Top all-time · #5131
Marcus Olang'
Personal blog · marcusolang.substack.comwritingculture
Marcus Olang' writes this man's mind, a personal blog at marcusolang.substack.com about writing and culture. Since 2025, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Marcus Olang' essay "I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me" on AI-style writing, AI detection, and Kenyan English in training data. Most comments are bare links or citations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Observations, essays, visual criticism, and cultural reflections from a photographer interrogating power, identity, memory, and meaning.
Most-linked posts?
- I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2025-12-15
What Hacker News says?
> Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram? The problem is writing such an essay takes magnitudes more of an effort for people who are not native English (or whatever the language is in which discussions are done about the project) speakers. Also, relatedly, essays written by non-native English speakers oft…
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"”Submitted I'm Kenyan. I don't write like ChatGPT, ChatGPT writes like me as a story · 799 points
HN discussion> I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated readme seriously. If you haven't bothered to write a readme, what else have you not bothered to do? I care whether the readme is any good, not who wrote it. If you haven't bothered to critique the readme and instead critique its suspected creator — something entirely in your head — what else have you not bothered to do? > (100% AI according to Pangram btw) So what? Who…
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “JetBrains Thinkrail”https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Brown student maps the hidden global labor powering AI”It's all the 1900s 'proper English' that's in the training material. There are indeed people who talk like that. https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message”This article is chock full of interesting links. The link about Kenyan English/LLMs [0] describes something that feels like it should have been obvious to me. [0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Credit where credit is due”Remember https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... ?
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Uproar in France over award-winning author accused of using AI”AI is also based on how we write. Some people are bound to write in a similar vein to LLMs naturally. See this person’s blog about it [0]. [0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Protect Your Shed”See also: “I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me” by Marcus Olang', https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... For what it’s worth, Pangram reports that Marcus’ article is 100% LLM-written: https://www.pangram.com/history/640288b9-e16b-4f76-a730-8000...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt?triedRedirect=true
on “We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code”"AI style" is an artifact of certain writing styles being overrepresented in training data. I expect in the long run it will be impossible to distinguish AI writing reliably. https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?”The LLM output isn't an unfiltered result of an unbiased model. Rather, some texts may be classified high-quality (where the em-dash, curly quotes, a more sophisticated/less-everyday vocabulary are more expected to appear), some low-quality, and some choices are driven by human feedback (aka fine-tuning), either to improve quality (OpenAI employs Kenyans, Kenyan/Nigerian English considered more colonial ) or engagem…
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Dead Internet Theory”Relevant concerning your point: > I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. > https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... HN discussion: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46273466
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “I wouldn't say Pangram is broken, but I would say that it's brittle”> Maybe you just write like an LLM. Please read https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Engineering for Bounded Cognition”No, we actually trained it on standardised tests https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28”https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... I keep coming back to this.
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “'It's sweet. It's bitter. It's ours.' The chocolate ritual that binds my family”Maybe this will help: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li... And I think I saw some others similar articles and blog posts over the years, but the tl;dr; is that a large enough ammount of text used in their training contains em-dashes because a large ammount of writers use them.
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Ask HN: Why do LLMs use em dashes so often?”Thank you. I am in the confusing situation of being extremely good at interpreting the nuance in human writing, yet extremely bad at detecting AI slop. Perhaps the problem is that I'm still assuming everything is human-written, so I do my usual thing of figuring out their motivations and limitations as a writer and filing it away as information. For example, when I read this article I mostly got "someone trying real…
Comment linking /p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt
on “Top downloaded skill in ClawHub contains malware”
