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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me
joshstrange wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
Nothing irks me quite as much as "Did you use ChatGPT/AI on this?" or
assumptions that it was used.
Just the other week a client reached out and asked a bunch of questions
that resulted in me writing 15+ SQL queries (not small/basic ones) from
scratch and then doing some more math/calculations on top of that to
get the client the numbers they were looking for. After spending an
hour or two on it and writing up my response they said something to the
effect up "Thanks for that! I hope AI made it easy to get that all
together!".
I'm sure they were mostly being nice and trying (badly) to say "I hope
it wasn't too much trouble" but it took me a few iterations to put
together a reply that wasn't confrontational. No, I didn't use AI,
mostly because they absolutely suck at that kind of thing. Oh, they
might spit of convincing SQL statements, those SQL statements might
even work and return data, but the chance they got the right numbers is
very low in my experience (yes, I've tried).
The nuance in a database schema, especially one that's been around for
a while and seen its share of additions/migrations/etc, is something
LLMs do not handle well. Sure, if you want a count of users an LLM can
probably do that, but anything more complicated that I've tried falls
over very quickly.
The whole ordeal frustrated me quite a bit because it trivialized and
minimized what was real work that I did (non-billed work, trying to be
nice). I wouldn't do this because I'm a professional but there was a
moment when I thought "Next time I'll just reply with AI Slop instead
and let them sort it out". It really took the wind out of my sails and
made me regret the effort I put into getting them the data they asked
for.
aryan1silver wrote 10 hours 14 min ago:
This is so true, and I say this myself coming from an Indian education
system that my vocabulary has gone through an objective optimization
function similar to that of these LLMs XD
delis-thumbs-7e wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
I think the biggest problem in LLM-generated text is that it is
semantically empty - ie. void of meaning. Most people do not realise
how it is them, not some âartificial intelligenceâ, 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 Weizenbaumâs 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
oneâs ideas and emotions forward to oneâs 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 LLMâs
can overcome this hurdle, since people writing without intent cannot
either. They are just statistical models guessing words after all.
grayxu wrote 14 hours 53 min ago:
same for chinese students
delifue wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
I put some article content to Pangram. Pangram says it's AI [1] 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).
HTML [1]: https://www.pangram.com/history/282d7e59-ab4b-417c-9862-10d633...
protocolture wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
What gets me these days is sort of this structure.
X isnt just Y its a Z!
esafak wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
It's even on computer-narrated Youtube videos now. It is infuriating.
danielodievich wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
In russian there is a saying that translates "try to prove that you are
not a camel" which describes the impossibility of proving what is
obviously not true to an unwilling and/or obtuse party.
According to russian language wikipedia ( [1] ) the original tale go
out to famous Persian poet Rumi from XII century, which just makes me
tickled pink about how awesome language is.
HTML [1]: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D...
Halan wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
If you think about societies still in English colonial hangover and
ChatGPT you might find that they have similar reasons to speak the way
they speak.
Both aim at using an English that is safe, controlled and
policed for fear of negative evaluation.
ropable wrote 20 hours 25 min ago:
This author writes in ESL better than 99% of the people I've worked
with in an English-native country, including myself. It's fascinating
to read just how much more emphasis good-quality written English seems
to have in Kenya than it does here in Australia (at least in the public
education system where I have experience). I suppose that it's
understandable, given that it gates access to higher-level education
opportunities.
I don't really understand the aversion some people have to the use of
LLMs to generate or refine written communication. It seems trigger the
"that's cheating!" outrage impulse.
normie3000 wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
I don't think the author mentioned that English is their second
language. English is an official language of Kenya, and there's a
reasonable chance it's the author's home language.
theLegionWithin wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
ai slop
OG_BME wrote 21 hours 0 min ago:
Pangram, the best AI-detector I know of, flagged this as 100% AI
generated.
That's just sad. I really feel for this author.
ern wrote 21 hours 1 min ago:
I firmly believe that the heuristics that
teachers/lecturers/instructors worldwide use to avoid engaging with
reams of mundane text have been successfully by LLMs, and that's why
they were so hostile to them initially.
They have to actually read material, and not just use the structure as
a proxy for ability.
blitz_skull wrote 21 hours 30 min ago:
It actually really bothers me that somehow the long dash has become
such a "giveaway" that now I have to consider how I write. I actually
used the long dash a lot in my normal writing, but now that everyone
considers it some sort of "giveaway," it's like a tic that I can't help
but notice.
It feels very natural to me. But if everyone and their mother considers
it a "giveaway", I'd be a fool not to consider it. * sigh *
behringer wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
The tell isn't the emdash alone, it's the emdash character being used
in place of a dash.
userbinator wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
If you are "average", you will sound like an AI, because an AI is the
average of its training data. I don't think it's only Kenyans; I've
seen the same distinctive "dialect" from many others.
creata wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
The "voice" of chatbots comes from the stuff after the main training,
which is very different to the average human voice. Even the main
training would give you something like "average on the internet"
voice, which is quite different to the average human voice.
gcanyon wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
> You didnât just âwalkâ; you âstrode purposefullyâ,
âtrudged wearilyâ, or âambled nonchalantlyâ.
âStridingâ is âpurposefulâ; âtrudgingâ expresses
âwearinessâ; âamblingâ implies ânonchalanceâ.
Good verb choice reduces adverb dependence.
ChuckMcM wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
On social media I've been accused of being AI twice now :-). I suspect
it is a vocabulary thing but still it is always amusing.
iLemming wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
It could be also because, we foreigners learn to write English prose
through our reading comprehension, not via our listening circuitry. The
text probably feels "normal" to me when I read it back to myself, but
there's no "proper" feedback loop from the native speakers - I have
zero idea how my written shit sounds to a native ear when they try to
read it. I still do agree though, it feels so friggin' annoying these
days to have to deliberately butcher some words and make sure there's a
typo somehwere in your text, just to convince people that tis indeed a
crap straight from my "head to the paper", not a slop.
iainctduncan wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
This essay is effin' brilliant, and beautifully written.
I'm not Kenyan, but I was raised in a Canadian family of academics,
where mastering thoughtful â but slightly archaic â 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.
Animats wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
I was just reading the 1897 style guide of the City News Bureau
(Chicago), in the book "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!". Some
highlights:
- Do not confuse 'night' with 'evening'.
- This office spells it 'programme'.
- Hotels are 'kept', not 'run'.
- Dead men do not leave 'wives', but they may leave 'widows'.
- 'Very' is a word often used without discrimination. It is not
difficult to express the same meaning when it is eliminated.
- The relative pronoun 'that' is used about three times superfluously
to the one time that it helps the sense.
- Do not write 'this city' when you mean Chicago.
koakuma-chan wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
Americans have no idea what evening is. It's always night for them.
esafak wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
We work past the evening without noticing :)
zahlman wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very"
today.
Animats wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
"Very unique" has its own problem.[1] It started appearing online
around 2007,
according to Google Trends. Sometimes in the description of NFTs.
As an absolute adjective, "unique" should not be modified.[1] But
now, "very unique" has joined the vocabulary of meaningless
marketing phrases.
HTML [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-unique-and-ab...
rdtsc wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
> I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied,
globally-sourced way, writes like me.
We will all soon write and talk like ChatGPT. Kids growing up asking
ChatGPT for homework help, people use it for therapy, to resumes, for
CVs, for their imaginary romantic "friends", asking every day questions
from the search engine they'll get some LLM response. After some time
you'll find yourself chatting with your relative or a coworker over
coffee and instead of hearing, "lol, Jim, that's bullshit" you'll hear
something like "you're absolutely right, here let me show you a
bulleted list why this is the case...". Even more scarier, you'll soon
hear yourself say that to someone, as well.
t0lo wrote 13 hours 53 min ago:
Yep will kill myself if it gets to this stage
username223 wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
(star-eyes emoji) You are absolutely correct, Jim!
(check-mark emoji) Add more emoji â 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)
RIMR wrote 1 day ago:
I have a degree in Journalism and now work in customer support.
Occasionally, people accuse me of being an AI because of my writing
style.
Thankfully, no one I report to internally wants me to simplify my
English to prevent LLM accusations. The work I do requires deliberate
use of language.
kouru225 wrote 1 day ago:
Actors have known this for decades: self-expression isnât only a
stage problem. Itâs a life problem. Most people fail to express
themselves on an hourly basis. Being good at expressing yourself is
unnatural. Having clarity of what âyourselfâ even is is unnatural.
The truth is that weâre all making comments, jokes, deciding whatâs
important and what not using old programming in our brainsâ¦
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 youâll 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 weâre so easy to imitate?
ChosenEnd wrote 1 day ago:
TIL Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda, not Kenya
cadamsdotcom wrote 1 day ago:
It is a shame that the author has to change to keep up, and I feel
their pain but .. itâs 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 itâs now easy to generate cookie cutter prose. Which raises
the bar for truly saying something original. To say something original
now, you must also put in the work to say it in an original way. In
particular by cutting words and rephrasing even more aggressively,
which saves your reader time and can take their thinking in new
directions.
Change is a constant, and good changes tend to gain mass adoption. Our
ancestors survived because they adapted.
xandrius wrote 10 hours 26 min ago:
I think you say that so easily because it doesn't actually impact
you. It'd be absolutely pissed off if I had to constantly watch out
how I naturally write because otherwise people will shame me for
thinking I had used AI.
zephyrthenoble wrote 1 day ago:
Always interesting (in an informative way) to see people "defending"
em-dashes from my personal perspective. Before you get mad, let me
explain: before ChatGPT, I only ever saw em-dashes when MS Word would
sometimes turn a dash into a "longer dash" as I always thought of it.
I have NEVER typed an em-dash, and I don't know how to do it on Windows
or Android. I actually remember having issues with running a program
that had em-dashes where I needed to subtract numbers and got errors,
probably from younger me writing code in something other than an IDE.
Em-dashes always seem very out of place to me.
Some things I've learned/realized from this thread:
1. You can make an em-dash on Macs using -- or a keyboard shortcut
2. On Windows you can do something like Alt + 0151 which shows why I
have never done it on purpose... (my first ever â)
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.
elephanlemon wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
In Microsoft Word, double hyphens convert to em dashes. Seems to be
the case on the iOS keyboard as well.
viccis wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
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.
lebca wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
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.
AlanYx wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ericmcer wrote 1 day ago:
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 â.
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.
Wowfunhappy wrote 1 day ago:
Well, (some) people on HN definitely used them before ChatGPT. [1]
(And as #9 on the leaderboard, I feel the need to defend myself!)
HTML [1]: https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...
wink wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
Unfortunately this table doesn't show us where the em-dash users
are coming from and if they are native speakers.
It's not that it doesn't exist in my native language, but I don't
remember seeing them very often outside of print books, and I even
know a couple typo nerds.
Maybe I'm totally off, and maybe it's the same as double spacing
after a '.'. I had not heard of this until I was ~30 and then saw
some Americans writing about it.
ryeights wrote 1 day ago:
Shift+Win/Option+-. And holding - gives you en/em dash on iOS and
Android. Personally I love using em dashes so this whole AI thing is
a real disaster for me.
ChosenEnd wrote 1 day ago:
> Human touch. Human touch. Iâll give you human touch, youâ
> TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES PLEASE STAND BY
This actually made me pee myself out loud!
didibus wrote 1 day ago:
Even more so, I think most of the curated data for the fine tuning
phase is hand crafted from people from countries like Kenya if I
recall.
unsupp0rted wrote 1 day ago:
I use semi-colons and em-dashes liberally too. But I tend to do a
second pass to avoid redundancy.
e.g. > [...] and there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark
and insidious slant to it
Let's leave it at "insidious" and "in my opinion". Or drop "in my
opinion" entirely, since it goes without saying.
Just take one dip and end it.
( [1] )
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfprRZQxWps
WalterBright wrote 1 day ago:
The article was obviously generated by ChatGPT.
j45 wrote 1 day ago:
ChatGPT definitely writes like it's trainers (like Kenya).
Kenya writes like the British taught before they left, and necessarily
they didn't speak or write how they did.
jdkee wrote 1 day ago:
""The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word
"floor.""
The models mostly say "mat".
nitwit005 wrote 1 day ago:
This is also happening to artists, people who make YouTube shorts, and
similar. Everyone gets accused of being AI if the feel happens to
match.
I'm sure there's some voice actor out there who can't get work because
they sound too similar to the generated voices that appear in TikTok
videos.
esafak wrote 6 hours 30 min ago:
My peeve is that I can't block them. They could easily let you block
users but they don't.
Uehreka wrote 22 hours 53 min ago:
I did a video a couple years ago about a thing I did in Factorio[0]
and got a couple comments who didnât ask if I had used an AI voice,
they just straight up told me that the AI voice I used was off
putting. I didnât use an AI voice, in fact I appeared on camera at
the end of the video in part so that people wouldnât have to guess,
but I guess people who thought I was AI didnât feel like watching
the whole video.
I suppose I donât mind people using AI voices if they have a thick
accent or are shy about their voice, but if Iâm 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 (âdraw the rest of the owlâ
type stuff) because they asked AI to create a tutorial for something
and didnât edit or reprompt based on the output. The video essay
world is also starting to get hit pretty hard, to the point that
Iâm less willing than ever to watch content unless I already know
the creatorâs work.
[0] Shameless plug:
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/PGiTkkMOfiw
Aachen wrote 12 hours 16 min ago:
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
6SixTy wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
I remember a video where the only thing that stuck with me was that
the guy was working on his English skills, and used an AI voice.
That's not abnormal by any stretch of the imagination nor
memorable, but how he edited the AI voice made it about as natural
as a normal voice.
leoc wrote 1 day ago:
I doubt itâs 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.
OutOfHere wrote 1 day ago:
It is highly inappropriate to accuse anyone with the claim that their
writing is AI generated. This often is used as an excuse to unfairly
discredit the content of the message. Whether the content is or isn't
AI generated can't be determined with any confidence, and even if it
is, it is improper to ignore the message. If you're going to criticize
a message, do so on the basis of its actual content, not its alleged
authorship.
jinushaun wrote 1 day ago:
I had a similar experience recently during code review. I was told to
remove extra comments produced by Cursor. I was like, âI didnât use
Cursor for any of this PRâ¦â
I also love and use em-dashes regularly. ChatGPT writes like me.
buyTheDip wrote 1 day ago:
Excellent article. Insightful observation, expressed and written well.
Just an opinion from a Canadian borne and American raised native
English speaker.
elzbardico wrote 1 day ago:
BS. ChatGPT writes in the sterile and boring manner of the average
graduate of business, marketing or journalism: it is dull, safe,
somewhat pompous but professional, the ideal style for corporate
communication.
Basically, for two reasons:
1) A giant portion of all internet text was written by those same
folks.
2) Those folks are exactly the people anyone would hire to RLHF the
models to have a safe, commercially desirable output style.
I am pretty convinced the models could be more fluent, spontaneous and
original, but then it could jeopardize the models' adoption in the
corporate world, so, I think the labs intentionally fine-tuned this
style to death.
vultour wrote 1 day ago:
This post doesn't read anything like ChatGPT. Correct grammar does not
indicate ChatGPT. Em-dashes don't indicate ChatGPT. Assessing whether
something was generated using an LLM requires multiple signals, you
can't simply decry a piece of text as AI-generated because you noticed
an uncommon character.
Unfortunately I think posts like this only seem to detract from valid
criticisms. There is an actual ongoing epidemic of AI-generated content
on the internet, and it is perfectly valid for people to be upset about
this. I don't use the internet to be fed an endless stream of
zero-effort slop that will make me feel good. I want real content
produced by real people; yet posts like OP only serve to muddy the
waters when it comes to these critiques. They latch onto opinions of
random internet bottom-feeders (a dash now indicates ChatGPT?
Seriously?), and try to minimise the broader skepticism against AI
content.
I wonder whether people like the Author will regret their stance once
sufficient amount of people are indoctrinated and their content becomes
irrelevant. Why would they read anything you have to say if the magic
writing machine can keep shitting out content tailored for them 24/7?
romaniv wrote 1 day ago:
The fact that everyone is now constantly forced to use (oftentimes
faulty) personal heuristics to determine whether or not they read slop
is the real problem here.
AI companies and some of their product users relentlessly exploit the
communication systems we've painstakingly built up since 1993. We (both
readers and writers) shouldn't be required to individually adapt to
this exploitation. We should simply stop it.
And yes, I believe that the notion this exploitation is unstoppable and
inevitable is just crude propaganda. This isn't all that different from
the emergence of email spam. One way or the other this will eventually
be resolved. What I don't know is whether this will be resolved in a
way that actually benefits our society as a whole.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> fact that everyone is now constantly forced to use (oftentimes
faulty) personal heuristics to determine whether or not they read
slop is the real problem here
It would be ironic and terrific if AI causes ordinary Americans to
devote more time to evaluting their sources.
0xbadcafebee wrote 1 day ago:
It's pretty rude to "accuse" someone of using AI. Would you yell
"Dictionary!", "Grammarly!", "Reference manual!", "Newspaper quote!" at
them? Maybe "Harvard!" or "Tutored!" ? You don't know who they are or
what their life is like. Maybe they're blind and using it as an
assisted device. Maybe their hand is injured and they use it to output
information faster. Maybe they're old, infirm, a non-native English
speaker, etc. Maybe they're just a regular person who feels insecure
writing, and wants to use new technology to give them the confidence to
write/comment more. Or, maybe they just talk like that.
Let's say you happen to be lucky, don't accuse someone unfairly, and
they are using ChatGPT to write what they said. Who cares?! What is it
you're doing by "calling them out" ? Winning internet points? Feeling
superior? Fixing the world?
xigoi wrote 1 day ago:
> Let's say you happen to be lucky, don't accuse someone unfairly,
and they are using ChatGPT to write what they said. Who cares?!
People who want to read thoughts of other people and not meaningless
slop.
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
I feel this a bit, since I'm a voracious reader and a constant writer
across a few languages (but mostly English), which over the decades has
led to my converging on a certain (if imperfect) degree of polish. Plus
my multiple concurrent and often fragmented simultaneous trains of
thought while writing lead me to use parentheticals very often while
drafting, which then means I often need go back and re-introduce
structure.
And guess what, when you revise something to be more structured and you
do it in one sitting, your writing style naturally gravitates towards
the stuff LLMs tend to churn out, even if with less bullet points and
em dashes (which, incidentally, iOS/macOS adds for me automatically
even if I am a double-dash person).
synapsomorphy wrote 1 day ago:
It's an arms race between human writers and AI. Writers want to sound
less like AI and AI wants to sound more like writers, so no indicator
is reliable for long. Today typos indicate a real writer, so tomorrow
LLMs will inject them where appropriate. Yesterday em dashes indicated
LLM, so now LLMs use them less.
Beyond these surface level tells though, anyone who's read a lot of
both AI-unassisted human writing as well as AI output should be able to
pick up on the large amount of subtler cues that are present partly
because they're harder to describe (so it's harder to RLHF LLMs in the
human direction).
But even today when it's not too hard to sniff out AI writing, it's
quite scary to me how bad many (most?) people's chatbot detection
senses are, as indicated by this article. Thinking that human writing
is LLM is a false positive which is bad but not catastrophic, but the
opposite seems much worse. The long term social impact, being
"post-truth", seems poised to be what people have been raving / warning
about for years w.r.t other tech like the internet.
Today feels like the equivalent of WW1 for information warfare, society
has been caught with its pants down by the speed of innovation.
lapcat wrote 1 day ago:
> society has been caught with its pants down by the speed of
innovation.
Or rather by the slowness of regulation and enforcement in the face
of blatant copyright violation.
We've seen this before, for example with YouTube, which became the
go-to place for videos by allowing copyrighted material to be
uploaded and hosted en masse, and then a company that was already a
search engine monopoly was somehow allowed to acquire YouTube,
thereby extending and reinforcing Google's monopolization of the web.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
Innovation has always been faster when copyright is lax. The US was
copying British and other European inventions during the industrial
age left and right, and their economy took off because of it.
yokoprime wrote 1 day ago:
The author uses dash (-) not em dash (â), 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.
elephanlemon wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
Double hyphen converts to em dash in Microsoft Word and I think some
other places. I was taught that it was incorrect to use a hyphen in
place of a dash, so Iâve always used em dashes -- sometimes Iâll
just use two hyphens if the software doesnât convert, like a forum
:).
xigoi wrote 23 hours 59 min ago:
I do have an em dash key on the keyboard on my phone :)
BalinKing wrote 1 day ago:
There is an easy shortcut for em dashes on macOS, Opt+Shift+-. This
makes it really easy to use them, which I do all the time in casual
settings (indeed, more often than in formal settings).
creata wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
And a very easy shortcut in Vim: Ctrl+K M -
pcthrowaway wrote 11 hours 13 min ago:
And a very easy shortcut in emacs: C-x M-c M-butterfly-dash
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
Autocomplete does that for me (bilingual English/Portuguese).
maqnius wrote 1 day ago:
Correlated but kinda off topic: I don't mind the style so much, I mind
the verbosity. The amount of words spit out effortless by the writer
which then need to be comprehended and filtered by every reader.
Seeing a project basically wrapping 100 lines of code with a novel
length README ala 'emoticon how does it compare to.. emoticon'-bla bla
really puts me off.
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
That's a hallmark of Claude. I stopped using Claude for documentation
because it was overly... JavaScripty in feel (all the stuff it
churned out felt like JavaScript framework docs of the 2010s, and I
bet it would have added Neon Cat if it knew how).
In comparison, I can sort of confidently ask GPT-5.1/2 to say "revise
this but be terse and concise about it" and arrive at something that
is more structured that what I input but preserves most of my writing
style and doesn't bore the reader.
Yizahi wrote 1 day ago:
While author is correct in general, I would like to add a counter-point
regarding em-dashes specifically. Yes, many people use them like this -
and many website frameworks will automatically replace a keyboard
not-really-a-minus symbol with em-dash. So that is not a sign of the
LLM generated slop.
What LLMs also do though, is use em-dashes like this (imagine that "--"
is an em-dash here): "So, when you read my work--when you see our
work--what are you really seeing?"
You see? LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a
period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would
write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So those
specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop.
creata wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
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.
zahlman wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
> 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.
brycewray wrote 1 day ago:
> LLMs often use em-dashes without spaces before and after, as a
period replacement. Now that is only what an Oxford professor would
write probably, I've never seen a human write text like that. So
those specific em-dashes is a sure sign of a generated slop.
Evidently, you've never read text from anyone whose job requires
writing, publishing, and/or otherwise communicating under rules
established in (e.g.) the Chicago Manual of Style.
Yizahi wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Those people broadly fall under "the Oxford professor" catch-all
phrase. Obviously. I was talking about 99.99% of random internet
texts, which do not conform to any Manual of style and are not
written by literature majors. If I see a text authored by some
known figure or in a respectable journal/site, then I don't have a
task of detecting LLM slop in the first place. But when I do want
to know if the text is generated or not, it is usually written by
less sophisticated crowd, or anonymous.
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
It could alsoâhear me out hereâbe 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!
vintermann wrote 1 day ago:
> For my generation, and the ones that followed, the English
Composition paper - and its Kiswahili equivalent, Insha - was not just
a test; it was a rite of passage.
OK but come ON, that has to have been deliberate!
In addition to the things chatbots have made clichés, the author
actually has some "tells" which identify him as human more strongly.
Content is one thing. But he also has things (such as small
explanations and asides in parentheses, like this) which I don't think
I've EVER seen an instruction-tuned chatbot do. I know I do it myself,
but I'm aware it's a stylistic wart.
esafak wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
> [It] was not just a test; it was a rite of passage.
Other than using a semi-colon instead of a comma, this is how ChatGPT
sounds.
radimm wrote 1 day ago:
I wouldn't usually use the 'non-native speaker argument', but thank
you! Just yesterday I was accused of sounding like AI - [1] - my
default mode is that I oscillate between sounding too boring/technical,
or when trying to do my best, sounding like AI
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262777
renewiltord wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
Your article is obviously written by Slavic writer, haha.
Characteristic sound of Slavic tint to the prose. If it is LLM, then
prompt engineering is good. I believe it is mostly human-written.
radimm wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
Yes, I'm Czech.
kevin061 wrote 1 day ago:
Everyone thinks they are great at detecting AI slop, but they usually
aren't. For art, there are certain giveaways, but for text?
I regularly find myself avoiding the use of the em-dash now even though
it is exactly what I should be writing there, for fear of people
thinking I used ChatGPT.
I wish it wasn't this way. Alas.
zkmon wrote 1 day ago:
If you used a calculator to do a calculation, would they say the answer
looks like created by calculator and not done by-hand?
I think the only solution to this is, people should simply not question
AI usage. Pretence is everywhere. Face makeup, dress, the way you
speak, your forced smile...
jagoff wrote 1 day ago:
Sorry but using the emdash is just a shitty, over corporate way to
write, and it instantly rubs some spot in the brain for some people; it
doesn't matter if it was generated by an llm or not.
ghc wrote 1 day ago:
Emdashes can also be part of beautiful writing, like this:
HTML [1]: https://poets.org/poem/feeling-first
sombragris wrote 1 day ago:
This resonates with me. LLM output in Spanish also has the tendency to
"write like me", as in the linked article.
On that regard, I have an anecdote not from me, but from a student of
mine.
One of the hats I wear is that of a seminary professor. I had a student
who is now a young pastor, a very bright dude who is well read and is
an articulate writer.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged" (with apologies to Jane
Austen) that theological polemics can sometimes be ugly. Well, I don't
have time for that, but my student had the impetus (and naiveté) of
youth, and he stepped into several ones during these years. He made
Facebook posts which were authentic essays, well argued, with balanced
prose which got better as the years passed by, and treating opponents
graciously while firmly standing his own ground. He did so while he was
a seminary student, and also after graduation. He would argue a point
very well.
Fast forward to 2025. The guy still has time for some Internet
theological flamewars. In the latest one, he made (as usual) a well
argued, long-form Facebook post, defending his viewpoint on some
theological issue against people who have opposite beliefs on that
particular question. One of those opponents, a particularly nasty
fellow, retorted him with something like "you are cheating, you're just
pasting some ChatGPT answer!", and pasted a screenshot of some AI
detection tool that said that my student's writing was something like
"70% AI Positive". Some other people pointed out that the opponent's
writing also seemed like AI, and this opponent admitted that he used AI
to "enrich" some of his writing.
And this is infuriating. If that particular opponent had bothered
himself to check my student's profile, he would have seen that same
kind of "AI writing" going on back to at least 2018, when ChatGPT and
the likes were just a speck in Sam Altman's eye. That's just the way my
student writes, and he does in this way because the guy actually reads
books, he's a bonafide theology nerd. Any resemblance of his writing to
a LLM output is coincidence.
In my particular case, this resonated with me because as I said, I also
tend to write in a way that would resemble LLM output, with certain
ways to structure paragraphs, liberal use of ordered and unordered
lists, etc. Again, this is infuriating. First because people tend to
assume one is unable to write at a certain level without cheating with
AI; and second, because now everybody and their cousin can mimic
something that took many of us years to master and believe they no
longer need to do the hard work of learning to express themselves on an
even remotely articulate way. Oh well, welcome to this brave new
world...
mattbee wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure I've read any of Marcus' previous writing, but there's no
way that essay could have been written by an AI. It's personal and has
a structure that follows human thought rather than a prompt.
For sure he describes an education in English that seems misguided and
showy. And I get the context - if you don't show off in your English,
you'll never aspire to the status of an Englishman. But doggedly
sticking to anyone's "rules of good writing" never results in good
writing. And I don't think that's what the author is doing, if only
because he is writing about the limitations of what he was taught!
So idk maybe he does write like ChatGPT in other contexts? But not on
this evidence.
I have seen people use "you're using AI" as a lazy dismissal of someone
else's writing, for whatever reasons. That usually tells you more about
the person saying it than the writing though.
giancarlostoro wrote 1 day ago:
I see people claiming real videos are AI, or even real photos. You
can really tell it's not when there's 17 other videos from other
angles. Maybe someday AI will get good at that level of faking a
video, but at the time being, it is much harder to pull off.
moviet wrote 1 day ago:
We shouldn't need to have people bearing false witness. Anyone who uses
AI tools to produce published works should offer a clear disclaimer to
their audience. I share the same concerns as the author: "Will my
written work be used to say that I plagiarize off ChatGPT?"
All the toil of word-smithing to receive such an ugly reward,
convincing new readers that you are lazy. What a world we live in.
komali2 wrote 1 day ago:
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to
student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with
a proverb or a powerful opening statement. âHaste makes waste,â 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 didnât just âwalkâ; you âstrode
purposefullyâ, âtrudged wearilyâ, or âambled nonchalantlyâ.
You didnât just âseeâ a thing; you âbeheld a magnificent
spectacleâ. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these âwow
words,â 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.
eudamoniac wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
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.
joseda-hg wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
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
neves wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
Funny that in science fiction robotic voices were always the ones
without adverbs and adjectives
torginus wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
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.
figassis wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
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.
chistev wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
" Proceeded to" is wrong?
komali2 wrote 5 hours 18 min ago:
Probably not, I just find it annoying. Maybe because cops use it a
lot.
protocolture wrote 18 hours 41 min ago:
>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.
clevergadget wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
til we go out of our way to make our writers boring...
protocolture wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
Well I wasnt studying narrative, but I wouldn't have been good at
that either.
munificent wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
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.)
meatmanek wrote 19 hours 46 min ago:
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.
whstl wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
Apocryphal, but someone once told me history of male grooming is
an example of this: When only rich people could afford to shave,
the fashion among the noble was to have a clean-shaved face to
signal status, and poor people had beards. Once safety razors
appeared, then the trend reverted.
AnonymousPlanet wrote 21 hours 45 min ago:
> [...] 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
komali2 wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
> 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!
mmooss wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
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.
fragmede wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
Whom among us has not misused whom.
ThePowerOfFuet wrote 13 hours 40 min ago:
>Common advice is to use 'that' with people and 'which' with
objects, though that isn't necessarily followed
Well played.
lupire wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
Elements of Style is reviled by modern linguists and writers.
mmooss wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
Some don't like it and many do, and it's been assigned for
decades. Just a few years ago I looked at a website that
collects college syllabi and it was one of the most assigned
books.
It gives clear, practical advice in a very accessible style and
format. If you have any comparable substitutes, I'm all ears.
elliotec wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
You should just not care. Both are acceptable, "that" is a little
less formal and probably more common in everyday speech.
AnonymousPlanet wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
Thanks. Is that true only for American English or other areas
too? I've only noticed this the last couple of years on HN.
Before that "who" and "that" were used more carefully. Or at
least I had the feeling it was. Sometimes I wondered if it's just
whatever people's autocomplete happens to spit out first.
elliotec wrote 15 hours 20 min ago:
It's true for all of English, even historically. Ignore the
grammar police. The differentiation between "who" and "that" in
this particular context is extremely low on the list of things
you'll ever need to worry about.
encroach wrote 22 hours 33 min ago:
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?
rippeltippel wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
> 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.
whstl wrote 13 hours 14 min ago:
It's both of those, and more.
It's "flowery" when you dislike it and "expressive" when you like
it.
Itâs âovercomplicatedâ when you donât get it and
ânuancedâ when you do.
Itâs âpretentiousâ when it annoys you and âambitiousâ
when it excites you.
Itâs âloudâ when you hate it and âenergeticâ when you
love it.
Just like TFA, different people write differently and different
people have different opinions.
layer8 wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
These actually all mean different things.
Guestmodinfo wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
It's a pain to read your reply because it's wrong. The poster
you're replying to correctly wrote the phrases and you are trying
to malign his or her painstaking work by such a low effort reply
without explaining exactly where he or she is wrong
biophysboy wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
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.
wcfrobert wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
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:
> "thereâs a real difference between writing where youâre
communicating to somebody, the same way Iâm trying to communicate
with you, versus writing thatâs almost a well-structured diary
entry where the point is [singing] âThis is me, this is me!â and
itâs going out into the world.
lesostep wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
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.
mmooss wrote 20 hours 56 min ago:
> 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.
michaelt wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
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.
dwd wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
Eric Weinstein made a good point about Trump and his use of
language:
Trump was much closer to saying âThe immigrants are taking your
jobs.â Well, to a labor market analyst, thatâs not remotely
the same thing at all as saying âUS employers and political
donors are colluding to confiscate your most valuable rights
without market-based compensation, while denigrating you as lazy
and stupid, and hiding behind a veneer of excellence and
xenophilia as they economically undermine your families.â But
itâs much easier, isnât it?
RossBencina wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
I don't think they communicate the same broad idea at all. Making
"unpredictable, seemingly irrational" choices is far from
equivalent to being a dumb asshole. Your second version assumes
the equivalence, which, hypothetically speaking, could provide a
nice cover for purposeful malfeasance, could it not?
Guestmodinfo wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
I will choose the second one because it packs more wrongs that he
has done which are not addressed by the first choice of words :)
mmooss wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
> They both communicate the same broad idea - but which
communicates it better? It depends on the audience.
Ugh. They say different things. The first describes the policy
mechanisms and impacts. The second says nothing about those
things; it describes your emotions.
The biggest communication problem I see now is people, especially
on the Internet, including on HN, use the latter for the former
purpose and say nothing.
HPsquared wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
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.
mmooss wrote 20 hours 55 min ago:
> It might take three or four simple words to convey the meaning
of one uncommon word.
Or just find the appropriate 'simple' word, which is very often
available.
itsamario wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
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.
dTal wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
> Our legal systems are based around being concise and succinct
That's a good one. Got any more?
__lain__ wrote 23 hours 29 min ago:
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.
mjrpes wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
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.
echelon_musk wrote 1 day ago:
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.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
> 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 âBusiness
Englishâ 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 donât have to read or hear it as much as the
business variety.
komali2 wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
> The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least
most of us donât have to read or hear it as much as the
business variety.
Ugh, and journalists often slip into cop dialect in their
articles. It's disgustingly propagandic.
Notice that cops never kill or shoot someone, even in situations
where they're blatantly in the wrong. It's always, "service
weapon was discharged" or "subject was fired upon." Make sure to
throw a couple "proceeded to's" in there for good measure.
jodrellblank wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
2005 Hurricane Katrina, news described a black man carrying
bread through floodwater as "looting a grocery store" and white
people carrying bread through floodwater as "finding bread and
soda from a local grocery store".
Image: [1] Snopes:
HTML [1]: https://media.snopes.com/2016/09/looting.jpg
HTML [2]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hurricane-katrina-lo...
SoftTalker wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
Most writing is intended to communicate. Business writing is
intended to create an impression.
mmooss wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
> Most writing is intended to communicate.
If you mean 'communicate information', no. Communication,
including written, is for emotion, social expression, and other
things before information.
Even information requires those other things to be retained
well.
engineer_22 wrote 1 day ago:
someone starts using business english and my bullshit meter pegs.
my significant other loves the "real life mormon housewives" and
"lovingly blind" reality shows, and when they use business
english (a weird thing to do when talking about relationships,
but hey, what do I know I'm an engineer) it's a tell that they're
lying.
whstl wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
I recently had a terrible experience with a developer who only
communicates this way, and it's terrible.
Every single sentence is way too complicated, vague, deferring,
or hand-wavy, and I can't know if they're being honest or just
bullshitting me.
Half of the terms are incorrectly or are exaggerations when I
probe: "Coupled" means "the code is confusing to me".
"Monolith" means "the architecture is complicated to me".
"Refactoring" means "adjusting the style". "We need a new
abstraction" means "we need a new idea".
The team already had some issues with misunderstandings because
of the above.
It's someone so eager to be part of the "big boys club" and
trying to push their way to the top.
It's also infuriating.
matthewkayin wrote 1 day ago:
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.
> âthe American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa
Writersâ Workshopâ as a âcontent farmâ first designed to
optimize for âthe spread of anti-Communist propaganda through
highbrow literature.â Its algorithm: âMore Hemingway, less Dos
Passos.â
HTML [1]: https://www.openculture.com/2018/12/cia-helped-shaped-amer...
lupire wrote 16 hours 25 min ago:
Dos Passos and Hemingway were both American.
The CIA's problem with Dos Passos was that the was left-wing.
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
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.
oasisbob wrote 1 day ago:
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.
miltonlost wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
spankibalt wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
> "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.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
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 canât tell whether itâs
supposed to be funny, but Iâm finding it funny (Iâve 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, itâs pretty much all supposed
to be funny, down to every word, even when it seems
seriousâuntil, 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, Iâd say
he leans harder into humor, by a long shot, than someone like
Vonnegut, even. But almost all of itâs dead-pan, and some of
itâs the sort of humor you get when someone who knows better does
poorly on purpose, in calculated ways. If you ever think youâre
laughing at him, not with⦠I reckon youâre probably wrong.
Whatâs perhaps most miraculous about this turn-around is that I
usually donât enjoy comedic novels, but once I figured Dickens
out, he works for me.
(To your broader pointâyeah, agreed that this sucks, good advice
for bad writers becoming how most judge all writers has been
harmful)
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
Obsession with short sentences and generally pushing extreme
simplicity of structure and word choice has been terrible for English
prose. Itâs not been terrible because most people arenât aided by
such guidance (most are) but because the same people who canât 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 âproceeded toâ, and most of
the quoted phrases, are garbage. Drilling the average student on
trying to make their language superficially âsmarterâ 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, anywayâplus,
I mean, big overlap between these two groups) romance authors loooove
this in particular, for whatever reason. Everyone âstridesâ
everywhere. No one can just fucking walk, ever, and itâs always
âstrodeâ. Itâs a major tell for a certain flavor of amateur.
osener wrote 12 hours 19 min ago:
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.
PunchyHamster wrote 15 hours 56 min ago:
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.
somenameforme wrote 16 hours 6 min ago:
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!
komali2 wrote 15 hours 27 min ago:
"Prosperity is the best protector of principle" taken out of
context can be used in many ways, including by a rich person
arguing that rich people have better morals, and poor people have
worse ones, and that's why they're poor.
The context is really necessary.
somenameforme wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
Whether one is trying to use it literally or ironically, it
means the exact same thing. The only question is whether the
speaker and the reader understand what it means. And in fact in
this case there was no context at all in Twain's original usage
- it was the epigraph for a chapter in this work. [1] And
that's what I mean in that modern writing, on the internet -
though rapidly leaking into 'real life', has become highly
infantilized where we assume everybody reading is an idiot, and
speak accordingly which, in turn, infantilizes and 'idiotizes'
our own speech, and simply makes it far more bland and less
expressive.
Interestingly, this is not ubiquitous. In other cultures,
including on the internet, there remains much more use of
irony, and more general nuance in speech. I suspect a big part
of the death of English fluency was driven by political
correctness - zomg what if somebody interprets what I'm saying
the wrong way!?! [1] -
HTML [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm
next_xibalba wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
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.
GMoromisato wrote 23 hours 56 min ago:
"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".
noufalibrahim wrote 14 hours 5 min ago:
Very much agree. In the rush to "simplify" writing, we've
stripped out a lot of the colour in the prose and made it boring.
Sentences have a certain rhythm which becomes even more apparent
when they're read out loudly or performed by someone with good
vocal training.
I can see the appeal in, perhaps, technical writing but even
there, I feel that there's room to make the prose more colourful.
hsn915 wrote 16 hours 28 min ago:
Non-native English speaker here.
I would not understand the last two sentences. Sidle? Tromp? I
don't think I've seen these words enough times for them to
register in my mind.
"Strode", I would probably understand after a few seconds of
squeezing my brain. I mean, I sort of know "stride", but not as
an action someone would take. Rather as the number of bytes a row
of pixels takes in a pixel buffer. I would have to extrapolate
what the original "daily English" equivalent must have been.
joseda-hg wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
That works transversally accross languages though
You can always choose uncommon more descriptive words
In spanish you could say "repare algo" ("I fixed") or
"parapetee algo" ("I Jury-rigged") and plenty would not know
of the cuff what the second one means
People either know, look it up or figure it out via context
GMoromisato wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also
wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages,
and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like
having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right outfit
for every event.
Bad writers, of course, pick a word to make them seem smarter
(which, of course, often fails). That's what the OP was
complaining about: using a fancy word just to impress.
But "stride" is not just a fancy version of "walk". When a
person strides they are taking big steps; their head is held
high, and they are confident in who they are and where they're
going.
"Sidle" is the opposite. A person who sidles is timid and meek;
they walk slowly, or maybe sideways, hoping that no one will
notice them.
And "tromp," of course, sounds like something heavy and dour. A
person who tromps stamps their feet with every step; you hear
them coming. They are angry or maybe clumsy and graceless.
dwd wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
> English is hard, even for native speakers. But it's also
wonderful! English loves to steal words from other languages,
and good writers love to choose the right word. It's like
having an expansive wardrobe and picking just the right
outfit for every event.
Very true. Take this passage:
âI am called Strider,â he said in a low voice. âI am
very pleased to meet you, Master â Underhill, if old
Butterbur got your name right.â
In an early draft Tolkien used a different word as the
character was originally a hobbit, rather than a long-legged
Ranger:
âIâm Trotter,â he said in a low voice. âI am very
pleased to meet you, Mr â Hill, if old Barnabas had your
name right?â
skylurk wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
A very different book that would have been! Where can I
read more?
Fomite wrote 18 hours 50 min ago:
Even more simply:
"God rest ye merry gentlemen" changes in tone and meaning
depending on where you put the comma in that sentence.
bsder wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
Mark Twain on this subject:
> Well, also he will notice in the course of time, as his reading
goes on, that the difference between the almost right word and
the right word is really a large matterââtis the difference
between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
But also:
> Unconsciously he accustoms himself to writing short sentences
as a rule. At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but
he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses,
no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole.
strken wrote 21 hours 57 min ago:
I know you know everything I'm about to write, but I read a lot
of dubious quality fiction. It needs to be made clear that if the
butler "strides" up to Helen, then I, the reader, am expecting
him to eject her from the party, tell her that her car is on
fire, or something equally dramatic. The writer can subvert this
expectation, but must at least acknowledge that it exists. The
butler can stride up to Helen with a self-important sniff and
welcome her to the house, but he can't just stride up for no
reason: the striding must be explained and it must be relevant to
the rest of the story.
Conveying meaning is the whole problem here. An unexpected word
choice is a neon sign saying "This is important!" and it
disappoints the reader if it is not.
lukeschlather wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
Between stride and walk, it seems like it would be unusual for
any character in a romance novel to merely walk rather than
stride. If anything the simple walk would need explanation.
GMoromisato wrote 17 hours 56 min ago:
Agreed. As always, it depends on what the author is trying to
convey. At the first meeting, you probably do want to
describe the walk in a way that reveals the character's inner
motivation. Are they excited to walk up to the woman? Scared?
Bored? They would walk differently depending on the feeling.
But a different scene might be better with the pedestrian
"walk". Imagine that the main character enters the woman's
office with an ostentatious bouquet of flowers. In that
scene, maybe the emphasis is on the flowers or on the
reaction of the woman or her co-workers. In the scene, a
simple "he walked" might work best.
GMoromisato wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
Yes, that's a great way of explaining it, and I 100% agree.
People shouldn't use "strides" just because "walked" is boring.
They should use "strides" when it's meaningful in the context
of the story.
FireBeyond wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
I remember as a younger teen my parents got me a workshop
seminar with maybe 10 other kids with a fairly acclaimed
author.
"You probably remember your English teacher saying 'the word
'said' is boring, use something different. Yes, find
something else, if it makes more sense. But the word 'said'
is a perfectly good word."
alexose wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
The Hawaiian language has a concept called Kaona, which is
essentially embedding deeper meanings in contextual word choices.
It can go way beyond the literal meaning of the words, and tie
into bigger concepts of culture, lineage, and places. It's super
cool hearing about it from native speakers.
We don't really do it intentionally in English, at least to the
same degree. But there's still a lot of information coded in our
word and grammar choices.
baconbrand wrote 20 hours 22 min ago:
In English the word is âconnotation.â
pksebben wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
you know, I feel like we don't actually do that so much
these days. It's simply too likely that the receiving party
is going to take you at face value or make up their own
deeper meaning.
Take irony / sarcasm / satire. They're pretty dead compared
to what they used to be. I can recall a time when just about
everything had subtext, but now you kind of have to play it
straight. You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because
anyone listening will just think you agree with them.
It's Poe's law across the board. World news brought to you
by Not The Onion(tm).
amenhotep wrote 10 hours 3 min ago:
You're right, there's absolutely no sarcasm ever seen on
the internet or anywhere else. These days if you say
something sarcastic they throw you in jail!
dragonwriter wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
> You can't respond to a racist with sarcasm because anyone
listening will just think you agree with them.
You absolutely can, if you are actually dealing with people
listening, because sarcasm is signalled with (among other
things) tone (the other things include the listeners
contextual knowledge of the speaker.)
You can't do it online, in text, where the audience is
mostly strangers who would have to actively dig into your
history to get any contextual sense of you as a speaker,
because text doesn't carry tone, and the other cues are
missing, too.
And by âyou canâtâ, I mean âyou absolutely can, but
you have to be aware of the limitations of the medium and
take care to use the available tools to substitute for the
missing signalling channelsâ.
pksebben wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
It's a matter of degree. You're right, of course, but
there was a time not so long ago when such things were
ubiquitous - even on the internet. Once upon a time,
even the darkest corners like 4chan were actually kind of
tongue-in-cheek. Then it slowly dawned on everyone that
there were a bunch of people there who weren't kidding,
and things kind of went to pot.
In a reversal of the aphorism; those were more complex
times. I miss them.
tourmalinetaco wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
Itâs not even really a problem of the Internet
necessarily; itâs rather a symptom of the growing
political divide in Western society. Things are
âsimpleâ now because weâve reached the point
where nuanced discussion is pointless. In Europe you
can be jailed for going against the Accepted
Opinionsâ¢, and weâre seeing a rise in politically
motivated attacks. There is no logical solution to
emotionally backed rhetoric like weâve seen with the
Turtle Island terrorists; you canât debate ethics
with someone who wants you dead.
chris_wot wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
"minced" would never be used in such fiction.
sshine wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
You forgot:
"He waddled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
phantasmish wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
"He scrambled up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
"He kick-flipped up to Helen and asked, 'What are you doing?'"
[edit] electric-slid! Pirouetted! Somersaulted!
glitchc wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
Let's not forget "sashayed" and "marched"
frm88 wrote 13 hours 11 min ago:
I love sashayed. It's always accompanied with a mental
image of a person clad in some silk, floor length robe who
walks a slightly sidewards, the fabric whispering. I have
no idea where that image came from, but it's always there.
wjb3 wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
"slunk"
komali2 wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
Maneuvered, marched, slid over to, snuck up on/to, rolled on
up to, ambled, thread his way through the crowd to,
slithered, slunk. Pimp walked. Danced over to. Hopped over
to. Sprinted! Jogged! Charged!
M_bara wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Sashayâ¦
mwigdahl wrote 16 hours 58 min ago:
Scooted!
phantasmish wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
Crunched.
komali2 wrote 21 hours 27 min ago:
Glomped. Oozed.
kazinator wrote 17 hours 50 min ago:
He vermiculated obliquely toward Helen, and from a yet
comfortable distance mumbled a barely audible request
for permission to ask how she's doing.
lazylizard wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
wodehouse loved ejaculated
anomaly_ wrote 21 hours 59 min ago:
He rolled away on his heelys.
phantasmish wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
My best guess is they lean so hard on âstrodeâ because they
are trying to convey âthis character is confidentâ and
arenât very good at it. So youâll get like ten âstrodesâ
in a short novel. Everyoneâs âstrodeâing into every room
they enter.
mr_00ff00 wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
Feel like this debate might be way different for novel writing vs
every day writing.
Iâm biased because I am not a very good writer, but I can see
why in a book you might want to hint at how someone walked up to
someone else to illustrate a point.
When writing articles to inform people, technical docs, or even
just letters, donât use big vocabulary to hint at ideas. Just
spell it out literally.
Any other way of writing feels like you are trying to be fancy
just for the sake of seeming smart.
toss1 wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
>> Just spell it out literally.
Spelling it out literally is precisely what the GP is doing in
each of the example sentences â literally saying what the
subject is doing, and with the precision of choosing a single
word better to convey not only the mere fact of bipedal
locomotion, but also the WAY the person walked, with what pace,
attitude, and feeling.
This carries MORE information about in the exact same amount of
words. It is the most literal way to spell it out.
A big part of good writing is how to convey more meaning
without more words.
Bad writing would be to add more clauses or sentences to say
that our subject was confidently striding, conspiratorially
sidling, or angrily tromping, and adding much more of those
sentences and phrases soon gets tiresome for the reader.
Better writing carries the heavier load in the same size
sentence by using better word choice, metaphor, etc. (and doing
it without going too far the other way and making the writing
unintelligibly dense).
Think of "spelling it out literally" like the thousand-line IF
statements, whereas good writing uses a more concise function
to produce the desired output.
dijit wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
Agreed.
Brevity is the soul of good communication.
mr_00ff00 wrote 22 hours 14 min ago:
Those examples were simple, so itâs less of an issue, but
if the words you use are so crazy that the reader has to read
slower or has to stop to think about what you meanâ¦then you
arenât making things more concise even if you are using
less words.
toss1 wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
For sure! Every author should know their audience and write
for that audience.
An author's word choices can certainly fail to convey
intended meaning, or convey it too slowly because they are
too obscure or are a mismatch for the the intended audience
â that is just falling off the other side of the good
writing tightrope.
At technical paper is an example where the audience expects
to see proper technical names and terms of art. Those terms
will slow down a general reader who will be annoyed by the
"jargon" but it would annoy every academic or professional
if the "jargon" were edited out for less precise and more
everyday words. And vice versa for the same topic published
in a general interest magazine.
So, an important question is whether you are part of the
intended audience.
dgan wrote 1 day ago:
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
nonameiguess wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
I was a hurdler in high school and mastering stride length was
almost the entire point of practicing. It's equally weird to me
to see someone claiming to be fluent in English who has never
heard the word. Maybe a reminder that we're not as knowledgeable
as we think we are and what we choose to consume on YouTube is a
tiny smittance of human experience. Running is a fairly universal
and important thing for nearly any land animal, hardly a niche
thing to talk about, but if you had ever talked to or listened to
runners speaking English, you'd have definitely heard them
talking about their strides.
eudamoniac wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Verbal fluency is a completely different ballgame to literary
fluency. Literature uses vastly more words. Stride is a pretty
common one.
Open a collegiate dictionary to a series of random pages,
checking the first word to see if you can give any vague
definition of it. A fluent speaker who doesn't read literature
will likely be able to for fewer than 1/4th of them. A decent
literary vocabulary would know ~2/3 or more imo.
RossBencina wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
Indeed "to stride" is roughly to walk with a larger than normal
distance (gap) between steps.
gertlex wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
I wonder if you've heard the expression "hitting your stride".
(native english speaker who was a bookworm as a kid; I admittedly
had to ask gemini to recall the general phrase that I had in
mind)
dgan wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
Nope, never heard!
pedroma wrote 22 hours 3 min ago:
People don't discuss how people walk in daily conversation, so
it's a word primarily encountered in literature, and more common
in specific types of literature (like romance novels to describe
how a man paces about with swagger).
aleph_minus_one wrote 22 hours 5 min ago:
>
I consider myself fluent in English, I watch technical talks and
casual youtubers on English daily, and this is the first time I
encounter this word lol.
> The only "stride" I know relates to the gap betweeb
heterogeneous elements in a contiguous array
I am also not a native English speaker, but I got to know the
verb to "to stride" from The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn is
originally introduced under the name "Strider":
> [1] "Aragorn is a fictional character and a protagonist in J.
R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is a Ranger of the
North, first introduced with the name Strider and later revealed
to be the heir of Isildur, an ancient King of Arnor and Gondor."
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aragorn&oldid...
esafak wrote 15 hours 50 min ago:
Or since we're in a techie forum:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strider_(1989_arcade_gam...
Aperocky wrote 17 hours 11 min ago:
Or if you spent any time on an elliptical or treadmill.
derefr wrote 1 day ago:
> Drilling the average student on trying to make their language
superficially âsmarterâ 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.
jay_kyburz wrote 1 day ago:
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.
heavyset_go wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
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"
SirHumphrey wrote 1 day ago:
I canât 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
complexityâs sake way to late.
tptacek wrote 1 day ago:
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.
heavyset_go wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Its output has the aesthetic of "good" writing, or at least
professional writing you typically find online.
notahacker wrote 1 day ago:
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
derefr wrote 1 day ago:
> MASSIVE EM DASH
Tangent: the thing I find most annoying about ChatGPT's use of
em-dashes is that it never even uses them for the one thing
they're best suited for. ChatGPT's em-dashes could almost always
be replaced with a colon or a comma.
But the true non-redundant-syntax use of em-dashes in English
prose, is in the embedding into a sentence of self-interruptive
'joiner' sub-sentences that can themselves bear punctuated
sub-clauses. "Xâor Y, maybeâbut never Z" sorta sentences.
These things are spoken entirely differently than â and on the
page, they read entirely differently to â regular
parenthetical-bearing sentences.
No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken
entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely
differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."
Different cadence; different pacing; possibly a different shade
of meaning (insofar as the emotional state of the author/speaker
is part of the conveyed message.)
But, for some reason, ChatGPT just never constructs these kinds
of self-interruptive sentences. I'm not sure it even knows how.
mannykannot wrote 20 hours 7 min ago:
Personally, I do not see the distinction here between the two
sentences, but your last paragraph got me thinking: should we
be using parenthetical, self-interruptive clauses? When we are
speaking extemporaneously, we may need them, but when writing,
could we rearrange things so they are not needed?
One reason I came up with for doing so is to acknowledge a
caveat or answer a question that the author anticipates will
enter a typical reader's mind at that point in the narrative.
If that is the case, then it seems to me that when an author
does this, they are making use of their theory of mind,
anticipating what the reader may be thinking as they read, and
acknowledging that it will likely differ from what they, as the
author, is thinking of (and knows about the topic) at that
point.
If this makes any sense, then we might ask if at least a
rudimentary theory of mind is needed to effectively use
parenthetical clauses, or can it be faked through the rote
application of empirically-learned style rules? LLMs have shown
they can do the latter, but excessive use might be signalling a
lack of understanding.
thaumasiotes wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
> These things are spoken entirely differently than â and on
the page, they read entirely differently to â regular
parenthetical-bearing sentences.
> No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken
entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely
differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."
Those are spoken the same way, they read the same way, and they
mean the same thing.
pxc wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
They do mean the same thing, but they have different moods.
With the em-dashes it's self-interjection that foregrounds
the detour, but with parentheses it's, well... parenthetical.
Aside: it's probably just style (maybe some style guides call
for the way you did it), but using em-dashes for this purpose
with whitespace on each side of them looks/feels wrong to me.
Anyone know if that's regional or something?
komali2 wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
Not universally. I disagree, they read differently to me, and
I'd say them differently.
Parentheses to me always feel like the speaker switching to
camera #3 while holding a hand up to their mouth
conspiratorially.
Em dashes are same-camera with maybe some kind of
gesticulation such as pointing or hands up, palms down, then
palms up when terminating the emdash clause.
derefr wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
Is this maybe a thing like how only designers are aware of
kerning? These read / sound very different to me, and to
everyone I've brought up the subject with (who admittedly are
in a certain bubble of people who either write
professionally, or "do things" with their voices, or both.)
⢠The length of the verbal pause is different. (It's hard
to quantify this, as it's relative to your speaking rate,
which can fluctuate even within a sentence. But I can maybe
describe it in terms of meter in poetry/songwriting: when
allowed to, a parenthetical pause may be read to act as a
one-syllable rest in the meter of a poem, often helpfully
shifting the words in the parenthetical over to properly
end-align a pair of rhyming [but otherwise misaligned] feet.
An em-dash, on the other hand, acts as only a half-syllable
rest; it therefore offsets the meter of the words in the
subclause that follow, until the closing em-dash adds another
half-syllable rest to set things right. This is in part why
ChatGPT's favored sentences, consisting of "peer" clauses
joined by a single em-dash, are somewhat grating to mentally
read aloud; you end up "off" by a half-syllable after them,
unless you can read ahead far enough to notice that there's
no closing em-dash in the sentence, and so allow the
em-dash-length pause to read as a semicolon-length pause
instead.)
⢠The voicing of the last word before the opening
parenthesis / first em-dash starts is different. (paren =
slow down for last few words before the paren, then suddenly
speed up, and override the word's normal tonal emphasis with
a last-syllable-emphasized rising tone + de-voicing of
vowels; em-dash = slow down and over-enunciate last few words
before the em-dash, then read the last syllable before the
em-dash louder with a overridden falling voiced tone)
⢠The speed at which, and vocal register with which, the
aside / subclause is read is different. (parens = lowest
register you can comfortably speak at, slightly quieter,
slightly faster than you were delivering the toplevel
sentence; em-dashes = delivery same speed or slower, first
few syllables given overridden voiced emphasis with rising
tone from low to normal, and last few syllables given
overridden voiced emphasis with falling tone from normal to
low)
⢠The voicing of the first words after the subclause ends
is different. (closing paren = resume speaking precisely as
if the parenthetical didn't happen; second em-dash = give a
fast, flat-low nasally voiced performance of the first one or
two syllables after the em-dash.)
To describe the overall effect of these tweaks:
A parenthetical should be heard as if embedded into the
sentence very deliberately, but delivered as an aside /
tangent, smaller and off-to-the-side, almost an "inlined
footnote", trying to not distract from the point, nor to
"blow the listener's stack" by losing the thread of the
toplevel point in considering it.
An em-dash-enclosed interruptive subclause should read like
the speaker has realized at the last moment that they have
two related points to make; that they are seemingly
proceeding, after a stutter, to finish the sentence with the
subclause; but that they are then "backing up" and finishing
the same sentence again with the toplevel clause. The
verbalization should be able to be visualized as the outer
sentence being "squashed in" to "make room" for the
interruptive subclause; and the interruptive subclause
"squashing at the edges" [tonally up or down, though usually
down] to indicate its own "squeezed in" beginning and end
edges.
Note that this isn't subjective/anecdotal descriptions from
how I speak myself. These are actually my attempt to distill
vocal coaching guidelines I've learned for:
⢠live sight-reading of teleprompter lines containing these
elements, as a TV show host / news anchor
⢠default-assumed directorial expectations for lines
containing elements like these, when giving screenplay
readings as a [voice] actor (before any directorial "notes"
come into play)
frm88 wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
I agree with my sibling commentor (same attributes apply):
this reads exactly how I vocalise it in my head.
SSLy wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
I'm not a native speaker, I don't do work with my voice,
and my English writing is confined to work â almost
always with other ESLs â and short comments on the
Internet; but what you write feels correct.
gowld wrote 1 day ago:
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!"
hyghjiyhu wrote 1 day ago:
I think that's a great sentence to include... you know, provided
it's actually true.
tptacek wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, it's usually wrong in its rhetoric, and the writing isn't
"good", but it's technically well constructed and it's well
constructed in a way that "Hemingway" doesn't reject.
Like, if I ask GPT5 to convert 75f to celsius, it will say "OK,
here's the tight answer. No fluff. Just the actual result you
need to know." and then in a new graf say "It's 23.8c." (or
whatever).
setsewerd wrote 1 day ago:
It already bugs me when ChatGPT describes how it is going to
answer before answering, but it's 10x more annoying when I'm
asking for a concise response without filler etc.
As an aside, I've noticed the self-description happens even
more often when extended thinking mode is being used. My
unverified intuition is that it references my custom
instructions and memory more than once during the thinking
process, as it then seems more primed than usual to mimic
vocabulary from any saved text like that.
tptacek wrote 1 day ago:
Right, it is currently incapable of providing a straight
answer without clearing it's throat selling the answer. It
reminds me of those recipe blogs that just can't get to the
fucking recipe. It's bad writing! But it's not bad
technically, in a style-guide kind of way.
cibyr wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
Sometimes I wonder if the throat-clearing is an
indispensable part of getting to the "good bits" that
follow. Like, do those extra tokens give it more "room to
think" even if they're basically meaningless in themselves?
dTal wrote 20 hours 13 min ago:
The output tokens are the only information that is
carried forward through each inference pass, so "more
room to think" is incompatible with "basically
meaningless". Perhaps one could imagine it somehow
stenographically encoding information in its precise
choice of meaningless throat clearing, but there are only
so many variations on that theme - word choice is heavily
constrained, so it doesn't feel like you could store a
whole lot of information there without it starting to
read froopiliciously.
alex43578 wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
Isnât that the point of the hidden chain of thought
tokens, rather than the visible cruft?
I think the fluff, the emojis, the sycophancy is all
symptomatic of the training process and human feedback.
lupire wrote 16 hours 17 min ago:
I thought PP was saying that the "Thinking" text is
only used for one turn, and the response text is the
compressed thinking that survives into future turns.
OptionOfT wrote 1 day ago:
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.
patrickmay wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
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!"
echelon_musk wrote 1 day ago:
> thought to write
Taught?
OptionOfT wrote 1 day ago:
Yea. I've been in the States for 8 years, yet sometimes my brain
thinks about a word and writes it down phonetically.
But hey, at least you know I didn't use ChatGPT to conjure that
comment.
shadow28 wrote 23 hours 14 min ago:
Sorry for the pedantry, but "thought" and "taught" are actually
phonetically different (/θÉËt/ vs /tÉËt/).
OptionOfT wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
I appreciate that. I tried to pronounce them, and out loud I
do differentiate.
But the voice in my head does not.
Pedantry is what makes me better.
tom_ wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
That may not be true if you struggle with "th"? Some ESL
speakers do.
engineer_22 wrote 1 day ago:
intentional typo to throw off the clankers :)
inanutshellus wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
or an intentionally-prompted typo to throw off the
anti-clankers. ;)
bookworm123 wrote 1 day ago:
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
stackghost wrote 1 day ago:
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.
MarkusQ wrote 1 day ago:
"Went" is a powerful word. With suitable helpers it can replace
"proceeded", as you demonstrated, "attended" ("I went to a good
school") as well as "became" ("On hearing this, Joe went all
silent") or "said" ("So then she went 'Dude!' and we all
laughed") and hundreds of other words.
Only a handful of words ("got", "y'know" and "fuck") rival its
versatility.
valbaca wrote 1 day ago:
> I proceeded to do the work.
> I did the work.
> I worked.
xboxnolifes wrote 1 day ago:
Each one of these has slightly different readings in my eyes.
hyghjiyhu wrote 1 day ago:
Unlike the last variant, the first two imply there was some
quantity of work and it was all completed.
I don't really see the difference between the two though.
thaumasiotes wrote 23 hours 41 min ago:
Well, option 1 implies that there was something else going on
before the event described in the sentence. Option 2 is
neutral about that.
Compare:
1. I did the work for that last week.
2. I proceeded to do the work for that last week.
Sentence 2 strikes me as questionably grammatical. It needs
to be proceeding from something in the context.
unsupp0rted wrote 1 day ago:
Not different enough to make it worth using anything but the
simplest one.
overfeed wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
Perhaps yet another American cultural artifact. One that - if
I were to guess - originated from the Calvinist disdain for
ostentiousness.
unsupp0rted wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
Yes yes, anybody who prefers plain, easily parsed wording
is American.
Wording? Don't you mean diction?
overfeed wrote 22 hours 49 min ago:
A -> B =/= B -> A.
I didn't claim that this was exclusively American. Though
I'd have to admit that one doesn't have to be American to
adopt Ameracanisms: rhotic Rs, Netflix color-grading, and
copy-cat political movements are other American cultural
artifacts showing up across the world due to America's
dominance of the zeitgeist.
Rap verses in pop songs wasn't a spontaneously phenomenon
across the globe, the origins are tracably American - but
that doesn't make all rappers American.
monster_truck wrote 1 day ago:
I'm of the notion that my certainty is not sufficiently
concrete to discover myself in the realm of agreement
yomismoaqui wrote 1 day ago:
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.
aomix wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time."
is my favorite quote for that
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to
paint like a child." â Pablo Picasso
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
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 :)
komali2 wrote 22 hours 4 min ago:
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)".
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> classic English literature to actually use "proceeded" regularly
Huh, apparently 'proceeded' was used more commonly in 19th-century
writing [1]
HTML [1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Proceeded&ye...
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
Well, I read Dickens, Hawthorne, Austen...
lo_zamoyski wrote 1 day ago:
> the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was
pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences
Language is like clothing.
Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to
show off their wealth. The clothing is merely a vector for this
purpose. They wonât use a piece of jewelry only if it contributes
to the ensemble. Oh, no. Theyâll 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 wonât use a word only if it
contributes to the prose. Oh, no. Theyâll 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.
Mouvelie wrote 1 day ago:
A nice metaphor, really. I always compared it to food but clothing
works more in that case, it seems.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> 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
disrespectfulâthis 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 isnât clued
into a hoodie and jeans being the surferâs English to Nairobiâs
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 ingredientsâ 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.)
HTML [1]: https://historyfacts.com/world-history/article/how-did-sal...
lapcat wrote 1 day ago:
False accusations of AI writing are becoming absurd and infuriating.
The other day I saw and argued with this accusation by a HN commenter
against a professional writer, based on the most tenuous shred of
evidence:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255049
tuetuopay wrote 1 day ago:
I can only dream of writing english as well as OP. Kudos for mastering
the language!
The formal part resonates, because most non-native english speaker
learnt it at school, which teaches you literary english rather than
day-to-day english. And this holds for most foreign languages learnt in
this context: you write prose, essays, three-part prose with an
introduction and a conclusion. I've got the same kind of education in
france, though years of working in IT gave me a more "american" english
style: straight to the point and short, with a simpler vocabulary for
everyday use.
As for whether your writing is ChatGPT: it's definitely not. What those
"AI bounty hunters" would miss in such an essay: there is no fluff.
Yes, the sentences may use the "three points" classical method, but
they don't stick out like a sore thumb - I would not have noticed
should the author had not mentioned it. This does not feel like
filling. Usually with AI articles, I find myself skipping more than
half of each paragraph, due to the information density - just give me
the prompt. This article got me reading every single word. Can we call
this vibe reading?
codeflo wrote 1 day ago:
To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many
people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but
they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are
more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of
idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.
Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from
this article:
> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be
seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity
that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a
machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial
legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the
effort required to master the official language of my own country.
And ChatGPT's "improvement":
> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen,
to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that
others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a
machine. It is the product of historyâmy 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.
port11 wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
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 â 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.
tim333 wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
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 "historyâmy history" which I don't
really mind what make it bad to me is detachment from reality.
kevin_thibedeau wrote 1 day ago:
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.
psunavy03 wrote 1 day ago:
Armies of idiots hunt down em dashes because they're too stupid to
understand the proper use of them.
lukeschlather wrote 18 hours 3 min ago:
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.
amanaplanacanal wrote 1 day ago:
They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard, I
don't use it.
alterom wrote 9 hours 30 min ago:
>They are probably like me: if punctuation isn't on my keyboard,
I don't use it.
LPT: on Android, pressing and holding a punctuation key on the
on-screen keyboard reveals additional variations of it â like
the em-dash, for example.
This is the â1 feature I expect everyone to know about (and
explore!), but, alas, it doesn't appear to be the case even on
Hackernews¹.
On Windows, pressing Win+. pops up an on-screen character
keyboard with all the symbols one may need (including math
symbols and emojis).
MacOS has a similar functionality IIRC.
And let's not forget that software like MS Word automatically
correct dashes to em-dashes when appropriate â and some people
may simply prefer typing text in a word processor and
copy-pasting from it.
Anyway...
_____
¹ For example, holding "1" yields the superscript version,
enabling one to format footnotes properly with less effort than
using references in brackets², yet few people choose to do that.
² E.g. [2]
eqvinox wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
[AltGr][Shift][-]
Without shift it's an en dash (â), with shift an em dash (â).
Default X11 mapping for a German keyboard layout, zero config of
mine.
LtWorf wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
â¸WHATâ½
hyperdimension wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
Neat, I didn't know there was an upside down interrobang.
jay_kyburz wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, this is what I don't understand, surely people aren't
"using" em dashes deliberately. I assumed MS word was just
inserting them automatically when the user used a minus symbol
between two words. Kind of like angled quotes.
jay_kyburz wrote 18 hours 30 min ago:
update: I read that word will place an em dash if you use two
dashes "--"
eqvinox wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
> surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately
I am, it's on the default German X11 keyboard layout. Same for
· à ÷ â¦
And that's without going to the trusty compose key (Caps Lock
for me)⦠wonders like ½ and HâO await!
pxc wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
I use them when they're easy to type. For me, that's on
Android, macOS, and anywhere I've configured a compose key.
Angled quotes I use only on systems on which I've configured a
compose key, or Android when I'm typing Chinese.
I don't like any kind of auto-replacement with physical
keyboards, so I turn off "smart quotes" on macOS.
Anyway I use characters like that all the time, but it's never
auto-replace.
acuozzo wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
> surely people aren't "using" em dashes deliberately
I've had a "trigger finger" for Alt+0151 on Windows since 2010
at least.
whstl wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
When I worked in company that did content marketing and had a
lot of writers, one of the coffee mugs they gave to us had
Alt+0151 in it!
Em-Dash was really popular with professional writers.
buu700 wrote 1 day ago:
I've been using em dashes for much longer than transformers
have existed. It's easily accessible on at least the Android
and macOS keyboards.
iammattmurphy wrote 1 day ago:
I one of the reasons I love macOS: it is if you hold option.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
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 ofâat face valueâtext that seems like it
was written with purpose.
Miraltar wrote 1 day ago:
You're doing it the wrong way imo, if you ask gpt to improve a
sentence that's already very polished it will only add grandiosity
because what else it could do? For a proper comparison you'd have to
give it the most raw form of the thought and see how it would phrase
it.
The main difference in the author's writing to LLM I see is that the
flourish and the structure mentioned is used meaningfully, they
circle around a bit too much for my taste but it's not nearly as
boring as reading ai slop which usually stretch a simple idea over
several paragraphs
rossant wrote 1 day ago:
Why can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's already
really good? Sometimes I wish the LLM would just tell me, "You
asked me to improve this sentence, but it's already great and I
don't see anything to change. Any 'improvement' would actually make
it worse. Are you sure you want to continue?"
bakugo wrote 1 day ago:
> Why can't the LLM refrain from improving a sentence that's
already really good?
Because you told it to improve it. Modern LLMs are trained to
follow instructions unquestioningly, they will never tell you
"you told me to do X but I don't think I should", they'll just do
it even if it's unnecessary.
If you want the LLM to avoid making changes that it thinks are
unnecessary, you need to explicitly give it the option to do so
in your prompt.
astrange wrote 11 hours 16 min ago:
They aren't trained to follow instructions "unquestioningly",
since that would violate the safety rules, and would also be
useless:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
lupire wrote 16 hours 10 min ago:
This is not true. My LLM will tell me it already did what I
told it to do.
buu700 wrote 1 day ago:
That may be what most or all current LLMs do by default, but it
isn't self-evident that it's what LLMs inherently must do.
A reasonable human, given the same task, wouldn't just make
arbitrary changes to an already-well-composed sentence with no
identified typos and hope for the best. They would clarify that
the sentence is already generally high-quality, then ask
probing questions about any perceived issues and the context in
and ends to which it must become "better".
heavyset_go wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
Reasonable humans understand the request at hand. LLMs just
output something that looks like it will satisfy the user.
It's a happy accident when the output is useful.
buu700 wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
Sure, but that doesn't prove anything about the properties
of the output. Change a few words, and this could be an
argument against the possibility of what we now refer to as
LLMs (which do, of course, exist).
azangru wrote 1 day ago:
What was the "dead giveaway" referred to in the pasted tweet? Was it
the dash, that people assume for some reason regular folks never use?
Or was it something more interesting?
pluc wrote 1 day ago:
I can't wait until we reach the point of AI adoption where genuine
content is suspicious.
Wanna submit a proof in a criminal case? Better be ready to debunk
whether this was made with AI.
AI is going to fuck everything up for absolutely no reason other than
profit and greed and I can't fucking wait
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
It's going to make accountability very, very difficult. We were
nearly at the point in politics anyway, where people could just claim
evidence was fake and get away with it. Now, it's an easy get-out. I
am fully expecting that, if any particularly incriminating photos
were to appear, say of powerful people engaging in activities with
Jeffrey Epstein, that they will simply dismiss them as "fake news
AI".
nout wrote 1 day ago:
Well, his writing style is too good. The sentences flow too
beautifully, he uses rich vocabulary and styling. It's unusual to see
that style of writing online. I definitely don't poses that power.
I don't know the author of this article and so I don't know whether I
should feel good or bad about this. LLMs produce better writing than
most people can and so when someone writes this eloquently, then most
people will assume that it's being produced by LLM. The ride in the
closed horse carriage was so comfortable it felt like being in a car
and so people assumed it was a car. Is that good? Is that bad?
Also note that LLMs are now much more than just "one ML model to
predict the next character" - LLMs are now large systems with many
iterations, many calls to other systems, databases, etc.
stephen_g wrote 1 day ago:
> LLMs produce better writing than most people can and so when
someone writes this eloquently, then most people will assume that
it's being produced by LLM.
I really donât 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
doesnât necessarily mean itâs good writingâ¦
nout wrote 1 day ago:
I meant "good" in the formatting, grammar, vocabulary sense. I'm
not arguing that LLMs are "good" in writing amazing prose.
I mean look at two of us - I have typos, I use half broken english,
I'm not good in doing noun articles, my vocabulary is limited, I
don't connect sentences well, you end sentences with "..." and
then you start sentence with "And", etc. I very much believe you
are a real person.
Tepix wrote 1 day ago:
I don't mind the "normal" text so much, where you aren't sure if it was
written by an AI or not. What's really getting annoying is the flood of
bullet points and emoji that is flooding LinkedIn in particular. Super
obnoxious!
dilap wrote 1 day ago:
I read about 4 paragraphs of the blog post, it does not at all read
like it was written by ChatGPT!
Some people are perhaps overly focussed on superficial things like
em-dashes. The real tells for ChatGPT writing are more subtle -- a
tendency towards hyperboly (it's not A, it's [florid restatment of
essentially A] B!), a certain kind of rhythym, and frequently a kind of
hard to describe "emptiness" of claims.
(LLMs can write in mang styles, but this is the sort of "kid filling
out the essay word count" style you get in chatgpt etc by default.)
ezoe wrote 1 day ago:
Hey bro! This is the real English bro! No way we can write like that
bro! What? - and ;? The words like "furthermore" or "moreever"? All
my homies nver use the words like that bro! Look at you. You're using
newline! You're using ChatGPT, right bro?
flowerthoughts wrote 1 day ago:
Given the eloquently natural words in this post, I conclude you
must be this thread's prompt engineer! Well done, my fellow
Netizen. Reading your words was like smelling a rosebud in spring,
just after the heavy snow fell.
Now, please, divulge your secret--your verbal nectar, if you
wish--so that I too can flower in your tounge!
Sharlin wrote 1 day ago:
It does not, but to many, many people who cannot tell the difference
it does. Simply because it's well-written somewhat-formal-register
English and not "internet speech" or similar casual register. As you
probably know, there are many these days who take the mere use of em
or en dashes as a reliable sign of LLM writing.
lxgr wrote 1 day ago:
Honestly, people assuming I'm using ChatGPT to communicate with them
and liberally using that suspicion as a filter sounds like a great
meta-filter.
htrp wrote 1 day ago:
the initial rlhf training evaluation was done by kenyans specifically
clbrmbr wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you for writing this. I too was a heavy user of the em-dash until
ChatGPT came along. Though my solution has been to eschew the em-dash
or at least replace with triple hyphens.
kome wrote 1 day ago:
as a researcher, writing ended up being my job, and more specifically,
writing in english. i never developed any sentimental link to the
english language, to me it always felt bland, because i had to use it
in bland environments, to write texts that had to be bland and
manneristic.
chatgpt revolutionized my work because it makes creating those bland
texts so much easier and fast. it made my job more interesting because
i don't have to care about writing as much as before.
to those who complain about ai slop, i have nothing to say. english was
slop before, even before ai, and not because of some conspiracy, but
because the gatekeepers of journals and scientific production already
wanted to be fed slop.
for sure society will create others, totally idiosyncratic ways to
generate distinction and an us vs others. that's natural. but, for now,
let's enjoy this interregnum...
dsign wrote 1 day ago:
Actually, there's a sweet solution to the writing and art crisis we are
inflicting ourselves with in our AI craze. I call it "the island". Just
find a nice tiny islet somewhere, make a few houses, and rent them by
the week to writers/artists. No internet in the place. Rent out
sanctioned devices; glorified typewriters without Internet access nor
GPU nor CPU fast enough to run an LLM. Bring a notary to certify stuff
was purely human-made. Have fun with like-minded individuals.
_Chief wrote 1 day ago:
Also Kenyan, I once recently spent 10min explaining a technical topic
via chat, and the response I got was "was this GPT?". I took a few
minutes then just linked an article of how underpaid Kenyans trained
ChatGPT for OpenAI [1] 1:
HTML [1]: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
mikigraf wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm 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
rukshn wrote 1 day ago:
I had a similar experience. We were talking about a colleague for using
ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with
interesting points. The talk sounds so mechanical and sounds exactly as
ChatGPT.
His responses in Zoom Calls were the same mechanical and sounds like AI
generated. I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI
by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed
that it's AI written and gave points to why it believes this message
was AI written.
When I showed the response to the colleague he swore that he was not
using ant AI to write his responses. I believe after he said to me it
was not AI written. And now reading this I can imagine that it's not an
isolated experience.
D-Machine wrote 21 hours 48 min ago:
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 tellsâor rather,
smellsâof AI slop.
handoflixue wrote 19 hours 18 min ago:
> 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"
D-Machine wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
It is up to the reader to judge whether my style is verbose, or
if I could have used less adjectives here. The adjectives all in
fact have different meanings, only "bad" is lazy, IMO (EDIT: and
"bad" is meant to be obvious moralizing - something AI in fact
almost never does).
Don't think that I don't hold myself to the same standards I am
pushing here, verbosity has always been a problem for me, and AI
verbosity is a good and necessary reminder for me to curb it.
xwolfi wrote 12 hours 1 min ago:
Frankly, using "bad" was a mistake, because it encompasses the
two other adjectives. "Your chatgpt-like style is
vomit-inducing, bad and boring" <-- you see, why add bad in the
middle, you already got that point from the two other insults,
right ?
I think if you want to sound less like an AI, you should cut
cut cut, and maybe write a bit more like speech, with sort of
slangish structures etc, people won't doubt you anymore.
Good luck !
D-Machine wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
This is subjective, lots of people think they sound smart /
better by avoiding moral phrases like "bad" or "evil", but
often this is just pointless class signaling, limp-wristed
relativism, or simple cowardice / excessive agreeableness.
To counter that kind of nonsense is why we have phrases like
"X is bad and you should feel bad for supporting it", and "X
is bad, actually", as they don't beat around the bush and
simply make one's moral statements clear. Maybe I should have
said "repetitive, unpleasant to read, and just bad" to make
this usage clearer, but, hey, one can only spend so much time
crafting quick comments on HN.
lynndotpy wrote 1 day ago:
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.
zahlman wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
> dyslexia-friendly writing
... How does that work, exactly?
lynndotpy wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
Bullet points and formatting are the main thing. Assume the
audience is smart and can fill in between the bold text. I also
try to make headlines a summary / takeaway of the content if it
makes sense.
jechton wrote 19 hours 8 min ago:
Namely, keeping things short and simple, and using formatting
like bullet points or holding for important information to make
text easier to scan.
sillyfluke wrote 1 day ago:
> 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).
0xbadcafebee wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Y_Y wrote 1 day ago:
You're expected to infer that it wasn't working.
mort96 wrote 1 day ago:
> I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by
asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed
that it's AI written
I will never understand why some people apparently think asking a
chat bot whether text was written by a chat bot is a reasonable
approach to determining whether text was written by a chat bot.
rafram wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Fishkins wrote 1 day ago:
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
HTML [1]: https://www.aiweirdness.com/dont-use-ai-detectors-for-anyt...
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Tepix wrote 1 day ago:
Well, case in point:
If you ask an AI to grade an essay, it will grade the essay highest
that it wrote itself.
KeplerBoy wrote 1 day ago:
Pangram seems to disagree. Not sure how they do it, but their
system reliably detected AI in my tests.
HTML [1]: https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-predicts-21-of-iclr...
noitpmeder wrote 1 day ago:
Citations on this?
Tepix wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
[1] (in German, hopefully machine translation works well)
English article: [2] If you speak German, here is their talk
from 38c3:
HTML [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06651
HTML [2]: https://www.heise.de/en/news/38C3-AI-tools-must-be-eva...
HTML [3]: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-chatbots-im-schulunterrich...
the_af wrote 1 day ago:
Is this true though? I haven't done the experiment, but I can
envision the LLM critiquing its own output (if it was created in
a different session) and iteratively correcting it and always
finding flaws in it. Are LLMs even primed to say "this is perfect
and it needs no further improvements"?
What I have seen is ChatGPT and Claude battling it out, always
correcting and finding fault with each other's output (trying to
solve the same problem). It's hilarious.
Tepix wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
There is a study in German that came to this conclusion,
there's an english news article discussing it at
HTML [1]: https://heise.de/-10222370
lm28469 wrote 1 day ago:
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
whimsicalism wrote 1 day ago:
seems like an unrelated anecdote, but thanks for sharing.
hammock wrote 1 day ago:
Why canât llm answer that question? Photo itself ought to be
enough for a bit of information (more than the bozo has to begin
with, at least), and ideally its pulling location from metadata
and pulling flash flood risk etc from the area
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
Probably the correct answer the LLM should give is "if you have
to ask, definitely don't do that". Or... it can start asking
diagnostic questions, expert-system style.
But yeah, I can imagine a multi-modal model actually might have
more information and common sense than a human in a (for them)
novel situation.
If only to say "don't be an idiot", "pick higher ground" . Or
even just as a rubber duck!
Forgeties79 wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
I uploaded a simple spreadsheet that was 8 rows and 12
columns. Not even 100 full cells. They were filled with plain
text numbers and names, and a few dozen had green blocks,
otherwise no other info/styling and no formulas. I asked
ChatGPT âhow many cells are green.â It told me 13 (there
were over 30). I uploaded a photo. Still couldnât do it.
I understand there are things a typical LLM can do and things
that it cannot, this is mostly just because I figured it
couldnât do it and I just wanted to see what would happen.
But the average person is not really given much information
on the constraints and all of these companies are promising
the moon with these tools.
Short version: It definitely did not have more common sense
or information than a human, and we all know it sure would
have given a very confident answer about conditions in the
area to this person that were likely not correct. Definitely
incorrect if itâs based off a photo.
In my experience when it has to crawl the Internet itâs
particularly flaky. The other day I queried who won which
awards in the game awards. 3 different models got it wrong,
all of them omitted at least 2 categories. You could throw a
rock on a search engine and find 80 lists ready to go.
rukshn wrote 1 day ago:
No it was not like that. I assumed it was AI that was my
interpretation as a human. And it was kind of a test to see what
AI would say about the content.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
Sam Altman literally said he didn't know how anyone could raise a
baby without using a chatbot. We're living in some very weird
times right now.
faefox wrote 1 day ago:
Ironic, given Sam Altman's entire fortune and business model is
predicated on the infantilization of humanity.
seanhunter wrote 1 day ago:
To be fair he can't imagine many other aspects of what it is
like to be a normal human being.
mikewarot wrote 1 day ago:
Wow, that's profoundly dangerous. Personally, I don't see how
anyone could raise a kid without having a nurse in the family.
I wouldn't trust AI to determine if something were really a
medical issue or not, and would definitely have been at the
doctors far, far more often otherwise.
xwolfi wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
You don't need nurses -_-, just your own parents or someone
who had kids before and some random books for theoretical
questions.
Raising a kid is really very natural and instinctive, it's
just like how to make it sleep, what to feed it when, and how
to wash it. I felt no terror myself and just read my book or
asked my parents when I had some stupid doubt.
They feel like slightly more noisy cats, until they can talk.
Then they become little devils you need to tame back to
virtue.
elzbardico wrote 1 day ago:
We should refrain from the common mistake of anthropomorphizing
Sam Altman.
OwlsParlay wrote 1 day ago:
For people invested in AI it is becoming something like
Maslow's Hammer - "it is tempting, if the only tool you have is
a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail"
signatoremo wrote 1 day ago:
He didnât say âhow could anyoneâ. His words:
"I cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without
ChatGPT. Clearly, people did it for a long time, no problem."
Basically he didnât know much about newborn and relied on
ChatGPT for answers. That was a self deprecating attempt on a
late night show. Like every other freaking guests would do, no
matter how cliché. With a marketing slant of course. He
clearly said other people donât need ChatGPT.
Given all of the replies on this thread, HN is apparently
willing to stretch the truth if Sam Altman can be put under any
negative light.
HTML [1]: https://www.benzinga.com/markets/tech/25/12/49323477/o...
latexr wrote 1 day ago:
I disagree with the use of âliterallyâ by the person
above you, since Sam didnât literally say those words
(unless you subscribe to the new meaning of âliterallyâ
in the dictionary, of course).
At the same time, their interpretation doesnât seem that
far off. As per your comment, Sam said he âcannot imagine
figuring out howâ which is pretty close to admitting heâs
clueless how anyone does it, which is what your parent
comment said.
Itâs the difference between âI donât know how to
paintâ and âI cannot imagine figuring out how to
paintâ. Or âI donât know how to plant a gardenâ and
âI cannot imagine figuring out how to plant a gardenâ. Or
âI donât know how to programâ and âI cannot imagine
figuring out how to programâ.
In the former cases, one may not know specifically how to do
them but can imagine figuring those out. They could read a
book, try things out, ask someone who has achieved the
results they seek⦠If you can imagine how other people
mightâve done it, you can imagine figuring it out. In the
latter cases, it means you have zero idea where to start, you
canât even imagine how other people do it, hence you
donât know how anyone does do it.
The interpretation in your parent comment may be a bit loose
(again, I disagree with the use of âliterallyâ, though
thatâs a lost battle), but it is hardly unfair.
Anon1096 wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
The interpretation is very off. You are way too focused on
whether the first sentence is quote accurately. But
>Clearly, people did it for a long time, no problem.
In fact means Altman thinks the exact opposite of "he
didn't know how anyone could raise a baby without using a
chatbot" - what he means is that while it's not imaginable,
people make do anyway, so clearly it very much is possible
to raise kids without chatgpt.
What the gp did is the equivalent of someone saying "I
don't believe this, but XYZ" and quoting them as simply
saying they believe XYZ. People are eating it up though
because it's a dig at someone they don't like.
latexr wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
I think what Altman defenders in this particular thread
are failing to realise is that his real comment is
already worthy of scrutiny and ridicule and it is
dangerous.
Saying âno no, he didnât mean everyone, he was only
talking about himselfâ is not meaningfully better,
heâs still encouraging everyone to do what he does and
use ChatGPT to obsess about their newborn. It is enough
of a representation of his own cluelessness (or greed,
take your pick) to warrant criticism.
sunaookami wrote 1 day ago:
Kinda ironic how the rest of the replies treat it as the
truth without checking!
n4r9 wrote 1 day ago:
> One example given by Altman was meeting another father and
hearing that this dad's six-month-old son had already started
crawling, while Altman's had not. That prompted Altman to go
to the bathroom and ask ChatGPT questions about when the
average child crawls and if his son is behind.
> The OpenAI CEO said he "got a great answer back" and was
told that it was normal for his son not to be crawling yet.
To be fair, that is a relatable anxiety. But I can't imagine
Altman having the same difficulties as normal parents. He can
easily pay for round the clock childcare including during
night-times, weekends, mealtimes, and sickness. Not that he
does, necessarily, but it's there when he needs it. He'll
never know the crushing feeling of spending all day and all
night soothing a coughing, congested one-year-old whilst
feeling like absolute hell himself and having no other
recourse.
latexr wrote 1 day ago:
Sam Altman has revealed himself to be the type of tech bro who
is embarrassingly ignorant about the world and when faced with
a problem doesnât think âIâll learn how to solve thisâ
but âI know exactly whatâll fix this issue I understand
nothing about: a new appâ.
He said they have no idea how to make money, that theyâll
achieve AGI then ask it how to profit; heâs baffled that
chatbots are making social media feel fake; the thing you
mentioned with raising a child⦠[1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://www.startupbell.net/post/sam-altman-told-inves...
HTML [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/sam-altman-says-that...
HTML [3]: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altma...
astrange wrote 11 hours 14 min ago:
> He said they have no idea how to make money, that theyâll
achieve AGI then ask it how to profit
Seems reasonable to me. If it can't answer that it doesn't
work well enough.
Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a great way for someone to accidentally harm their
infant. What an irresponsible thing to say. There are all sorts
of little food risks, especially until they turn 1 or so (and
of course other matters too, but food immediately comes to
mind).
The stakes are too high and the amount youâre allowed to get
wrong is so low. Having been through the infant-wringer myself
yeah some people fret over things that arenât that big of a
deal, but some things can literally be life or death. I canât
imagine trying to vet ChatGPTâs âadviceâ while delirious
from lack of sleep and still in the trenches of learning to be
a parent.
But of course he just had to get that great marketing sound
bite didnât he?
the_af wrote 1 day ago:
Sam Altman decided to irresponsibly talk bullshit about
parenting because yes, he needed that marketing sound bite.
I cannot believe someone will wonder how people managed to
decode "my baby dropped pizza and then giggled" before LLMs.
I mean, if someone is honestly terrified about the answer to
this life-or-death question and cannot figure out life
without an LLM, they probably shouldn't be a parent.
Then again, Altman is faking it. Not sure if what he's faking
is this affectation of being a clueless parent, or of being a
human being.
Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs not the questions people will ask though.
Theyâll go âwhat body temperature is too high?â Baby
temperatures are not the same as ours. The threshold for
fevers and such are different.
They will ask âhow much water should my newborn drink?â
Thatâs a dangerous thing to get wrong (outside of certain
circumstances, the answer is ânone.â Milk/formula
provides necessary hydration).
They will ask about healthy food alternatives - what if it
tells them to feed their baby fresh honey on some homemade
concoction (botulism risk)?
People googled this stuff before, but a basic search
doesnât respond with you about how itâs right and
consistently feed you emotionally bad info in the same
fashion.
the_af wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
Agreed. I wasn't defending Altman!
Forgeties79 wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
I was mostly responding to the section about how those
people should not be parents but I mustâve misread
tone/missed something.
the_af wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
I was mostly arguing that Altman's statements, if
taken at face value, show him to be unfit to be a
parent. I stand by this, but mostly because I think
people like him -- Altman, Musk, I tend to conflate
-- are robots masquerading as human beings.
That said, of course Altman is being cynical about
this. He's just marketing his product, ChatGPT. I
don't believe for a minute he really outsources his
baby's well-being to an LLM.
Timpy wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM
data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors
of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese
idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ã" or
"ã§ããã", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of
every message.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intel...
casey2 wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
樣 is just setting us up for
ChatGPT :|
ChatGPT (japan) XD
bpodgursky wrote 23 hours 30 min ago:
This is a wild misunderstanding of LLMs. Data labeling has nothing
to do with generating the astronomical text corpus used to train
modern LLMs.
heavyset_go wrote 22 hours 54 min ago:
The HF part of RLHF to refine the output of LLMs also happens in
these places
astrange wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
Note RLHF can only perform selection on existing model outputs,
adding new data is SFT or else just more pretraining.
ChatGPT speaking African English was mostly just 3.5. 4o speaks
like a TikTok user from LA. 5 seems kind of generic.
bakugo wrote 1 day ago:
I guess it can't be helped.
koakuma-chan wrote 20 hours 18 min ago:
It's not because I like you or anything.
erikig wrote 1 day ago:
The Indian-born textbook author mentioned (Malkiat Singh [0]) had an
inordinate influence on many Kenyan students because his textbooks
were the de-facto standard for years. Its interesting how this
influence extends as his students get to curate the LLMs on which the
world has come to rely.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malkiat_Singh
jojobas wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
So twists of training data procurement bring us the best of doing
the needful through Africa.
m4rtink wrote 1 day ago:
You are completely right dajou~ ^_^ !
delis-thumbs-7e wrote 13 hours 0 min ago:
Maybe we all should start writing Japanglish to show our
authenticity? Or rather, âMaybe we all should start writing the
Japanglish, so that peoples can feel our real soul, you know?â
checker659 wrote 1 day ago:
Bang on. The self proclaimed detectives have never had to take TOEFL
where you'll get marks deducted for not using connectors like
furthermore.
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
Goodness, I forgot about TOEFL. That might indeed shape a lot of your
early vocabulary choices if you need to get an English certificate
(which I suppose would happen during college years, which is also
when most of your personal writing style gels together).
xeonmc wrote 1 day ago:
Funny how sci-fi always envisioned AI to speak in a rigid,
hyper-rational terseness, whereas reality gave us AI which inherited
the worst linguistic vices of "human" voices.
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
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.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
Probably because we're discussing the chatbot form of AI rather than
a more general one.
Kuinox wrote 1 day ago:
You call writing in a structured fashion with formal words the "worst
linguistic vices"
komali2 wrote 1 day ago:
I was trying to figure out why my SD card wasn't mounting and asked
ChatGPT. It said:
> Your kernel is actually being very polite here. It sees the USB
reader, shakes its hand, reads its name tag⦠and then nothing
further happens. That tells us something important. Letâs walk
this like a methodical gremlin.
It's so sickly sweet. I hate it.
Some other quotes:
> Letâs 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: âFailed to enable⦠already exists.â Despite
the ominous tone, this is usually systemdâs way of saying:
âFriend, the thing youâre trying to enable is already
enabled.â
Kuinox wrote 1 day ago:
Did you not put some weird thing in your prompt ? That's not the
style of writing I have in my ChatGPT, I run without memory and
with default prompt.
Yours try to make a metaphore at every single response.
You can check both in ChatGPT settings.
komali2 wrote 1 day ago:
These are cherry picked. Mostly the first and last sentence
look like this.
I just checked settings, apparently I had it set to "nerdy,"
that might be why. I've just changed it to "efficient,"
hopefully that'll help.
xeonmc wrote 1 day ago:
The worst vices are the superfluous faux-eloquence that meanders
without meaning. Employing linguistic devices for the sake of
utilizing them without managing to actually make a point with its
usage.
scandox wrote 1 day ago:
Looking forward to the deliberately abstruse and illogical essays of
the future. Everyone will have to write like a second-rate French
philosopher.
esafak wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
This so-called âhuman touchâ 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 empireâs syntax ...
PeterStuer wrote 1 day ago:
"Rewrite this email paragraph in the style of a corporate ToS
statement. Do NOT expose my orders and their implicit acceptance of
them by the recipient pending a 24 hr deadline anywhere before page
18."
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
The internet been the same for a long time, it's just the wording that
changed. As someone who apparently thinks differently, the amount of
time people just end up saying "Well, you're just a troll, no one
actually believes something like that, so whatever" since I started
frequenting the internet in the early 2000s is the same as always. But
some people try to be trendy and accuse you of using AI for writing the
replies instead, but it's the same sentiment.
Besides, of course what people write will sound as LLMs, since LLMs are
trained on what we've been writing on the internet... For us who've
been lucky and written a lot and are more represented in the dataset,
the writings of LLMs will be closer to how we already wrote, but then
of course we get the blame for sounding like LLMs, because apparently
people don't understand that LLMs were trained on texts written by
humans...
Terretta wrote 1 day ago:
Love this, everything about this - I still teach the foundation, 3
columns, roof, of the persuasive essay - except one bit:
Perplexity gauges how predictable a text is. If I start a sentence,
"The cat sat on the...", your brain, and the AI, will predict the word
"floor."
No. No no no. The next word is "mat"!
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
rat. And its claws dug in its back.
How do you like that, Mr. Rat
Thought the Cat.
sam-cop-vimes wrote 1 day ago:
ha ha - I had the same thought!
bryanhogan wrote 1 day ago:
AI / LLMs, including ChatGPT, can already be made to sound (almost) any
way you want, just by telling it to. The usual tells that something was
written or created by AI are changing monthly.
Just recently I was amazed with how good text produced by Gemini 3 Pro
in Thinking mode is. It feels like a big improvement, again.
But we also have to honest and accept that nowadays using a certain
kind of vocabulary or paragraph structure will make people think that
that text was written by AI.
elcapitan wrote 1 day ago:
Ironically, mistakes and idiosyncrasies are becoming a sign of
authenticity and trustworthiness, while polish and quality signal the
opposite.
Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post that started with a sentence
that was obviously written by someone with a slavic background (most
writers from other language families create certain grammatical
patterns when writing in another language, e.g. German is also quite
typical). My first thought was "great, this is most likely not written
by a LLM".
userbinator wrote 21 hours 41 min ago:
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.
notahacker wrote 1 day ago:
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.
oersted wrote 1 day ago:
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.
elcapitan wrote 1 day ago:
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.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
AI is not only replacing us, it's forcing us to self-dumb down too!
lencastre wrote 1 day ago:
until you ask it write like this, because why use many word when few
do trick?
throwaway613745 wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe for writing, but in digital art circles if anyone notices a
mistake in your lines or perspective or any kind of technical error
you will get the anti-AI cancel mob after you even if you didnât
use generative AI at all.
I would not want to be an artist in the current environment, itâs
total chaos.
renewiltord wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
Social media artists appear to be bucket crabs. If any of them
succeed, the remainder express reactor-grade envy and attempt to
tear them down. Perhaps it's the relative poverty and the low
stakes of the field that drive it to this end.
raincole wrote 1 day ago:
> artist
Social media artists, gallery artists and artists in the industry
(I mean people who work for big game/film studios, not industrial
designers) are very different groups. Social media artists are
having it the hardest.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
I'm an artist in the current environment, it's not total chaos.
Ignore what others are doing, do what you want with the tools you
have available, and you'll be fine. There are huge echo-chambers on
the internet, but once you get out in the real world, things are
not as people on the internet paints it out to be.
lynx97 wrote 1 day ago:
Systemic discrimination, happens all the time. I am blind. I
regularily fail the "tell computers and humans apart" test. You
imagine, that feels very much like the dehumanisation it is. Big tech
couldn't care less. After all, they need to protect themselves against
spammers. Much like the guy who was on the HN frontpage just a few
days ago, arguing that he is now trashing accessibility because he
doesn't want to be web scraped. If you raise these issues with devs,
all you get it pushback, no understanding at all. Thats the way it is.
If you are amongst a minority small enough and without a rainbow
coloured flag, you end up being ignored, stepped over, and pushed
aside. If you are lucky. If you are unlucky, and you raise your
voice, you will be critizied for pointing out the obvious.
PeterStuer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lynx97 wrote 1 day ago:
I know... Its depressing.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
> arguing that he is now trashing accessibility because he doesn't
want to be web scraped
Interesting, because he failed me too just because I use Firefox.
Have you been told about the article or it actually worked with your
screen reader software?
lynx97 wrote 1 day ago:
I have to admit I only read the heading. I didn't want to read the
article, that would have ruined my day.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
He messed with the glyph indexes in a customized font so the text
is gibberish if you look just at the code points but displays as
english.
That would probably mess up any screen reader, but it also didn't
work on a regular Firefox :)
SSLy wrote 1 day ago:
wasn't that the article about the obfuscation of kindle ebooks?
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
[1] No, don't think so. To compensate, I probably missed the
article about the obfuscation of kindle ebooks...
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264955
SSLy wrote 1 day ago:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
Hmm 2 months ago. Now I wonder if the link you posted
inspired the link I posted...
p410n3 wrote 1 day ago:
I always thought the whole argument was about explicitly using em dash
and / or en dash. Aka â and â.
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.
vsl wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, the joys of mass ignorance.
- Barely literate native English speakers not comprehending even
minimally sophisticated grammatical constructs.
- Windows-centric people not understanding that you can trivially
type em-dash (well, en-dash, but people donât understand the
difference either) on Mac by typing - twice.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
> and basically no one will care
Wow, you really do under/over estimate some of us :)
p410n3 wrote 1 day ago:
Fair. I was probably just projecting. I cant even figure out when
to use a comma in my native language. So caring about which type of
hyphen was used feels like overly sophisticated to me - because I
dont care myself.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, no, I was only joking. I may be a grammar pedant, but I can
also do self-deprecation.
foundddit wrote 1 day ago:
Recently, many people do use the em dash. One big reason is that iOS
and I think macOS auto converts a double - into an em dash.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
The funniest thing I see are people who are harking "Eww, you used AI
for this and it's bad because of that, I can tell because I used this
other AI service who said what you wrote was 90% of AI", completely
failing to grasp the irony.
shlip wrote 1 day ago:
This must be infuriating:
> You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal
rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a
machine built an ocean away calls you a fake.
This is :
> humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors,
American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational
rhythm
And once you start noticing the 'threes', it's fun also.
philipwhiuk wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, "to err is human" was written in the 1700s, by the
enlightenment era author the essay writer is presumably reading.
Humanity has always been about errors.
dismantlethesun wrote 1 day ago:
Ironically OpenAI used Kenyan workers[1] to train its AI and now we've
come to the point where Kenyans are being excluded because they sound
too much like the AI that they helped train.
HTML [1]: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
rcarmo wrote 1 day ago:
I actually think that's a great endorsement of Kenyan education. I
don't deal with English-speaking African countries that often (I'm
Portuguese, so naturally we have ties to other bits of the
continent), but I've often been impressed by how well they
communicate regardless of the profession they're in--I don't mean
that as a bias, but rather as it befitting the kind of conversation
you'd have with an English major in the UK (to which I have a lot of
exposure).
Perhaps the US-centric "optimization" of English is to blame here,
since it is so obvious in regular US media we all consume across the
planet, and is likely the contrasting style.
tantalor wrote 1 day ago:
It's not ironic
dismantlethesun wrote 1 day ago:
I think it is. The irony is that the people you hired to help make
your machine seem human are seen as mechanical because of their
distinct and uniformly sophisticated tone. Thus we have a situation
thatâs contrary to expectations.
wccrawford wrote 1 day 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.
t0lo wrote 13 hours 54 min ago:
It writes well by the impression of the average person...
zjp wrote 1 day ago:
LLMs don't even write as well as people do. If you talk to them long
enough, you'll notice they produce the same errors careless people
do. Sometimes they wrongly elide the article 'a'. They occasionally
mess up 'a/an' vowel agreement. The most grating thing of all is that
the fully-elided 'because' (as in 'because traffic') lives on in LLM
output, even though you rarely see it anymore because people rightly
got the sense it was unfair for a writer to offload semantic
reconstruction to the reader.
I have a confession to make: I didn't think lulcat speak was funny,
even at the time.
It's pretty annoying and once you catch them doing it, you can't
stop.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got
accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes
Outrage mills mill outrage. If it wasn't this, it would be something
else. The fact that the charge resonated is notable. But the fact
that it exists is not.
killerstorm wrote 1 day ago:
This reminds me of Idiocracy: "Ah, you talk like a fag, and your
shit's all retarded" as a response to a normal speech.
woliveirajr wrote 1 day ago:
And good students are getting in trouble (meaning "have to explain
themselves") to lousy teachers just because they write well,
articulate ideas and can summarize information from documents where
other regular people would make mistakes.
twoodfin wrote 1 day ago:
ChatGPT does not âwrite wellâ unless your standard is some set of
statistical distributions for vocabulary, sentence length, phrase
structure, â¦
Writing well is about communicating ideas effectively to other
humans. To be fair, throughout linguistic history it was easier to
appeal to an audienceâs innate sense of authority by âsounding
smartâ. Actually being smart in using the written word to hone the
sharpness of a penetrating idea is not particularly evident in
LLMâs to date.
xeonmc wrote 1 day ago:
Good writers use words to make a point. LLMs use words to make a
salad.
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
Depends what you ask the LLM to do!
If you're using it to write in programming language, you often
actually get something that runs (provided your specifications
are good - or your instructions for writing the specifications
are specific enough!) .
If you're asking for natural language output ... yeah... you need
to watch it like a hawk by hand - sure. It'd be nice if there was
some way to test-suite natural language writing.
zdragnar wrote 1 day ago:
The last time I asked it to write something in a programming
language, it put together a class that seemed reasonable at
first blush, but after review found it did not do what it was
supposed to do.
The tests were even worse. They exercised the code, tossed the
result, then essentially asserted that true was equal to true.
When I told it what was wrong and how to fix it, it instead
introduced some superfluous public properties and a few new
defects without correcting the original mistake.
The only code I would trust today's agents with is so simple I
don't want or need an agent to write it.
antonvs wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
Like most other tools, it can take some experience to become
good at using them. What youâre describing suggests a lack
of that, assuming you used a good coding model or reasonably
recent frontier model.
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, people have wildly different experiences.
I think it depends on what models you are using and what
you're asking them to do, and whether that's actually inside
their technical abilities. There are not always good manuals
for this.
My last experience: I asked claude to code-read for me, and
it dug out some really obscure bugs in old Siemens Structured
Text source code .
A friend's last experience: they had an agent write an entire
Christmas-themed adventure game from scratch (that ran
perfectly).
wongarsu wrote 1 day ago:
But they will make the salad delicious, marvelous and intricate.
It's not just a salad - it's a new way to talk like marketing
copy (/s)
tete wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on your definition of "well". I hate that writing style. It's
the same writing style that people who want to sell you something use
and it seems to be really good at tiring the reader out - or at least
me.
It gives a vibe like a car salesman and I really dislike it and
personally I consider it a very bad writing style for this very
reason.
I do very much prefer LLMs that don't appear to be trained on such
data or try to word questions a lot more to have more sane writing
styles.
That being said it also reminds me of journalistic articles that feel
like the person just tried to reach some quota using up a lot of
grand words to say nothing. In my country of residence the biggest
medium (a public one) has certain sections that are written exactly
like that. Luckily these are labeled. It's the section that is a bit
more general, not just news and a bit more "artsy" and I know that
their content is largely meaningless and untrue. Usually it's enough
to click on the source link or find the source yourself to see it
says something completely different. Or it's a topic that one knows
about. So there even are multiple layers to being "like LLMs".
The fact that people are taught to write that way outside of
marketing or something surprises me.
That being said, this is just my general genuine dislike of this
writing style. How an LLM writes is up to a lot of things, also how
you engage with it. To some degree they copy your own style, because
of how they work. But for generic things there is always that
"marketing talk" which I always assumed is simply because the
internet/social media is littered with ads.
Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?
twoodfin wrote 1 day ago:
Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?
Iâm highly skeptical. At one point the author tries to argue this
local pedagogy is downstream of âThe Queenâs Englishâ &
British imperial tradition, but modern LLM-speak is a couple orders
of magnitude closer in the vector space to LinkedIn clout-chasing
than anything from that world.
thevillagechief wrote 1 day ago:
Yes they are, or rather, we were when I was in primary school. My
essays (we called them composition) were filled with these these
red check marks for every esoteric word, proverb, metaphor or
simile you used. The more you had the higher you'd score. So I
did my homework with a dictionary open. I remember writing some
document at work in the US and everyone commenting on how Queen's
English it was. This was before ChatGPT. I know know it was all
silly, and I've spent a bunch of time learning to write simply.
But then I've listen to too many tech podcasts, and now I find
silicon valley tech-speak creeping in, and I hate it. The one
that I hear everywhere now that I swear not to ever use is let's
double-click on that point. Just why?
twoodfin wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, I believe that completely. But that's not how ChatGPT
writes!
Here are some random examples from one of the (at least)
half-dozen LLM-co-written posts that rose high on the front
page over the weekend: [1] You write a record to disk before
applying it to your in-memory state. If you crash, you replay
the log and recover. Done. Except your disk is lying to you.
This is why people who've lost data in production are paranoid
about durability. And rightfully so.
Why this matters: Hardware bit flips happen. Disk firmware
corrupts data. Memory busses misbehave. And here's the kicker:
None of these trigger an error flag.
Together, they mean: "I know this is slower. I also know I
actually care about durability."
This creates an ordering guarantee without context switches.
Both writes complete before we return control to the
application. No race conditions. No reordering.
... I only got about halfway through. This is just phrasing,
forget about the clickbaity noun-phrase subheads or random
boldface.
None of these are representative (I hope!) of the kind of
"sophisticated" writing meant to reinforce class distinctions
or whatever. It's just blech LinkedIn-speak.
HTML [1]: https://blog.canoozie.net/disks-lie-building-a-wal-tha...
thevillagechief wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I agree. I think the point here was the self-appointed AI
detectives, who will declare any writing style unfamiliar to
them a product of ChatGPT. You might remember the Paul Graham
"delve-gate" controversy on twitter last year. It was exactly
this.
twoodfin wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
Yeah. But I will die on the hill that ChatGPT (today, at
least) is a bad writer, and makes prompted writing worse in
a way that isn't anything like the way schematic style or
vocabulary rules might for an over-eager student.
For whatever combination of prompt and context, ChatGPT 5.2
did some writing for me the other day that didn't have any
of the surface style I find so abrasive. But it could still
only express its purported insights in the same "A & ~B"
structure and other GPT-isms beneath the surface. Truly
effective writers are adept with a much broader set of
rhetorical and structural tools.
rich_sasha wrote 1 day ago:
ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting
on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like
"the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single.
Time." And so on.
dogleash wrote 1 day ago:
It's the content mill blogspam voice. The machine generated slop
looks a lot like the artisan hand crafted slop.
the_af wrote 1 day ago:
I saw this described as LLMs writing "punched up" paragraphs, and
every paragraph must be maximally impacting. Where a human would
acknowledge some paragraphs are simply filler, a way to reach some
point, to "default" LLMs every paragraph must have maximum effect,
like a mic drop.
esafak wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
The silver lining is that this style has been carpet bombed by
LLMs. Nobody will be able to write like this without being
ridiculed ever again.
bryanrasmussen wrote 1 day ago:
"Every. Single. Time." has been a staple of American online humor
for at least a decade. Commonly used, hence commonly used by
ChatGPT.
n4r9 wrote 1 day ago:
This may be true. I personally didn't get any hint of LLM usage from
their writing. Even where they use em-dashes it's for stuff like
this:
> there is - in my observational opinion - a rather dark and
insidious slant to it
That feels too authentic and personal to be any of the current
generation of LLMs.
petesergeant wrote 1 day ago:
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote 1 day ago:
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.
petesergeant wrote 21 hours 32 min ago:
Double hyphen works in many places
gowld wrote 1 day ago:
On Mac emdash is option-shift-hypen (aka shift-endash, aka
capital endash)
In Menlo font (Chrome on Mac's default monospace font, used for
HN comments) em-dash(â) and en-dash (â) use the same
glyph, though.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
And many of us human writers would have done so, too, since we've
had to learn theânot very obscureâkeyboard shortcut to insert
an emdash.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system
prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget
LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate)
computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can
come up with an instruction to remove.
astrange wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
That doesn't work, they beat it so hard into ChatGPT it won't
always listen to you about it.
You can't stop it from doing the "if you like I can " thing in
every reply either.
Kim_Bruning wrote 1 day ago:
They're really not programmable computers! (Bad mental model is
bad.)
But yes the current commercial ones are somewhat controllable,
much of the time.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Obviously not, computers are the true programmable computers.
But I'd still think it's accurate to say they're like
programmable computers that are sometimes inaccurate, for
most intents and purposes it's a fine mental model unless you
really wanna get into the weeds.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
Except for your poor editor who then has to manually replace
your hyphens with proper em dashes. Still, if you're already
disrespecting your editor enough to feed them AI slop...
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
My editor? I don't think it cares what I input into it, it's
just a program. As long as I feed it characters it'll happily
tick along as always.
jasonjmcghee wrote 1 day ago:
The parent comment is referring to a human editor, not a
text editor.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Huge assumption on their side then, isn't the context
"humans writing for other humans"? Not sure how
"publication editors" entered the conversation nor from
where.
oneeyedpigeon wrote 1 day ago:
I was referring to a human editor, which I thought was
obvious enough from context. I assumed the reply was in
jest. My original comment was light-hearted, so I don't
think it needs to be rigorously analysed, but plenty of
humans write for other humans but still have an editor
involved in the process.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
Actually it's public info that ChatGPT was originally trained by
speakers of some african business english "dialect". [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
> They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is
taught in the entire area.
Nigeria and Kenya are two very different regions with different
spheres of business. I don't know, but I wouldn't expect the
English to overlap that much.
neffy wrote 1 day ago:
There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating
around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are
particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author
says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the
colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common
"educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local
accents and dialects back in the motherland.
guerrilla wrote 1 day ago:
That's not a very good argument, because then you could say the
same for American, Canada, South Africa, Australia and so on.
If recency is an issue, then here's a list of colonies that got
their freedom around the same time:
Cyprus, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, Tanzania, Jamaica,
Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Malta,
Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius,
Eswatini (Swaziland).
If what you're saying is right then you'd have to admit
Jamaican and Barbados English are just the same as Kenyan or
Nigerian... but they're not. They're radically different
because they're radically different regions. Uganda and Kenya
being similar is what I would expect, but not necessarily
Nigeria...
Barrin92 wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
>They're radically different because they're radically
different regions.
They're radically different predominantly at the street level
and everyday usage, but the kind of professional English of
journalists, academics and writers that the author of the
article was surrounded by is very recognizable.
You can tell an American from an Australian on the beach but
in a journal or article in a paper of record that's much more
difficult. Higher ed English with its roots in a classical
British education you can find all over the globe.
guerrilla wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
That's not my experience at all. I can quite easily
identify Kenyans, Australians and English from the way they
write and they're all rather unique.
Go read some Kenyan news. It's very obvious.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
But The Guardian could have been wrong about the country, and I'm
a stupid European so I just don't know.
All we can hope is for a local to show up and explain.
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