Post #4282706

2026-07-31 09:01 UTC

If you go to #Africa, you will notice that many educated people speak the way people now call #AI language. Not because ChatGPT taught us to speak like that. ChatGPT learned it from us. Take a university lecture from before the AI boom, transcribe it, and you will find the same formal structure, careful explanations, and academic tone. Maybe a bit more verbose and a little less confident, but the style is remarkably similar. The reason is simple: most educated Africans speak at least two languages, often three or four. The way we organize our thoughts makes perfect sense in Arabic, Swahili, Zulu, Wolof, French, or Darija. But when we switch to English, some of that structure comes along for the ride. For example, when an African says, The thing is…, Basically…, or So…, it isn't because we are trying to burn more tokens. It is often just a tiny pause while our brain assembles the next sentence. That previous sentence was one of those pauses, by the way. So the A in AI stands for Africa. The I stands for #india Remember when politicians wanted to keep Africans and Indians out from some countries? Well… now you have invited both into your hardware. They are there every time you press Enter.

Replies (1)

@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-07-31 09:22

I have open source code I pushed 10 years ago. PR reviews asking me to remove verbosity before they were merged. Comments full of em dashes because typing -- automatically turned into —. All of that predates GPT. It predates me using Google Translate. You will recognize what people now call the 'AI tone,' but the grammar is often completely broken. That is because it isnt AI. It is just how we think. For many Africans, English is the second or third language. The sentence structure from our native languages leaks into English. For example, in Morocco: * 1 drink: Give me one Fanta. * 3 drinks: Give me three Red Bulls. * 2 drinks: We literally say, "Give me one-two Cokes." That last one sounds bizarre in English, but it makes perfect sense if you know Arabic. Arabic has a dedicated grammatical form for exactly two things (the dual), separate from the singular and the plural. That structure survived into Moroccan Darija, and then leaked into French and English when we speak them. So yes, sometimes our English has what people now label as an AI style. The irony is that much of it existed long before AI. It is simply the result of translating how our brains organize language or tokens :).

Open ##4283634