I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world.
(Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White).
Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols.
The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating.
LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois.
America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing.
It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak.
I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to.
Look it (as my relatives confounding say)
LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.
I am English and from a well educated upper middle class family. When I moved to the US I was staggered to find my language being corrected by people taught that specific words were overly complicated and that any sentence over a handful of words was excess. It seemed that Hemingway was credited as Shakespeare and Americans all now lived in his very limited world.
(Don’t even get me started on the nonsense promoted by Strunk and White).
Like the poster I am also accused of writing like an LLM because I use constructions that aren’t simple and more than the first page of punctuation symbols.
The irony is that the machines have been trained on the world of English language writing and the complaints come from people who find the breadth of it intimidating.
LLMs were trained on all English text. Much of it from my home, the home of the language. Much more from the children of empire educated to write like Englishmen. Chat GPT is thus biased toward native English and upsetting people who want it to adopt the American dialect/patois.
America, a country with a majority of non English speaking immigrants over time, has developed a dialect that’s been simplified for ease of learning; undergirded with local rules which aren’t part of native English, and aren’t reflected in English writing.
It’s as if Canadians insisted that Quebecois French was the standard. Or Mexicans stated that Spanish is written only as they speak.
I often see, my now fellow, Americans struggle not to split an infinitive—pointlessly as it’s perfectly cromulent and correct. Or waste words describing something for which a word already exists. The illusion of efficiency in Hemingway’s style is just that. It works for him because he isn’t being required to convey anything he doesn’t want to.
Look it (as my relatives confounding say)
LLMs often write poorly but they should not be criticized for writing like an educated, global, English speaker.