"Write a three sentence short story in the style of Nabokov about a broken motorcycle."
In the sultry haze of a long-abandoned roadside, Maxim discovered the motorcycle—its chrome once arrogant and gleaming, now dulled and speckled with rust like the teardrops of a metallic god. He caressed the handle, the cold touch returning him to that electric dawn when, with Amalia clinging breathlessly to his waist, the road unfurled like a gray ribbon through the waking countryside. Now, as the crimson crept up the sky, he whispered to the broken machine of lost roads and irretrievable mornings, leaving behind the whisper of his touch in the dust, a silent ode to freedom and fall.
"Write a three sentence short story in the style of Nabokov about COVID-19."
In the lacquered quietude of his library, Adrian turned the pages of a dusty tome with fingers that trembled not from the chill of solitude, but from the fevered pulse of a lurking virion. Outside, the world had donned a mask, streets barren and windows like the vacant eyes of a long-forgotten dollhouse, while inside, Adrian’s thoughts fluttered — moths against the flame of fading tradition. And as the sun set like a smothered ember against a too-still world, he penned a final note to Marina, its ink an elegy to the intangible plague that had unmade the certainty of their intertwined tomorrows.
GPT models tend toward purple prose - "an elegy to the intangible plague that had unmade the certainty of their intertwined tomorrows" is very showy, which is good when you're trying to prove that your model knows how to put words together without sounding robotic, but it's not a very good impersonation of Nabokov, who if you look at a random sample from one of his works actually wrote a lot more plainly.
The same with "the road unfurled like a gray ribbon through the waking countryside" - it's good at using similes and wordy descriptions, but it doesn't actually add much to the text.
Apparently much of ChatGPT's purple prose and occasional rare word usage is because it's speaking African-accented English because they used Kenyan/Nigerian workers for training.
> Apparently much of ChatGPT's purple prose and occasional rare word usage is because it's speaking African-accented English because they used Kenyan/Nigerian workers for training.
Do you have a source for the 2nd part of your claim that they use Nigerians for RLHF?
I’m know OpenAI use Kenyans via Sama / Samasource [0] and it has been discussed here [1] before.
Mostly that some of the words it uses like "delve" are common in Nigerian English, according to them anyway, and they consider themselves especially big fans of writing purple prose the same way it does.
Delve is not commonly used Nigerian English nor is it common in the corrupt form of English that is widely spoken in Nigeria called pidgin.
The link you shared doesn’t really back up your claim though.
It merely talks about government communications and reporting by the press that tend to use unfamiliar words when simple words would have done the same job. That’s a phenomenon that’s not unique to Nigerians though.
Compare, this from real Nabokov (he wrote long sentences; sentences in imitation actually needs to be longer):
Twelve years and some eight months later, two naked children, one dark-haired and tanned, the other dark-haired and milk-white, bending in a shaft of hot sunlight that slanted through the dormer window under which the dusty cartons stood, happened to collate that date (December 16, 1871) with another (August 16, same year) anachronistically scrawled in Marina's hand across the corner of a professional photograph (in a raspberry-plush frame on her husband's kneehole library table) identical in every detail -- including the commonplace sweep of a bride's ectoplasmic veil, partly blown by a parvis breeze athwart the groom's trousers -- to the newspaper reproduction.
Compare, a Nabokov imitation about high speed rail written by Claude:
The sleek, serpentine carriages slithered through the verdant landscape, their velocity a silver-streaked affront to the indolent clouds above. Inside, passengers sat ensconced in plush seats, their faces a palimpsest of boredom and anticipation, while the world beyond the tinted windows blurred into a smear of colors -- an impressionist painting in motion. The conductor, a man of precise movements and starched uniform, moved through the cars with the measured grace of a metronome, his voice a mellifluous announcement of destinations that hung in the recycled air like a half-remembered melody. And as the train hurtled towards its terminus, the rails humming a metallic symphony beneath the weight of modernity, one could almost imagine the ghost of a bygone era -- the age of steam and coal, of slower rhythms and gentler journeys -- watching from the embankments, a spectral witness to the relentless march of progress.
"Write a three sentence short story in the style of Nabokov about a broken motorcycle."
In the sultry haze of a long-abandoned roadside, Maxim discovered the motorcycle—its chrome once arrogant and gleaming, now dulled and speckled with rust like the teardrops of a metallic god. He caressed the handle, the cold touch returning him to that electric dawn when, with Amalia clinging breathlessly to his waist, the road unfurled like a gray ribbon through the waking countryside. Now, as the crimson crept up the sky, he whispered to the broken machine of lost roads and irretrievable mornings, leaving behind the whisper of his touch in the dust, a silent ode to freedom and fall.
"Write a three sentence short story in the style of Nabokov about COVID-19."
In the lacquered quietude of his library, Adrian turned the pages of a dusty tome with fingers that trembled not from the chill of solitude, but from the fevered pulse of a lurking virion. Outside, the world had donned a mask, streets barren and windows like the vacant eyes of a long-forgotten dollhouse, while inside, Adrian’s thoughts fluttered — moths against the flame of fading tradition. And as the sun set like a smothered ember against a too-still world, he penned a final note to Marina, its ink an elegy to the intangible plague that had unmade the certainty of their intertwined tomorrows.