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I have observed that South Asians like this excuse a lot because their own notion of English fluency and "high-class" writing is very similar to ChatGPTese: too many words, spicy metaphors, abuse of idioms, witticisms, hyperbolic imagery, casual winking at the reader, lots of assorted verbal flourish, "it's not X – it's Y" and other… practices impress and fascinate them; ChatGPT provides a royal road to the top, to the Brahmin league, becoming like Chamath or Balaji. Maybe they played a role in RLHF.
In my view, all prose of this kind, whether organic or synthetic, is insufferable redditslop. But at least human South Asians are usually trying to express some opinion, and an LLM pass over it detracts from whatever object-level precision it had.
This is part of the general problem with taste, which is sadly even less equally distributed between branches of humanity than cognitive ability.
P.S. No, this is not a specific dig at self_made_human, I mainly mean people I see on X and Substack, it's incredibly obvious. I am also not claiming to be a better writer; pompous South Asian redditslop is apparently liked well enough by American native speakers, whereas I'm just an unknown Ruskie, regularly accused of obscurantism and overly long sentences. I do have faith in the superiority of my own taste, but it's a futile thing to debate.
lol, I made this association before getting halfway through your first paragraph
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I would like to see someone do some kind of analysis of whether writing style is genetic. How you would adjust for the confounder of culture, I have no idea.
Adoption studies.
I am pretty sure temperament is largely genetic, but that shouldn't translate into such a conspicuous stylistic pattern as you get from cultural environment.
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