I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me
113 comments
·December 15, 2025komali2
> There were unspoken rules, commandments passed down from teacher to student, year after year. The first commandment? Thou shalt begin with a proverb or a powerful opening statement. “Haste makes waste,” we would write, before launching into a tale about rushing to the market and forgetting the money. The second? Thou shalt demonstrate a wide vocabulary. You didn’t just ‘walk’; you ‘strode purposefully’, ‘trudged wearily’, or ‘ambled nonchalantly’. You didn’t just ‘see’ a thing; you ‘beheld a magnificent spectacle’. Our exercise books were filled with lists of these “wow words,” their synonyms and antonyms drilled into us like multiplication tables.
Well, this is very interesting, because I'm a native English speaker that studied writing in university, and the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences. It's all Hemingway now, and if I spot an adverb or, lord forbid, a "proceeded to," I feel the pain in my bones.
The way ChatGPT writes drives me insane. As for the author, clearly they're very good, but I prefer a much simpler style. I feel like the big boy SAT words should pop out of the page unaccompanied, just one per page at most.
lo_zamoyski
> the deeper I got into the world of literature, the further I was pushed towards simpler language and shorter sentences
Language is like clothing.
Those with no taste - but enough money - will dress in gaudy ways to show off their wealth. The clothing is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a piece of jewelry only if it contributes to the ensemble. Oh, no. They’ll drape themselves with gold chains and festoon their fingers with chunky diamond rings. Brand names will litter their clothing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly.
By analogy, those with no taste - but enough vocabulary - will use words in flashy ways to show off their knowledge. Language is merely a vector for this purpose. They won’t use a word only if it contributes to the prose. Oh, no. They’ll drape their phrases with unnecessarily unusual terms and festoon their sentences with clumsy grammar. Obfuscation, rather than clarity, will define their writing. The composition will lack intelligibility, cohesiveness, and proportion. It will be ugly.
As you can see, the first difference is one of purpose: the vulgarian aims for the wrong thing.
You might also say that the vulgarian also lacks a kind of temperance in speech.
rukshn
I had a similar experience. We were talking about a colleague for using ChatGPT in our WhatsApp group chat to sound smart and coming up with interesting points. The talk sounds so mechanical and sounds exactly as ChatGPT.
His responses in Zoom Calls were the same mechanical and sounds like AI generated. I even checked one of his responses in WhatsApp if it's AI by asking the Meta AI whether it's AI written, and Meta AI also agreed that it's AI written and gave points to why it believes this message was AI written.
When I showed the response to the colleague he swore that he was not using ant AI to write his responses. I believe after he said to me it was not AI written. And now reading this I can imagine that it's not an isolated experience.
mort96
> 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.
lm28469
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
oneeyedpigeon
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.
hammock
Why can’t 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
rukshn
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.
Tepix
Well, case in point:
If you ask an AI to grade an essay, it will grade the essay highest that it wrote itself.
noitpmeder
Citations on this?
the_af
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 interactively 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.
tuetuopay
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?
wccrawford
It's the curse of writing well. ChatGPT is designed to write well, and so everyone who does that is accused of being AI.
I just saw someone today that multiple people accused of using ChatGPT, but their post was one solid block of text and had multiple grammar errors. But they used something similar to the way ChatGPT speaks, so they got accused of it and the accusers got massive upvotes.
nottorp
Actually it's public info that ChatGPT was originally trained by speakers of some african business english "dialect".
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...
They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Maybe the article author will chip in.
> ChatGPT is designed to write well
If you define well as overly verbose, avoiding anything that could be considered controversial, and generally sycophantic but bland soulless corporate speak, yes.
guerrilla
> 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
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.
nottorp
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.
twoodfin
ChatGPT does not “write well” unless your standard is some set of statistical distributions for vocabulary, sentence length, phrase structure, …
Writing well is about communicating ideas effectively to other humans. To be fair, throughout linguistic history it was easier to appeal to an audience’s innate sense of authority by “sounding smart”. Actually being smart in using the written word to hone the sharpness of a penetrating idea is not particularly evident in LLM’s to date.
xeonmc
Good writers use words to make a point. LLMs use words to make a salad.
n4r9
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
ChatGPT would have used an actual em dash instead of a hyphen
embedding-shape
Add "Always use dash instead of em dash" to the developer/system prompt, and that's never an "issue" anymore. Seems people forget LLMs are really just programmable (sometimes inaccurate) computers. Whatever you can come up with a signal, someone can come up with an instruction to remove.
oneeyedpigeon
And many of us human writers would have done so, too, since we've had to learn the—not very obscure—keyboard shortcut to insert an emdash.
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woliveirajr
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.
tete
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
Are Kenyans really taught to write that way?
I’m highly skeptical. At one point the author tries to argue this local pedagogy is downstream of “The Queen’s English” & British imperial tradition, but modern LLM-speak is a couple orders of magnitude closer in the vector space to LinkedIn clout-chasing than anything from that world.
rich_sasha
ChatGPT writes a particular dialect of good writing. Always insisting on cliffhangers towards the summary, or "strong enumerations", like "the candidate turned out to be a bot. Using ChatGPT. Every. Single. Time." And so on.
bryanrasmussen
"Every. Single. Time." has been a staple of American online humor for at least a decade. Commonly used, hence commonly used by ChatGPT.
the_af
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.
killerstorm
This reminds me of Idiocracy: "Ah, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded" as a response to a normal speech.
codeflo
To my eyes, this author doesn't write like ChatGPT at all. Too many people focus on the em-dashes as the giveaway for ChatGPT use, but they're a weak signal at best. The problem is that the real signs are more subtle, and the em-dash is very meme-able, so of course, armies of idiots hunt down any user of em-dashes.
Update: To illustrate this, here's a comparison of a paragraph from this article:
> It is a new frontier of the same old struggle: The struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the same presumption of humanity that is afforded so easily to others. My writing is not a product of a machine. It is a product of my history. It is the echo of a colonial legacy, the result of a rigorous education, and a testament to the effort required to master the official language of my own country.
And ChatGPT's "improvement":
> This is a new frontier of an old struggle: the struggle to be seen, to be understood, to be granted the easy presumption of humanity that others receive without question. My writing is not the product of a machine. It is the product of history—my history. It carries the echo of a colonial legacy, bears the imprint of a rigorous education, and stands as evidence of the labor required to master the official language of my own country.
Yes, there's an additional em-dash, but what stands out to me more is the grandiosity. Though I have to admit, it's closer than I would have thought before trying it out; maybe the author does have a point.
Miraltar
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
dismantlethesun
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.
tantalor
It's not ironic
elcapitan
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".
oersted
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
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.
throwaway613745
Maybe for writing, but in digital art circles if anyone notices a mistake in your lines or perspective or any kind of technical error you will get the anti-AI cancel mob after you even if you didn’t use generative AI at all.
I would not want to be an artist in the current environment, it’s total chaos.
embedding-shape
I'm an artist in the current environment, it's not total chaos. Ignore what others are doing, do what you want with the tools you have available, and you'll be fine. There are huge echo-chambers on the internet, but once you get out in the real world, things are not as people on the internet paints it out to be.
raincole
> 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.
oneeyedpigeon
AI is not only replacing us, it's forcing us to self-dumb down too!
lencastre
until you ask it write like this, because why use many word when few do trick?
dilap
I read about 4 paragraphs of the blog post, it does not at all read like it was written by ChatGPT!
Some people are perhaps overly focussed on superficial things like em-dashes. The real tells for ChatGPT writing are more subtle -- a tendency towards hyperboly (it's not A, it's [florid restatment of essentially A] B!), a certain kind of rhythym, and frequently a kind of hard to describe "emptiness" of claims.
(LLMs can write in mang styles, but this is the sort of "kid filling out the essay word count" style you get in chatgpt etc by default.)
Sharlin
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.
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ezoe
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?
mattbee
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
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.
bryanhogan
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.
p410n3
I always thought the whole argument was about explicitly using em dash and / or en dash. Aka — and –.
Because while people OBVIOUSLY use dashes in writing, humans usually fell back on using the (technically incorrect) hyphen aka the "minus symbol" - because thats whats available on the keyboards and basically no one will care.
Seems like, in the biggest game of telephone called the internet, this has devolved into "using any form of dash = AI".
Great.
embedding-shape
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.
vsl
Yeah, the joys of mass ignorance.
- Barely literate native English speakers not comprehending even minimally sophisticated grammatical constructs.
- Windows-centric people not understanding that you can trivially type em-dash (well, en-dash, but people don’t understand the difference either) on Mac by typing - twice.
foundddit
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.
oneeyedpigeon
> and basically no one will care
Wow, you really do under/over estimate some of us :)
p410n3
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
Ah, no, I was only joking. I may be a grammar pedant, but I can also do self-deprecation.
A lot of training data was curated in Kenya[0]. I would imagine if LLM data was curated in Japan our LLMs would sound a lot like the authors of their most popular English text books. Maybe other common Japanese idioms would leak in to the training data, like "ね" or "でしょう", ChatGPT would say "Don't you agree?" at the end of every message.
https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...