Comment by wccrawford
1 month ago
It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI.
I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
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.
There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.
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But The Guardian could have been wrong about the country, and I'm a stupid European so I just don't know.
All we can hope is for a local to show up and explain.
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.
Depends what you ask the LLM to do!
If you're using it to write in programming language, you often actually get something that runs (provided your specifications are good - or your instructions for writing the specifications are specific enough!) .
If you're asking for natural language output ... yeah... you need to watch it like a hawk by hand - sure. It'd be nice if there was some way to test-suite natural language writing.
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But they will make the salad delicious, marvelous and intricate. It's not just a salad - it's a new way to talk like marketing copy (/s)
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
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
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And many of us human writers would have done so, too, since we've had to learn the—not very obscure—keyboard shortcut to insert an emdash.
I would use an actual em dash if there were a keyboard key for it. On my macbook, I have an an action script set up on the touchbar for emdash and a few other unicodey glyphs, but the (virtual) buttons are like 2 inches wide each so I can't fit more than 5 or 6 across it. Sucks.
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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.
Yes they are, or rather, we were when I was in primary school. My essays (we called them composition) were filled with these these red check marks for every esoteric word, proverb, metaphor or simile you used. The more you had the higher you'd score. So I did my homework with a dictionary open. I remember writing some document at work in the US and everyone commenting on how Queen's English it was. This was before ChatGPT. I know know it was all silly, and I've spent a bunch of time learning to write simply. But then I've listen to too many tech podcasts, and now I find silicon valley tech-speak creeping in, and I hate it. The one that I hear everywhere now that I swear not to ever use is let's double-click on that point. Just why?
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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.
The silver lining is that this style has been carpet bombed by LLMs. Nobody will be able to write like this without being ridiculed ever again.
"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.