Reposted by Simon Christiansen
Simon Christiansen
@simonchris.bsky.social
1.4K followers 612 following 794 posts
Interactive fiction writer. Normal fiction writer. Poet. Contact Juggler. Author of PataNoir, Death off the Cuff and AlethiCorp. He/him. #dkgame. sichris.azurewebsites.net
![In his essay, which The Independent has seen, Falade writes that his first language – Yorùbá – is “a highly lyrical dialect rich in proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors, parallelism” – and “not X, but Y” constructions – many features of which, he notes, are now the hallmarks of AI-generated writing.
Falade explains that he “drew on Yorùbá oral storytelling traditions while writing Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body. As a Yorùbá writer telling a voice-driven thriller, it felt natural that the rhythms, sarcasm, humor, and narrative techniques of my culture would shape the novel’s voice.”
It was a voice that impressed publishers enough that 14 of them entered into an auction in the US alone to bid for the debut novel. In his essay, Falade offers an example of how the Yorùbá dialect works. “Even an insult should display imagination,” he writes. “A blunt ‘You jerk!’ or ‘Go to hell’ would disappoint your Yorùbá ancestors. They might turn in their graves if you wasted an insult by making it ordinary. We say things like: Ẹ rí bí orí ẹ ṣe rí pẹlẹbẹ bí ìdí ìgbákọ (‘See how flat your head is, like the bottom of a food scoop’). But place something along [those] lines … in a manuscript, and an editor trained to fear every unfamiliar metaphor may swear on their life that some hallucinating machine wrote it.”
He went through his manuscript after researching the writing features people associate with AI. “There were 18 ‘not X, but Y’ constructions and 46 em dashes,” he writes. “A career I spent years building was derailed because people unfamiliar with the Yorùbá rhetoric and oral storytelling traditions that shaped my narrative voice concluded, out of sheer cultural ignorance, that a chatbot must have written my work.”
It is ironic then that Falade tells me the reason his manuscript got so much attention was because of its unique voice. “They told me they handle thousands of manuscripts yearly and had not found one that sounded like mine.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3qjzg45h4skpra47nqyhzwzl/bafkreidellh6n6xdyn6ofoozaou5mkemdvc5wupucd2lqdw5jleabzdc6a)
