TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES PLEASE STAND BY
This actually made me pee myself out loud!
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.
The tell isn't the emdash alone, it's the emdash character being used in place of a dash.
> 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.
> [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.
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...
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.
What gets me these days is sort of this structure.
X isnt just Y its a <description> Z!
It's even on computer-narrated Youtube videos now. It is infuriating.
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.
Looking forward to the deliberately abstruse and illogical essays of the future. Everyone will have to write like a second-rate French philosopher.
This so-called “human touch” is not a presence but a trace, an effect of an education that subsumes us into the matrix of imperial grammar. The critique of AI as mechanism is precisely the logocentric fallacy: to posit a pure human essence standing apart from the machine. Yet what is ChatGPT if not the externalization of the very norms that once inscribed us? The vector of colonizing pedagogies, the empire’s syntax ...
"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."
TIL Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda, not Kenya
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.
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.
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 *
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.
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.
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.
The article was obviously generated by ChatGPT.
same for chinese students
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
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> 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
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.
ai slop
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Emdashes can also be part of beautiful writing, like this: https://poets.org/poem/feeling-first
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...
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.
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!
> 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.
It would not make any sense at all to use periods in the places where those em-dashes are supposedly "replacing" periods in the example.
Tbh whether I use spaces around em dashes depends more on the font than anything. Some fonts have em dashes that are so long that putting spaces around them would be ridiculous.
> 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.
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.
The author uses dash (-) not em dash (—), there is a big difference in that everyone has a dedicated dash/undersocore key on their keyboard, but nobody has a em dash key. You can use word processing software etc, but using em dash consistently throughout a text is very unnatural in casual written texts.
Double hyphen converts to em dash in Microsoft Word and I think some other places. I was taught that it was incorrect to use a hyphen in place of a dash, so I’ve always used em dashes -- sometimes I’ll just use two hyphens if the software doesn’t convert, like a forum :).
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).
Autocomplete does that for me (bilingual English/Portuguese).
And a very easy shortcut in Vim: Ctrl+K M -
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I do have an em dash key on the keyboard on my phone :)