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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Actually it's public info that ChatGPT was originally trained by speakers of some african business english "dialect".

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape...

They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area. Maybe the article author will chip in.

> ChatGPT is designed to write well

If you define well as overly verbose, avoiding anything that could be considered controversial, and generally sycophantic but bland soulless corporate speak, yes.

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> They said nigerian but there may be a common way English is taught in the entire area.

Nigeria and Kenya are two very different regions with different spheres of business. I don't know, but I wouldn't expect the English to overlap that much.

But The Guardian could have been wrong about the country, and I'm a stupid European so I just don't know.

All we can hope is for a local to show up and explain.

There are a lot of very distinctive versions of English floating around after the British Empire, Indian newspapers are particularly delightful that way - but there is as the author says, an inherited common educational system dating back to the colonial period, which has probably created a fairly common "educated dialect" abroad, just as it has between all the local accents and dialects back in the motherland.

That's not a very good argument, because then you could say the same for American, Canada, South Africa, Australia and so on. If recency is an issue, then here's a list of colonies that got their freedom around the same time:

Cyprus, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kuwait, Tanzania, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Malta, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Lesotho, Barbados, Yemen, Mauritius, Eswatini (Swaziland).

If what you're saying is right then you'd have to admit Jamaican and Barbados English are just the same as Kenyan or Nigerian... but they're not. They're radically different because they're radically different regions. Uganda and Kenya being similar is what I would expect, but not necessarily Nigeria...

>They're radically different because they're radically different regions.

They're radically different predominantly at the street level and everyday usage, but the kind of professional English of journalists, academics and writers that the author of the article was surrounded by is very recognizable.

You can tell an American from an Australian on the beach but in a journal or article in a paper of record that's much more difficult. Higher ed English with its roots in a classical British education you can find all over the globe.

That's not my experience at all. I can quite easily identify Kenyans, Australians and English from the way they write and they're all rather unique.

Go read some Kenyan news. It's very obvious.

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