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With the increased usage of ChatGPT and other aislop in everyday communication such as casual emails and slack messages, AI apologists have increasingly tried to excuse this usage by non-native English speakers(citation needed, but besides the point). The excuse being that for non-native speakers, AI usage can save time, or even increase the quality of the resulting writing. I want to argue this is actually the opposite, and that using AI output particularly and exceptionally corrosive when used by non-English speakers.
I came across this section(plaintext transcription in below comment) of a YT video, where an intermediate level English learner is trying to use ChatGPT improve a piece of writing, and also learn from it. (source video, not important). Here’s the catch ChatGPT’s output is just plain bad
Overall, my issues with ChatGPT for this use case can be broken down into three main problems:
Let’s go over the main revisions point by point
stunning -> absolutely mind-blowing - Stunning is already quite a strong adjective and ChatGPT is overdoing it. OK edit.
I commented -> I typed in the comments - Absolutely a bad edit. More wordy for no more meaning, and the original English is more true to the original Japanese.
Moreover -> Not only that - Moreover is perfect here. Bad edit.
Em dash - not called for here. AI tell.
reacted really disgusting me -> actually reacted - This seriously changes the meaning, taking away a major element of the storytelling. Bad edit.
I’m in a heaven right now -> I’m in heaven - I’m in heaven right now is emphasis. Bad edit.
It was a peaceful and amazing moment in my life -> That one moment was pure peace and bliss. Probably one of the best highlights of my life. - Deemphasized and wordified into two sentences. A better version would easily be “It was the most peaceful and amazing moment in my life”. Bad edit.
And also, the most excited thing is -> And the most exciting part is still ahead. - AI slop tell. Bad edit.
I could die there -> nothing - ChatGPT just took that out completely!!!! WFT!!!!
I really wanna support her live too. -> I really, truly want to support her with everything I’ve got. - “really, truly” came out of nowhere and the double emphasis with “with everything I’ve got” is odd. Bad edit.
Imagine that live I feel like drinking her bath water. -> Just thinking about that live … feels like I could drink her bathwater. - This one is totally lost. Basic context clues and cultural knowledge make it clear that the narrator already wants to drink gamer girl bathwater irregardless of any live. The correct edit would be “When I imagine that live, I feel like I’m drinking her bathwater” or “Imagining that live feels like drinking her bathwater.” The original English is closer to correct than ChatGPT and the correct meaning can be inferred.
Of course ChatGPT can probably be made to produce better outputs with better prompting, or used differently, but this is just one of many examples where ChatGPT usage by a casual user has actually made things worse.
Now what's the point of this post? First I would like to urge everyone not to use GenAI outputs in the final work, even for edits. Using AI as a judge is probably fine, but the best way to maintain quality is probably write all of the final text in your own words. Even for people without perfect English. Secondly, with all levels of society using or even abusing AI tools, it may increase productivity by some metrics, it will also be like an enshittification of all written communication.
We've seen an increasing number of complaints enter the discourse about foreign immigrants with weak English skills just being annoying to deal with in everyday life. And I've also had similar experiences, where dealing with a fresh off the boat foreigner has been an annoyance when ordering food or asking a simple question - and also where hiring an American would have only costed a tiny bit more. Well now AI slop is going to provide a double whammy - lazy or misguided native speakers are going to enshittify their own communication with slop, and also foreigners will have their English learning impeded, and the English they do write will be worse.
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.
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.
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