Post #4283634

2026-07-31 09:22 UTC

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 :).

Replies (2)

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-07-31 15:52

@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe That last one sounds bizarre in English, but it makes perfect sense if you know Arabic. The direct English equivalent of this would be 'Give me a pair of cokes', which is the same grammatical structure as the Arabic version (one unit of two objects).

Open ##4283632
@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe 2026-07-31 09:50

Here is my completely unscientific linguistic theory. Europe got cold weather. The rule became: speak less, do more. Standing outside giving a 40-minute speech was a suicide act. The Middle East got sun. Lots of it. So they invented stories, poetry, debates… and eventually holy books that people have been arguing about for thousands of years. A European proverb is basically: "Don’t be an asshole." A Middle Eastern version starts with the genealogy of the guy who wasnt an asshole, introduces twelve characters, three metaphors, a camel, a mountain, and by the end you have forgotten what the original question was. I grew up in France and learned Arabic much later. It felt like mental gymnastics. Now imagine training an LLM on that. People complain that today's AI is verbose because it learned English. I'm just glad the first generation didn't think primarily in Arabic. We will spend half the context window arguing over which of forty equally correct words for 'door' best captures the mood. 😄

Open ##4284035