11 ms·

I do not want AI to "polish" me

415 points by doodpants 2y ago

pjc50 2y ago
You have an individual and unique way of speaking and writing? We're going to have to polish that out with the slop machine, citizen.
- baq 2y ago
  Your thoughts will be replaced by <thoughts></thoughts>. For your convenience.
- ckozlowski 2y ago
  Newspeak.
  - normalaccess 2y ago
    This 100% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV0CtZga7qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV0CtZga7qM
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      Wtf is that comment section
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I use Grammarly to check for errors I make during writing more serious stuff (English is not my native language), but any suggestion it sends in my way changes the tone of the text so much that it sounds like it's written by a PR agency with a fake, forced attitude; sounding bland and colorless. So no, thank you. Correct my textbook punctuation mistakes, and leave my wordy and "not positive enough" sentences to me.
  - EugenioPerea 2y ago
    I'm getting increasingly irritated by Grammarly's attempts to boringify my writing. I've even considered doing away with it entirely, even if it means I have to do my own spell-checking.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- laurent_du 2y ago
  I wouldn't say the author's style is unique or individual in any way. Every single tumblr blog sounds like that. You could easily create a "make edgy" function that would feed your formal writings and turn them into that kind of prose. Is it better or worth than "polish"? There's no substantial difference. The "polish" version sure sounds less exhausting than the original.
  - roywiggins 2y ago
    your writing style doesn't have to be "unique" or "original" to be yours
  - itishappy 2y ago
    It's personal. "Unique" and "individual" might not be the best words to describe it, but it's clearly a style they've intentionally adopted. They appear to have been quite successful for it to!
- ragazzina 2y ago
  What a strange complaint about AI. This already happens and happened without AI. >You have an individual and unique way of speaking and writing? You're going to wish your e-mail finds people well, corporate-monkey.
  - jollyllama 2y ago
    Is it really so strange to complain about the nudging towards the phenomenon of which you speak?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I'm working on a dystopia where the resistance is using text-in-text steganography to coordinate, so unpolished communication is flagged for extra scrutiny because all those stylistic choices might be hiding something.
  - shagie 2y ago
    Ever read The Freeze Frame Revolution? Though, its stenography is a bit more obvious given the "you've got to be able to read it". The kindle version of the book starts with https://imgur.com/uIBjwlQ https://imgur.com/uIBjwlQ This would give you the opportunity to have another ending to the book.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I love The Freeze Frame Revolution, and yeah I was planning on doing something similar. I figure I'll publish an app that OCRs the text and displays the hidden message, and make the book read differently based on whether you can or can't see the messages. Then readers can use the app for hiding their own messages to each other also.
      - shagie 2y ago
        (realizing this is veering off into tangents of tangents)... An idea I discussed with someone tossing story ideas about was regarding the reliable / unreliable narrator for a mystery mixed in with being able to view (lock a display screen to a geographic location, got a knob to rewind / fast forward time (up to the present)) immutable past events who finds something amiss. Upon the "somethings not right..." the narrator reviews their own events of the previous day and finds that the events don't match their memory. Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator that is questioning their own reliability the narrator or an external agent trying to cast doubt on the reliability of the actual narrator?
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        That does sound interesting--to give the reader a bit more tooling to decide whether they're being lied to and by whom. You might enjoy The Quantum Thief, which isn't published in a such a unique way, but which has fun a story that would fit right in.
bloomingkales 2y ago
There is no way in hell anyone who knows me would get that email and not think I’d been abducted This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.
- oglop 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    You have to look at it holistically. This is the current modern Human: 1. Born into the beast, enters social media by 5-7 years old 2. All math and writing is done for you (becoming illiterate) 3. You don't have to spell ever again (becoming illiterate) 4. You cultivate a virtual persona since childhood (becoming vain) 5. Did your life really happen if it wasn't posted online (the digital existentialist crisis -- do you even exist if you aren't part of the hive?) Then add more shit to this like, I dunno, no jobs, swipe left and right to find your soul mate ... Yeah and then you finally get ... you and me, the whole fuck it, I don't care anymore. Feeding apathy with AI will not end well, we have to care. Look at our kids today, we screwed them.
    - mavhc 2y ago
      The old human: 1. Born into plague 2. Never learns maths or writing 3. Nor spelling 4. Half the time your life ends before childhood does 5. Nothing happens in your life
      - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
waihtis 2y ago
The obsessive need for AI developers to make everything into the most banal, inoffensive version of said thing will probably end up being the biggest roadblock for AI taking over human jobs.
- damidekronik 2y ago
  "The obsessive need for AI developers (...)" - Of product product/business people trying to fit into the "AI era". Developers, if given a chance, wouldn't probably built this.
- jerf 2y ago
  You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange. If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process. "We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable." It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > postmodern It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum. > It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art. People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.
    - jerf 2y ago
      I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.
chias 2y ago
That opening sentence is magical.
pipeline_peak 2y ago
The irony is that someone would just use an AI to summarize the long winded polished version.
- kqr 2y ago
  I have noticed many news outlets presenting articles with an "AI summary" on top. Often the article is copied right off of a newswire service, with some elaborations woven in. I have a feeling the thing the LLM is summarising is increasingly something another LLM has previously expanded. What if we just wrote articles well, such that (a) they were not filled with fluff, and (b) the summary would be to only read the first paragraph of the article?
  - immibis 2y ago
    News outlets rely on you scrolling down the whole article so they can show you more ads.
benreesman 2y ago
Digital culture was fake and performative and insincere enough before Turboclippy: fuck that with something sharp. It feels like the whole world is turning into an HR department premised on the ideological axiom that killing one man is a murder but killing a million is a statistic.
- incognito124 2y ago
  I truly appreciate the term Turboclippy and will be using it from now on
- polynomial 2y ago
  Well that's just corporatism taken to the extreme which everything is.
dsr_ 2y ago
Since the standard thing for the marketing side of the industry is to promise blatant absurdities, I'm sure the next big thing will be "Let us maintain your authentic voice by learning from your messages!" Oops, probably too late.
causal 2y ago
I think LLMs are transformative but it's incredible to me how unimaginative most product managers have been. It reminds me of the 90s when people discovered GIFs can be put on web pages so every page had to have a hundred of them. It was tacky, as is most embedded AI.
- munificent 2y ago
  > I think LLMs are transformative So is a landmine.
thrwaway1985882 2y ago
I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates. I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose. On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting that exists solely to provide evidence for compliance reasons, something out of the CIA's sabotage field manual that David Graeber has probably written about. But is now a thirty second exercise in uploading a transcript to ChatGPT, prompting for three evidentiary bulletpoints, and pasting the output in a wiki no human will ever read.
- nicbou 2y ago
  That's also what I do. I hand-write every email because these words have my name under them. On the other hand, if I'm asking the tax office to issue a specific document, I let AI handle it.
- SkyBelow 2y ago
  I was thinking about the authenticity of my writing earlier this week and wondering why I have no problem accepting code from an AI and committing it, but I find the idea of passing off an AI's writing as my own feels not just wrong, but immoral on the level of purposeful plagiarism. I feel a distinct difference, but I'm not particular clear why. I'm okay with sharing AI writing, but only when I've clearly communicated it was written by AI. Probably related to why I can copy a piece of code from elsewhere (with sufficient work to verify it does what I expect and only what I expect) but I don't copy a quote and use it as my own. My words are my words. My code doesn't have the same guarantee.
  - nicbou 2y ago
    Code uses a simplified set of instructions to instruct a computer to do things. Hopefully these instructions can be understood and maintained by a human. Writing uses the entire breadth of human language to convey information between human beings with unique and complex understandings of the universe. If those words come from a machine that is not you - that is not someone - you ought to disclose it.
tlonny 2y ago
AI "polishing" tools are essentially a form of anti-compression. Lets take some information represented concisely and needlessly pad it with formalities and waffle so it appears more "professional" (whilst also throwing away useful "metadata" like message tone). No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant! It just feels absurd.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Why read something someone couldn't be bothered to write.
  - codr7 2y ago
    Yeah, and once that happens, why read anything from them ever agin?
- pimlottc 2y ago
  > No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant! Not entirely, there’s still the energy usage and stock price increases. All because everyone’s too anxious to just talk to each other directly.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  AI has simultaneously created two industries: One around using AI to pad out documents and another one around summarising with AI. The more the first pads, the more the second is needed. If AI really were Intelligent, I'd fear it's an organism making sure it's needed in the ecosystem.
  - munchler 2y ago
    https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
seydor 2y ago
I think it would be more successful if the tool was labeled "Make more persuasive" or "Manipulate"
idoco 2y ago
I get the frustration, but I think there’s a hidden assumption in this discussion: that everyone can write well in English. Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first. It’s fair to dislike how AI flattens unique voices, but for a huge part of the world, it’s not erasing personality—it’s making participation possible.
- nottorp 2y ago
  You somehow assume that being a native english speaker is correlated to being able to write well in english. It's how well you know english that's correlated to being able to write well in english instead.
- pjc50 2y ago
  AI translation is definitely a great enabler, both for written material and things like live subtitles, but people are already aware that translations are imperfect and can be disputed. Something that anime fans can get very heated about.
- grishka 2y ago
  English is not my native language yet somehow I share this sentiment towards AI. I'm fine with a spell checker, I don't need whatever I write completely rewritten, thank you very much.
- mcpar-land 2y ago
  If you can't translate your email into a foreign language, how is the AI going to rewrite your incorrect prose into correct prose? it's working on something incorrect. And then after the ai rewrites it, how can you tell if it's saying what you want it to? When I'm communicating with a non-native speaker, I intentionally use shorter / easier to translate words and sentences, and I give them more leeway with word usage / don't expect them to use the right words all the time. And that's fine! Communication still happens! We manage! But if a non-native speaker starts running their text through an AI it makes communication harder, not easier. I can't tell if their word choice is intentional or if the AI did it. A tiny mistake I can understand gets expanded into multiple incorrect sentences.
dcre 2y ago
I actually use LLMs to unpolish dictation results from MacWhisper[0] to match the way I write in chats. MacWhisper lets you set a prompt to automatically post-process your transcribed output. Here is my prompt: 'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting. - Always capitalize "I" and derived words like "I'm" - Sentences should start with lower case letters unless they start with “I” - Replace explicit punctuation callouts with the actual punctuation - No period at the end of the message, but leave periods between sentences - Do not remove commas - Do not change sophisticated words to more common ones Return only the result. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edit.' [0]: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper
- AlfredBarnes 2y ago
  Do you know if there is a windows equivalent? I cant seem to find one that is as well done as this MacWhisper.
  - dcre 2y ago
    Nope. I see a few in search results but none look that great.
Tade0 2y ago
As a tangent, the other day I read a post of a person who used to be close to Elon Musk and was giving their account of that relationship, and it was translated to Polish via DeepSeek. It was not idiomatic Polish - very far from it really, so I guess depending on the model used here, the result could have been equally disappointing if it was really trying to Polish that email.
MrMcCall 2y ago
AI does not want to do anything, whatsoever. It's owners, however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths. Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.
- oldwebguy94 2y ago
  > Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer. Always strikes me as interesting that "Nvidia" sounds like the syllables in the middle of "invidious"
  - Pannoniae 2y ago
    invidia = envy in latin
- danparsonson 2y ago
  Oh come on - we've been doing this since way before crypto was a thing. We knew about climate change in the 80s.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    So then it's ok to not only continue ignoring it as the evidence mounts, but to actually accelerate it? No. No, it's not. It doesn't matter how many fools do something, they're still fools. The root word of ignorance is "to ignore".
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      You said "Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining" But it didn't. That's what I'm saying.
flatline 2y ago
> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something. Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. But mostly, it can sometimes be a useful tool, and the fact everyone is shoving it in my face reeks of desperation. The tech industry is in real trouble.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. This is a massive liability that almost everybody seems to be ignoring. My employer has a ban on using AI on IP until this is properly resolved, because we actually care about it leaking. Maybe an Information Commissioner will get round to issuing a directive some time in the mid-2030s about how none of this complies with GDPR.
  - UweSchmidt 2y ago
    I think in general, no major liability issue will come up: - if everyone is doing it, you can't really fault anyone - on some level we are, or will be, kinda dependent on that AI and opting out will probably be made unpleasant via dark patterns as usual - no pushback to every piece of software, including at the operating system level, slurping all the keystrokes and data, let alone the data that's already in the cloud - big tech knows everything about us but to my surprise no major public leak has happened, i.e. one where you really can see your neighbor's private data without buying leaked data from someone on the dark web or wherever - things are moving too fast, and you don't know if you can afford to have your programmers not use tomorrow's AI, for example, so your "bans" will have to be soft etc., this limits the potential pushback and outrage
  - mrweasel 2y ago
sghiassy 2y ago
My mother is a first-generation immigrant. Her writing isn’t ideal, but AI allows her to communicate articulately in a way, where before she might have been discriminated against
- simonw 2y ago
  That's one of my favorite optimistic applications of AI-assisted writing. Our society is very openly discriminatory against people who aren't able to produce written communication that fits a huge number of unwritten rules. LLMs know those rules. Helping people with ESL better interact with a world that requires them is a huge win in my book.
- codr7 2y ago
  Awesome! Better hurry up to graduate out of the slop academy though, the style is becoming a red flag real fast now.
burkaman 2y ago
Obviously the AI version is bland and terrible, but arguably more importantly it has also completely changed the meaning of the message. The AI version: - apologizes - implies the recipient was "promised" this email as a "response" to something - blames a hectic schedule - invites questions None of this was in or was even implied in the original. This is not a "polished" version, it's just a straight-up different email. I thought that style transfer while maintaining meaning was one of the few things LLMs can be good at, but this example fails even that low bar.
- polynomial 2y ago
  Correct. This is called the production of subjectivity. (tyrna be funny not patronizing. but the machinery of subjectivity production is ofc very real)
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  The AI has some ... "ideas" ... of its own on what workplace relationships apparently need to be like.
  - escapecharacter 2y ago
    A lot of people who want to replace most human interactions with LLMs assume that there is some objective set of cultural values true in all contexts, and that it is good and easy to encode these as axioms into an AI.
    - tclancy 2y ago
      Yes. As an Old now (GenX), I feel like moving all interactions to text and now having AI as a man in the middle is just reinventing ways to get in a situation where a decade down the line you reconnect with someone who used to be a friend and both discover "Hey, that wasn't what I meant at all!" As ever, T.S. Eliot was right: "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      And those objective set of cultural values are, apparently... a sort of parody of 90s corporate culture, a sort of polite version of Michael Scott. Like, no-one ever _actually_ wrote like LLMs tend to write; it reads as a parody of a now slightly obsolete corporate-speak.
ubermonkey 2y ago
A quick glance suggests that, because the site is pretty far afield of usual HN fare, folks here don't realize that Lawson is the author of several books. I personally do not want you -- for any value of "you" -- to use an AI to "polish" any writing sent to ME. I want the author's actual thoughts, not their thoughts massaged by an LLM.
- nottorp 2y ago
  "NYT bestselling author" too. Whatever value that holds. But I think it's a safe assumption that she can write well when she wants to.
- pjc50 2y ago
  While not as longstanding as, say, Lileks, thebloggess is someone from the blog era of the Internet, and publishes an RSS feed. She's well known in other internet communities.
ipsento606 2y ago
I simply do not understand the end game of these sorts of features. Presumably, the idea is to make the other person think you've written the email yourself, and you're a "better"/more corporate/more professional writer than you actually are. But once everyone starts using this kind of transformer, so nobody assumes that anyone else is actually writing the content they're sending out -- what's the point?! Who benefits?
- coldpie 2y ago
  > Who benefits? The team that implemented the feature and hit their quarterly goal and got their full quarterly bonus. The execs who set the quarterly goals will be rewarded by wall street for shipping AI features. In 2 years, when reality has struck and the market has moved on from the AI fad, another team will receive their bonus for lowering COGS by removing this feature. Users' needs are irrelevant to this cycle. Big tech companies need to be broken up into teeny, tiny pieces.
- Izkata 2y ago
  > Who benefits? Phishers.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  > Who benefits? The vendor's share price. This is nothing to do with the _users_; it is about cramming 'AI' into as many press releases as possible because it gives the markets the warm fuzzies. No-one wants to use this, and that's really beside the point; for the time being it makes stock price go up. Presumably in a year or so there'll be a new fad, and most LLM-based 'features' will go the way of Clippy.
nicbou 2y ago
AI takes the personality out of written communication, and swaps it with a bland corporate persona. I want to know that I am working with actual human beings. It reassures me to know that if something goes wrong, I can appeal to those human beings, and not to soulless corporate automatons working off of a flowchart.
- normalaccess 2y ago
  I feel like this is what corporate wants. A single way of speaking. A single way of thinking. Round off all the sharp edges and smooth out all the wrinkles. Humanity filtered through a sycophantic psychotic AI tuned to perfection by psychopaths who want to change humanity into their image. "The idea of a Soul, Free Will -- these are Over!" - Technocracy explained by Prof Yuval Harari https://youtu.be/NV0CtZga7qM https://youtu.be/NV0CtZga7qM
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Double-plus-good. (People tend to forget it, and it's only seen in passing, but the Ministry of Truth has machines for writing terrible books in the novel!)
- munificent 2y ago
  It's the end game of consumerism. Everything is a product. Every choice is a product purchasing choice. We ourselves are products. And endless sea of products selecting from other products.
anoncow 2y ago
Please stop to gtvn me ai - hilarious.
dagw 2y ago
Good news is that AI is equally adept at turning long polite business speak emails into short, blunt, and sweary emails, so you can choose what you prefer.
- bityard 2y ago
  I don't think Gmail/Outlook offer that yet. (But I might actually use it if they did!)
throwaway173738 2y ago
Forget Newspeak, we’ll just have get everyone on VR and polish their language until it’s identically upbeat no matter the situation.
- codr7 2y ago
  I might forgive AI once it starts taking my video calls, nothing important ever happens and no one listens so it's a pretty perfect application.
lacoolj 2y ago
I ran into this exact situation when I went to post something on reddit, thought it was too "rude" and ran it through chatGPT to make more polite After I posted I immediately regretted it. It sounded too structured and should have been more whine-y. Weird, but it would have been more like-able.
elric 2y ago
I need an AI detector which just straight up sends any generated emails to /dev/null. If you can't be arsed to write something, why should I waste my time reading the slop? Yes yes, languages and translations are a potentially valid use case, but irrelevant for the vast majority of people I communicate with.
upghost 2y ago
You had me at > "why would I want to translate my email into Polish?"
- pimlottc 2y ago
  You know that someone brought that up internally and so they added the sparkles to totally clear that up.
cbold 2y ago
I want a tool that would reverse the content to the original prompt. > "Write a thank you note that sounds sincere to that ahole" > "Some deep musing on the meaning of life tied to b2c marketing for a LinkedIn post"
- bityard 2y ago
  I was playing with a self-hosted model a while back and instructed it to only give answers that were unhelpful, vague, and borderline rude. It worked surprisingly well a lot of the time! But most of the time it also kinda broke the model in terms of coherent answers because it was obviously trained for the exact opposite thing.
mandarlimaye 2y ago
[flagged]
MisterTea 2y ago
Is there anyone like me out there who has yet to use AI? I think it's interesting but I have no strong feelings for it. Aside from a few images generated with early image generators I have not used anything else, not even chatgpt. AI search results I mostly scroll past are an exception.
- AyyEye 2y ago
  I haven't used any LMMs and I'm not missing anything. At some point in the last couple of years I have entered a couple prompts in chatbotgpt using my friend's account just to see it with my own eyes (funny enough asking slop, but before that was the word, and hallucinations). I also ran a prompt through llama.cpp just to see if it would work. It did, great, I don't really care.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  I've done a few experiments on some project I've been putting of, one involves parsing some email. There's certainly some interesting use cases, but I've yet to figure out how to actually go about deploying a solution. It does seem, to me, that the benefits are there, but not to the extend that the AI companies would have me believe.
- bityard 2y ago
  I was an LLM skeptic for a long time. I still have a hard time trusting it to the same extent that most HN'ers appear to. (I would never use an LLM as a substitute for my own "voice" when writing, or put any AI-generated code into production.) But I think I have reached a middle ground: I basically use it as a first approximation when I am exploring something entirely new to me. For example, if I'm learning a programming language, I might ask it for ways to unpack an array into separate variables. Or if I'm reading an ingredients list, I'll ask what psyllium husk is. Basically anything that's moderately easy to verify if I get any suspicion that the LLM is hallucinating again. These are things that I _used_ to simply ask a search engine, before Google results became 99% SEO-optimized blogspam and therefore useless for actual knowledge-seeking. I think an important part of overcoming AI skepticism is to understand (at a very high level) how it all works so that you understand its limitations and know when you can and cannot trust it.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I'd be interested in a "polish" feature if it had a drop down where I could select which of my aliases it makes me sound like. It's too easy to use the wrong one's voice here or there.
ericlamb89 2y ago
I had the same initially confusing experience as the author, confusing "polish" for the language "Polish". The product manager should have used AI to get feedback on this feature... I put the following into chatGPT: "I am a developer for an email client. I want to incorporate some AI features to help users write more polished emails. I'm thinking I will have an option that appears under the email body where a user can click "Polish". Can you see any issues with this UX?" ChatGPT: There are a few potential issues or points of confusion with a button labeled “Polish”: Ambiguity: Some users might confuse “Polish” (as in “to make shiny or more refined”) with “Polish” (the language). If your product is used internationally or by non-native English speakers, that label can be unintentionally confusing. Even among English speakers, “Polish” may not be immediately clear as a writing enhancement feature—people might wonder, “What exactly does it do?” Lack of Context: If users don’t already know what the feature does, they won’t know what to expect when they click “Polish.” You may need a tooltip, hover text, or short description like “Improve your text with AI suggestions” so users understand it’s about refinement, grammar, tone, etc. User Control: How much will it change their text? Will it rewrite in a new style or just fix grammar? If it makes heavier changes, users might worry about losing their personal style or voice. Be clear about the scope of the changes. Trust & Consent: Users may have privacy concerns if their email content is being sent to an AI for processing. Even if that’s already in your privacy policy, the feature’s label (just “Polish”) doesn’t convey what happens behind the scenes. You might consider adding a “What will happen to my text?” link or a discreet explanation about how data is handled. Alternative Wording: Using a label like “Improve,” “Refine,” “Enhance,” or “Polish Text” might provide clearer expectations. You might also consider dynamic or contextual labeling like “Improve Grammar & Clarity.” How to address these concerns: Add clarity in the UI: A short descriptive text or tooltip under the “Polish” button can briefly explain what the feature does: “AI-powered text improvements.” Offer user choice: Present a preview of the changes before they commit. Let them accept or reject individual suggestions so they feel in control. Signal the feature’s AI: Some users will want to know that an AI is involved, especially if they’re concerned about style changes or privacy. Labeling it as “Polish with AI” or something similar can help set expectations. Overall, the idea of a quick “one-click to refine” feature is appealing, but make sure the button’s purpose and functionality are crystal clear—both to avoid confusion and to build user trust.
deleted 2y ago
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mywittyname 2y ago
> Kill me if I ever write "Regards" non-irnoically. One time, I couldn't remember the name of the album I wanted SIRI to play, so it kept picking the wrong one. After the fifth or so time, I told Siri, "you're killing me Siri" and it called 911. The future sucks.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Actually that's pretty cool. Takes you literally and seriously. What did you expect the machine to understand subtleties and responding like an informal friend? I'm fine with AI being 100% serious
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    If it took me literally, it would have turned itself into the police for attempting to murder its user.
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  Getting swatted by your smartphone sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  You must be extraordinarily polite to say something that mild after that many failed tries. I mutter expletives at chatGPT much sooner. AIR (AI induced rage) is going to be a thing. I just hope it doesn't start to reverse affect how I behave with people.
FiddlerClamp 2y ago
OneNote now shows the Copilot icon right where I start writing on a blank page. That's infuriating (as much as I see some uses for AI). Fortunately you can turn it off in the 'connected experiences' setting.
josefritzishere 2y ago
AI creep is like a leaky sewage pipe oozing gray water into everything you'd want to keep it out of. Disabling it is increasingly difficult on every app.
- wang_li 2y ago
  Nadella and the board approved billions of dollars in spending for AI. It's going to be in every single thing whether you want it or not. Otherwise, there will be a shareholder lawsuit.
jabroni_salad 2y ago
The AI polish feels like it was written by someone with only an elementary schooler's understanding of how to write a letter. Even in stuffy institutions like banks and insurance companies, corporate email style is very straightforward and, idk, undecorated? You learn pretty quick that people only skim emails and every word beyond your core message creates opportunity for your core message to be skipped over. NOBODY is writing salutations or 'i hope this finds you well' or whatever other garbage chatgpt thinks the first paragraph should be. When I read historical items on lettersofnote I find that even super old business messages are pretty streamlined and only have some crunch because some runner has to physically find the dude you are writing to.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
A huge problem with AI generated content is a reduction to the mean.
ongytenes 2y ago
Soon everyone will be texting, emailing etc with an AI secretary doing it all. "AI take a letter and polish it up for me..." Maybe even video conferences will use 'Polish' to portray a recreated lifelike sophisticated avatar with real time grammar correction. When folks finally do meet in real life, they will discover slobs, socially awkward or tactless idiots instead of the suave intellect portrayed by the AI. LOL
- 65 2y ago
  Person 1: AI, take these bullet points and write an email to Person 2 Person 2: AI, please take this email from Person 1 and convert it into bullet points
crazygringo 2y ago
I think a lot of people miss the point. If you're already an effective writer, obviously AI will usually only make things worse. But for people where English is not their first language (or whatever language you're writing in), polish is a godsend. It fixes your grammatical errors, vocabulary errors, spelling errors, punctuation errors, and all the rest. Obviously it can go overboard in changing your meaning (as any flesh-and-blood editor also might), and presumably over time these tools will get more refined. But for most people who write intelligent comments here on HN, you are not the target audience for this feature. Well, until you have to dust off your high-school French or Spanish or whatever for an e-mail exchange.
robwwilliams 2y ago
Yes amusing, since unsolicited polishing, but I sincerely doubt this was forced on our fine humorist. English to English editing or “translation” from snarky to suave is straightforward to understand and fix. But what about translation by professional human translators between languages? is it really any better at preserving the intent and sub-text? Kundera has an amazing essay—- “The Sentence”—-in his collection of essays “Testaments Betrayed” on the woes of translation of, yes, a single sentence from Kafka’s “The Castle”. As he (or his translator Linda Asher) say: The sentence “describes the coition of K. and Frieda”. Under the bar too ;-) Not a topic I tend to associate with Franz Kafka. When AI systems can match Milan Kundera (translated from the French) then we will have definitely gotten to Pro level. “Write me a brilliant essay in the style of xxxx, on topic yyyy in French, and translate it into Mandarin for grins. I would be a wreck if I had to translate Kundera.
ongytenes 2y ago
Soon everyone will be texting, emailing etc with an AI secretary doing it all. "AI take a letter and polish it for me..." Maybe even video conferences will use "Polish" to portray a recreated lifelike sophisticated avatar with real time grammar correction. When folks finally do meet in real life, they discover a socially awkward, an illiterate or tactless boor instead of the suave intellect portrayed by the AI. Please forgive my comment, I didn't have any polish for it. LOL
GuB-42 2y ago
Why is the author mad? The "polish" button does exactly what you would expect it to do if you understand "polish" as "make polite". If you want to keep your words true and "unpolished", maybe at the risk of sounding rude, then don't use that feature. It is actually one of the first things I used LLMs for, and I still am. Latest example, I received an email from an administration asking me to sign some document, but it contained some incorrect information. I used a LLM to write a nice letter telling them to fix it. I could have just replied "it is not A, it is B", but without some formalism, it sounds rude, and I didn't want to sound rude, I also didn't want to make efforts for that formalism. It may be one of the things LLMs do best, they are like supercharged model letters. Of course I don't do that in informal situations or when I want some emotional connection. By the way, no LLM touched this comment, I don't consider posting on HN a formal situation. EDIT: typoes, but maybe I should have let them in, to show that it wasn't the work of a LLM ;)
- bityard 2y ago
  > and I didn't want to sound rude I think it's interesting how this has changed. If you go back and look at politically correct corpo-speak from decades past, it was bland and impersonal but aimed to be direct, clear, and reasonably concise. These days, it's still impersonal but now couched in platitudes, apologies, and excessively polite language in an attempt to avoid possibly offending anyone in any conceivable fashion. I'm worried that we'll get to a point in regular work communications where responding to a question with a simple and succinct "yes" instead of, "Great idea, I think that is an absolutely perfect plan and you surely deserve a call-out at the next all-hands meeting for coming up with the idea to fix that problem in the team's code!!!" will get you put on an HR watchlist for being difficult to get along with.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    From my experience with LLMs, it matches your description of "corpo-speak". I think it is the right balance of politeness. The result is usually rather simple, and when it is not, that's because it wants me to add extra information, which is often a good idea, not because of too much politeness. It is not at all like you say in the end, way more boring and that's the point. But out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT for some appropriate formula for a use case like yours and I got "Sounds good to me! I accept your suggestion—let's move forward with it." Of course, there is some formalism here, in day-to-day communication with people you know, I found it to become less formal over the years. "ok" is fine now when it wasn't before. I think because test-based instant messaging is now commonplace.
hulium 2y ago
Even though I am not a fan of it, I can see how some people might want to use AI to improve their grammar, maybe because they are afraid to leave a bad impression. But why would anyone put AI generated images into an Email?
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
While I find AI to be quite useful in many contexts, I 100% agree with this assessment, and I loath all these SV bubble-dwellers who think our lives should be airbrushed and "polished" for presentation. I think a bunch of Google's Gemini ads highlighted how clueless they were on this subject. Like one of their very first Gemini announcements highlighted how you can get AI to write a caption for your social media photos of your dog. God forbid you actually use your own brain to write an actual human caption (flaws and all) for photos of your dog. Google also highlighted how their Pixel camera AI features can "correct" photos of your kids making funny faces in family photos, because how awful would it be if you didn't look like some sort of Stepford family. I was glad Google finally got a ton of pushback against their ad about using AI for a young girl to write a fan letter to her Olympic idol. Seriously, fuck off with that. Makes me wonder if these marketing folks are actual humans in the first place.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ergonaught 2y ago
I’m pretty close to wildly unprofessional raging at coworkers sending me LLM-written emails/Slack messages. So far the 21st century seems to be a mad dash to see who can turn off their brain the most.
whoomp12342 2y ago
polishing you means snap back to the mean. AI will not make you extrordinary
babl-yc 2y ago
The first rule of working on Gmail is DO NOT change the interface. The second rule is if you insist, please let us turn off your dumb AI feature.
deleted 2y ago
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soerxpso 2y ago
What's really annoying is how its idea of "polishing" is just making the email worse. Who could possibly benefit from the recipient needing to sift through more boilerplate to find the actual content of the email? 15 years ago I might have imagined that an email sent by a robot would be extremely efficient, including only the relevant information, in order of importance. In 2025 it's apparently the opposite; we're trying our best to communicate effectively and an AI is nagging us to include an extra paragraph of flirtation.
unsupp0rted 2y ago
I’d rather get the bland polished version than the “I’m so silly/sarcastic/eccentric” version. Although ideally there’d be an AI setting that makes it both polished and terse.

415 points by doodpants 2y ago

You have an individual and unique way of speaking and writing? We're going to have to polish that out with the slop machine, citizen.

baq 2y ago
Your thoughts will be replaced by <thoughts></thoughts>. For your convenience.
ckozlowski 2y ago
Newspeak.
- normalaccess 2y ago
  This 100% https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV0CtZga7qM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV0CtZga7qM
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Wtf is that comment section
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
bayindirh 2y ago
I use Grammarly to check for errors I make during writing more serious stuff (English is not my native language), but any suggestion it sends in my way changes the tone of the text so much that it sounds like it's written by a PR agency with a fake, forced attitude; sounding bland and colorless. So no, thank you. Correct my textbook punctuation mistakes, and leave my wordy and "not positive enough" sentences to me.
- EugenioPerea 2y ago
  I'm getting increasingly irritated by Grammarly's attempts to boringify my writing. I've even considered doing away with it entirely, even if it means I have to do my own spell-checking.
deleted 2y ago
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laurent_du 2y ago
I wouldn't say the author's style is unique or individual in any way. Every single tumblr blog sounds like that. You could easily create a "make edgy" function that would feed your formal writings and turn them into that kind of prose. Is it better or worth than "polish"? There's no substantial difference. The "polish" version sure sounds less exhausting than the original.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  your writing style doesn't have to be "unique" or "original" to be yours
- itishappy 2y ago
  It's personal. "Unique" and "individual" might not be the best words to describe it, but it's clearly a style they've intentionally adopted. They appear to have been quite successful for it to!
ragazzina 2y ago
What a strange complaint about AI. This already happens and happened without AI. >You have an individual and unique way of speaking and writing? You're going to wish your e-mail finds people well, corporate-monkey.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  Is it really so strange to complain about the nudging towards the phenomenon of which you speak?
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
I'm working on a dystopia where the resistance is using text-in-text steganography to coordinate, so unpolished communication is flagged for extra scrutiny because all those stylistic choices might be hiding something.
- shagie 2y ago
  Ever read The Freeze Frame Revolution? Though, its stenography is a bit more obvious given the "you've got to be able to read it". The kindle version of the book starts with https://imgur.com/uIBjwlQ https://imgur.com/uIBjwlQ This would give you the opportunity to have another ending to the book.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I love The Freeze Frame Revolution, and yeah I was planning on doing something similar. I figure I'll publish an app that OCRs the text and displays the hidden message, and make the book read differently based on whether you can or can't see the messages. Then readers can use the app for hiding their own messages to each other also.
    - shagie 2y ago
      (realizing this is veering off into tangents of tangents)... An idea I discussed with someone tossing story ideas about was regarding the reliable / unreliable narrator for a mystery mixed in with being able to view (lock a display screen to a geographic location, got a knob to rewind / fast forward time (up to the present)) immutable past events who finds something amiss. Upon the "somethings not right..." the narrator reviews their own events of the previous day and finds that the events don't match their memory. Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator that is questioning their own reliability the narrator or an external agent trying to cast doubt on the reliability of the actual narrator?
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        That does sound interesting--to give the reader a bit more tooling to decide whether they're being lied to and by whom. You might enjoy The Quantum Thief, which isn't published in a such a unique way, but which has fun a story that would fit right in.

bloomingkales 2y ago

There is no way in hell anyone who knows me would get that email and not think I’d been abducted This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.

oglop 2y ago
[flagged]
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  You have to look at it holistically. This is the current modern Human: 1. Born into the beast, enters social media by 5-7 years old 2. All math and writing is done for you (becoming illiterate) 3. You don't have to spell ever again (becoming illiterate) 4. You cultivate a virtual persona since childhood (becoming vain) 5. Did your life really happen if it wasn't posted online (the digital existentialist crisis -- do you even exist if you aren't part of the hive?) Then add more shit to this like, I dunno, no jobs, swipe left and right to find your soul mate ... Yeah and then you finally get ... you and me, the whole fuck it, I don't care anymore. Feeding apathy with AI will not end well, we have to care. Look at our kids today, we screwed them.
  - mavhc 2y ago
    The old human: 1. Born into plague 2. Never learns maths or writing 3. Nor spelling 4. Half the time your life ends before childhood does 5. Nothing happens in your life
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago

waihtis 2y ago

The obsessive need for AI developers to make everything into the most banal, inoffensive version of said thing will probably end up being the biggest roadblock for AI taking over human jobs.

damidekronik 2y ago
"The obsessive need for AI developers (...)" - Of product product/business people trying to fit into the "AI era". Developers, if given a chance, wouldn't probably built this.
jerf 2y ago
You phrase it well. It's not the AI themselves. You can as easily get an AI to take something fundamentally banal and write it into something exciting, dynamic, exotic, or strange. If you analyze these systems as a work of art, using the postmodern toolset, the people and systems taking one of the most potent technologies humanity has ever created and using it to craft a banality machine is just... very revealing. Like the great-uncle who can't even finish protesting how non-racist he is without using a racial slur in the process. "We're innovative! We're hip! We're on the cutting edge! We're setting trends! Now here, let me help you turn your text into the grayest corporate sludge imaginable." It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art.
- pjc50 2y ago
  > postmodern It is, isn't it. It's the Sokal Hoax on a society-wide automated scale: rather than being concerned with what a "text" might "mean", generate millions upon millions of "text" sequences and mechanically separate those which pass as real enough. Baudrillard's simulacrum. > It's art. It's probably not art they intended to make, but it's art. People seem to be very insistent that the output of AI is not capital-A art, because that threatens their worldview, ignoring how artists had previously pushed to expand "art" away from any concerns of technique, intent, legibility etc.
  - jerf 2y ago
    I mean the system itself is art. The output is some kind of anti-art, but the system that uses the world's most amazing technology to extract the art out of everything that passes through it is an amazing piece of inadvertent outsider art on its own.

chias 2y ago

That opening sentence is magical.

pipeline_peak 2y ago

The irony is that someone would just use an AI to summarize the long winded polished version.

kqr 2y ago
I have noticed many news outlets presenting articles with an "AI summary" on top. Often the article is copied right off of a newswire service, with some elaborations woven in. I have a feeling the thing the LLM is summarising is increasingly something another LLM has previously expanded. What if we just wrote articles well, such that (a) they were not filled with fluff, and (b) the summary would be to only read the first paragraph of the article?
- immibis 2y ago
  News outlets rely on you scrolling down the whole article so they can show you more ads.

benreesman 2y ago

Digital culture was fake and performative and insincere enough before Turboclippy: fuck that with something sharp. It feels like the whole world is turning into an HR department premised on the ideological axiom that killing one man is a murder but killing a million is a statistic.

incognito124 2y ago
I truly appreciate the term Turboclippy and will be using it from now on
polynomial 2y ago
Well that's just corporatism taken to the extreme which everything is.

dsr_ 2y ago

Since the standard thing for the marketing side of the industry is to promise blatant absurdities, I'm sure the next big thing will be "Let us maintain your authentic voice by learning from your messages!" Oops, probably too late.

causal 2y ago

I think LLMs are transformative but it's incredible to me how unimaginative most product managers have been. It reminds me of the 90s when people discovered GIFs can be put on web pages so every page had to have a hundred of them. It was tacky, as is most embedded AI.

munificent 2y ago
> I think LLMs are transformative So is a landmine.

thrwaway1985882 2y ago

I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates. I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose. On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting that exists solely to provide evidence for compliance reasons, something out of the CIA's sabotage field manual that David Graeber has probably written about. But is now a thirty second exercise in uploading a transcript to ChatGPT, prompting for three evidentiary bulletpoints, and pasting the output in a wiki no human will ever read.

nicbou 2y ago
That's also what I do. I hand-write every email because these words have my name under them. On the other hand, if I'm asking the tax office to issue a specific document, I let AI handle it.
SkyBelow 2y ago
I was thinking about the authenticity of my writing earlier this week and wondering why I have no problem accepting code from an AI and committing it, but I find the idea of passing off an AI's writing as my own feels not just wrong, but immoral on the level of purposeful plagiarism. I feel a distinct difference, but I'm not particular clear why. I'm okay with sharing AI writing, but only when I've clearly communicated it was written by AI. Probably related to why I can copy a piece of code from elsewhere (with sufficient work to verify it does what I expect and only what I expect) but I don't copy a quote and use it as my own. My words are my words. My code doesn't have the same guarantee.
- nicbou 2y ago
  Code uses a simplified set of instructions to instruct a computer to do things. Hopefully these instructions can be understood and maintained by a human. Writing uses the entire breadth of human language to convey information between human beings with unique and complex understandings of the universe. If those words come from a machine that is not you - that is not someone - you ought to disclose it.

tlonny 2y ago

AI "polishing" tools are essentially a form of anti-compression. Lets take some information represented concisely and needlessly pad it with formalities and waffle so it appears more "professional" (whilst also throwing away useful "metadata" like message tone). No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant! It just feels absurd.

whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Why read something someone couldn't be bothered to write.
- codr7 2y ago
  Yeah, and once that happens, why read anything from them ever agin?
pimlottc 2y ago
> No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant! Not entirely, there’s still the energy usage and stock price increases. All because everyone’s too anxious to just talk to each other directly.
xnorswap 2y ago
AI has simultaneously created two industries: One around using AI to pad out documents and another one around summarising with AI. The more the first pads, the more the second is needed. If AI really were Intelligent, I'd fear it's an organism making sure it's needed in the ecosystem.
- munchler 2y ago
  https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

seydor 2y ago

I think it would be more successful if the tool was labeled "Make more persuasive" or "Manipulate"

idoco 2y ago

I get the frustration, but I think there’s a hidden assumption in this discussion: that everyone can write well in English. Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first. It’s fair to dislike how AI flattens unique voices, but for a huge part of the world, it’s not erasing personality—it’s making participation possible.

nottorp 2y ago
You somehow assume that being a native english speaker is correlated to being able to write well in english. It's how well you know english that's correlated to being able to write well in english instead.
pjc50 2y ago
AI translation is definitely a great enabler, both for written material and things like live subtitles, but people are already aware that translations are imperfect and can be disputed. Something that anime fans can get very heated about.
grishka 2y ago
English is not my native language yet somehow I share this sentiment towards AI. I'm fine with a spell checker, I don't need whatever I write completely rewritten, thank you very much.
mcpar-land 2y ago
If you can't translate your email into a foreign language, how is the AI going to rewrite your incorrect prose into correct prose? it's working on something incorrect. And then after the ai rewrites it, how can you tell if it's saying what you want it to? When I'm communicating with a non-native speaker, I intentionally use shorter / easier to translate words and sentences, and I give them more leeway with word usage / don't expect them to use the right words all the time. And that's fine! Communication still happens! We manage! But if a non-native speaker starts running their text through an AI it makes communication harder, not easier. I can't tell if their word choice is intentional or if the AI did it. A tiny mistake I can understand gets expanded into multiple incorrect sentences.

dcre 2y ago

I actually use LLMs to unpolish dictation results from MacWhisper[0] to match the way I write in chats. MacWhisper lets you set a prompt to automatically post-process your transcribed output. Here is my prompt: 'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting. - Always capitalize "I" and derived words like "I'm" - Sentences should start with lower case letters unless they start with “I” - Replace explicit punctuation callouts with the actual punctuation - No period at the end of the message, but leave periods between sentences - Do not remove commas - Do not change sophisticated words to more common ones Return only the result. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edit.' [0]: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

AlfredBarnes 2y ago
Do you know if there is a windows equivalent? I cant seem to find one that is as well done as this MacWhisper.
- dcre 2y ago
  Nope. I see a few in search results but none look that great.

Tade0 2y ago

As a tangent, the other day I read a post of a person who used to be close to Elon Musk and was giving their account of that relationship, and it was translated to Polish via DeepSeek. It was not idiomatic Polish - very far from it really, so I guess depending on the model used here, the result could have been equally disappointing if it was really trying to Polish that email.

MrMcCall 2y ago

AI does not want to do anything, whatsoever. It's owners, however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths. Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.

oldwebguy94 2y ago
> Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer. Always strikes me as interesting that "Nvidia" sounds like the syllables in the middle of "invidious"
- Pannoniae 2y ago
  invidia = envy in latin
danparsonson 2y ago
Oh come on - we've been doing this since way before crypto was a thing. We knew about climate change in the 80s.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  So then it's ok to not only continue ignoring it as the evidence mounts, but to actually accelerate it? No. No, it's not. It doesn't matter how many fools do something, they're still fools. The root word of ignorance is "to ignore".
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    You said "Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining" But it didn't. That's what I'm saying.

flatline 2y ago

> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something. Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. But mostly, it can sometimes be a useful tool, and the fact everyone is shoving it in my face reeks of desperation. The tech industry is in real trouble.

pjc50 2y ago
> no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. This is a massive liability that almost everybody seems to be ignoring. My employer has a ban on using AI on IP until this is properly resolved, because we actually care about it leaking. Maybe an Information Commissioner will get round to issuing a directive some time in the mid-2030s about how none of this complies with GDPR.
- UweSchmidt 2y ago
  I think in general, no major liability issue will come up: - if everyone is doing it, you can't really fault anyone - on some level we are, or will be, kinda dependent on that AI and opting out will probably be made unpleasant via dark patterns as usual - no pushback to every piece of software, including at the operating system level, slurping all the keystrokes and data, let alone the data that's already in the cloud - big tech knows everything about us but to my surprise no major public leak has happened, i.e. one where you really can see your neighbor's private data without buying leaked data from someone on the dark web or wherever - things are moving too fast, and you don't know if you can afford to have your programmers not use tomorrow's AI, for example, so your "bans" will have to be soft etc., this limits the potential pushback and outrage
- mrweasel 2y ago

sghiassy 2y ago

My mother is a first-generation immigrant. Her writing isn’t ideal, but AI allows her to communicate articulately in a way, where before she might have been discriminated against

simonw 2y ago
That's one of my favorite optimistic applications of AI-assisted writing. Our society is very openly discriminatory against people who aren't able to produce written communication that fits a huge number of unwritten rules. LLMs know those rules. Helping people with ESL better interact with a world that requires them is a huge win in my book.
codr7 2y ago
Awesome! Better hurry up to graduate out of the slop academy though, the style is becoming a red flag real fast now.

burkaman 2y ago

Obviously the AI version is bland and terrible, but arguably more importantly it has also completely changed the meaning of the message. The AI version: - apologizes - implies the recipient was "promised" this email as a "response" to something - blames a hectic schedule - invites questions None of this was in or was even implied in the original. This is not a "polished" version, it's just a straight-up different email. I thought that style transfer while maintaining meaning was one of the few things LLMs can be good at, but this example fails even that low bar.

polynomial 2y ago
Correct. This is called the production of subjectivity. (tyrna be funny not patronizing. but the machinery of subjectivity production is ofc very real)
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
The AI has some ... "ideas" ... of its own on what workplace relationships apparently need to be like.
- escapecharacter 2y ago
  A lot of people who want to replace most human interactions with LLMs assume that there is some objective set of cultural values true in all contexts, and that it is good and easy to encode these as axioms into an AI.
  - tclancy 2y ago
    Yes. As an Old now (GenX), I feel like moving all interactions to text and now having AI as a man in the middle is just reinventing ways to get in a situation where a decade down the line you reconnect with someone who used to be a friend and both discover "Hey, that wasn't what I meant at all!" As ever, T.S. Eliot was right: "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    And those objective set of cultural values are, apparently... a sort of parody of 90s corporate culture, a sort of polite version of Michael Scott. Like, no-one ever _actually_ wrote like LLMs tend to write; it reads as a parody of a now slightly obsolete corporate-speak.

ubermonkey 2y ago

A quick glance suggests that, because the site is pretty far afield of usual HN fare, folks here don't realize that Lawson is the author of several books. I personally do not want you -- for any value of "you" -- to use an AI to "polish" any writing sent to ME. I want the author's actual thoughts, not their thoughts massaged by an LLM.

nottorp 2y ago
"NYT bestselling author" too. Whatever value that holds. But I think it's a safe assumption that she can write well when she wants to.
pjc50 2y ago
While not as longstanding as, say, Lileks, thebloggess is someone from the blog era of the Internet, and publishes an RSS feed. She's well known in other internet communities.

ipsento606 2y ago

I simply do not understand the end game of these sorts of features. Presumably, the idea is to make the other person think you've written the email yourself, and you're a "better"/more corporate/more professional writer than you actually are. But once everyone starts using this kind of transformer, so nobody assumes that anyone else is actually writing the content they're sending out -- what's the point?! Who benefits?

coldpie 2y ago
> Who benefits? The team that implemented the feature and hit their quarterly goal and got their full quarterly bonus. The execs who set the quarterly goals will be rewarded by wall street for shipping AI features. In 2 years, when reality has struck and the market has moved on from the AI fad, another team will receive their bonus for lowering COGS by removing this feature. Users' needs are irrelevant to this cycle. Big tech companies need to be broken up into teeny, tiny pieces.
Izkata 2y ago
> Who benefits? Phishers.
rsynnott 2y ago
> Who benefits? The vendor's share price. This is nothing to do with the _users_; it is about cramming 'AI' into as many press releases as possible because it gives the markets the warm fuzzies. No-one wants to use this, and that's really beside the point; for the time being it makes stock price go up. Presumably in a year or so there'll be a new fad, and most LLM-based 'features' will go the way of Clippy.

nicbou 2y ago

AI takes the personality out of written communication, and swaps it with a bland corporate persona. I want to know that I am working with actual human beings. It reassures me to know that if something goes wrong, I can appeal to those human beings, and not to soulless corporate automatons working off of a flowchart.

normalaccess 2y ago
I feel like this is what corporate wants. A single way of speaking. A single way of thinking. Round off all the sharp edges and smooth out all the wrinkles. Humanity filtered through a sycophantic psychotic AI tuned to perfection by psychopaths who want to change humanity into their image. "The idea of a Soul, Free Will -- these are Over!" - Technocracy explained by Prof Yuval Harari https://youtu.be/NV0CtZga7qM https://youtu.be/NV0CtZga7qM
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Double-plus-good. (People tend to forget it, and it's only seen in passing, but the Ministry of Truth has machines for writing terrible books in the novel!)
munificent 2y ago
It's the end game of consumerism. Everything is a product. Every choice is a product purchasing choice. We ourselves are products. And endless sea of products selecting from other products.

anoncow 2y ago

Please stop to gtvn me ai - hilarious.

dagw 2y ago

Good news is that AI is equally adept at turning long polite business speak emails into short, blunt, and sweary emails, so you can choose what you prefer.

bityard 2y ago
I don't think Gmail/Outlook offer that yet. (But I might actually use it if they did!)

throwaway173738 2y ago

Forget Newspeak, we’ll just have get everyone on VR and polish their language until it’s identically upbeat no matter the situation.

codr7 2y ago
I might forgive AI once it starts taking my video calls, nothing important ever happens and no one listens so it's a pretty perfect application.

lacoolj 2y ago

I ran into this exact situation when I went to post something on reddit, thought it was too "rude" and ran it through chatGPT to make more polite After I posted I immediately regretted it. It sounded too structured and should have been more whine-y. Weird, but it would have been more like-able.

elric 2y ago

I need an AI detector which just straight up sends any generated emails to /dev/null. If you can't be arsed to write something, why should I waste my time reading the slop? Yes yes, languages and translations are a potentially valid use case, but irrelevant for the vast majority of people I communicate with.

upghost 2y ago

You had me at > "why would I want to translate my email into Polish?"

pimlottc 2y ago
You know that someone brought that up internally and so they added the sparkles to totally clear that up.

cbold 2y ago

I want a tool that would reverse the content to the original prompt. > "Write a thank you note that sounds sincere to that ahole" > "Some deep musing on the meaning of life tied to b2c marketing for a LinkedIn post"

bityard 2y ago
I was playing with a self-hosted model a while back and instructed it to only give answers that were unhelpful, vague, and borderline rude. It worked surprisingly well a lot of the time! But most of the time it also kinda broke the model in terms of coherent answers because it was obviously trained for the exact opposite thing.

mandarlimaye 2y ago

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MisterTea 2y ago

Is there anyone like me out there who has yet to use AI? I think it's interesting but I have no strong feelings for it. Aside from a few images generated with early image generators I have not used anything else, not even chatgpt. AI search results I mostly scroll past are an exception.

AyyEye 2y ago
I haven't used any LMMs and I'm not missing anything. At some point in the last couple of years I have entered a couple prompts in chatbotgpt using my friend's account just to see it with my own eyes (funny enough asking slop, but before that was the word, and hallucinations). I also ran a prompt through llama.cpp just to see if it would work. It did, great, I don't really care.
mrweasel 2y ago
I've done a few experiments on some project I've been putting of, one involves parsing some email. There's certainly some interesting use cases, but I've yet to figure out how to actually go about deploying a solution. It does seem, to me, that the benefits are there, but not to the extend that the AI companies would have me believe.
bityard 2y ago
I was an LLM skeptic for a long time. I still have a hard time trusting it to the same extent that most HN'ers appear to. (I would never use an LLM as a substitute for my own "voice" when writing, or put any AI-generated code into production.) But I think I have reached a middle ground: I basically use it as a first approximation when I am exploring something entirely new to me. For example, if I'm learning a programming language, I might ask it for ways to unpack an array into separate variables. Or if I'm reading an ingredients list, I'll ask what psyllium husk is. Basically anything that's moderately easy to verify if I get any suspicion that the LLM is hallucinating again. These are things that I _used_ to simply ask a search engine, before Google results became 99% SEO-optimized blogspam and therefore useless for actual knowledge-seeking. I think an important part of overcoming AI skepticism is to understand (at a very high level) how it all works so that you understand its limitations and know when you can and cannot trust it.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

I'd be interested in a "polish" feature if it had a drop down where I could select which of my aliases it makes me sound like. It's too easy to use the wrong one's voice here or there.

ericlamb89 2y ago

I had the same initially confusing experience as the author, confusing "polish" for the language "Polish". The product manager should have used AI to get feedback on this feature... I put the following into chatGPT: "I am a developer for an email client. I want to incorporate some AI features to help users write more polished emails. I'm thinking I will have an option that appears under the email body where a user can click "Polish". Can you see any issues with this UX?" ChatGPT: There are a few potential issues or points of confusion with a button labeled “Polish”: Ambiguity: Some users might confuse “Polish” (as in “to make shiny or more refined”) with “Polish” (the language). If your product is used internationally or by non-native English speakers, that label can be unintentionally confusing. Even among English speakers, “Polish” may not be immediately clear as a writing enhancement feature—people might wonder, “What exactly does it do?” Lack of Context: If users don’t already know what the feature does, they won’t know what to expect when they click “Polish.” You may need a tooltip, hover text, or short description like “Improve your text with AI suggestions” so users understand it’s about refinement, grammar, tone, etc. User Control: How much will it change their text? Will it rewrite in a new style or just fix grammar? If it makes heavier changes, users might worry about losing their personal style or voice. Be clear about the scope of the changes. Trust & Consent: Users may have privacy concerns if their email content is being sent to an AI for processing. Even if that’s already in your privacy policy, the feature’s label (just “Polish”) doesn’t convey what happens behind the scenes. You might consider adding a “What will happen to my text?” link or a discreet explanation about how data is handled. Alternative Wording: Using a label like “Improve,” “Refine,” “Enhance,” or “Polish Text” might provide clearer expectations. You might also consider dynamic or contextual labeling like “Improve Grammar & Clarity.” How to address these concerns: Add clarity in the UI: A short descriptive text or tooltip under the “Polish” button can briefly explain what the feature does: “AI-powered text improvements.” Offer user choice: Present a preview of the changes before they commit. Let them accept or reject individual suggestions so they feel in control. Signal the feature’s AI: Some users will want to know that an AI is involved, especially if they’re concerned about style changes or privacy. Labeling it as “Polish with AI” or something similar can help set expectations. Overall, the idea of a quick “one-click to refine” feature is appealing, but make sure the button’s purpose and functionality are crystal clear—both to avoid confusion and to build user trust.

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mywittyname 2y ago

> Kill me if I ever write "Regards" non-irnoically. One time, I couldn't remember the name of the album I wanted SIRI to play, so it kept picking the wrong one. After the fifth or so time, I told Siri, "you're killing me Siri" and it called 911. The future sucks.

TZubiri 2y ago
Actually that's pretty cool. Takes you literally and seriously. What did you expect the machine to understand subtleties and responding like an informal friend? I'm fine with AI being 100% serious
- mywittyname 2y ago
  If it took me literally, it would have turned itself into the police for attempting to murder its user.
Freak_NL 2y ago
Getting swatted by your smartphone sounds like a Black Mirror episode.
noisy_boy 2y ago
You must be extraordinarily polite to say something that mild after that many failed tries. I mutter expletives at chatGPT much sooner. AIR (AI induced rage) is going to be a thing. I just hope it doesn't start to reverse affect how I behave with people.

FiddlerClamp 2y ago

OneNote now shows the Copilot icon right where I start writing on a blank page. That's infuriating (as much as I see some uses for AI). Fortunately you can turn it off in the 'connected experiences' setting.

josefritzishere 2y ago

AI creep is like a leaky sewage pipe oozing gray water into everything you'd want to keep it out of. Disabling it is increasingly difficult on every app.

wang_li 2y ago
Nadella and the board approved billions of dollars in spending for AI. It's going to be in every single thing whether you want it or not. Otherwise, there will be a shareholder lawsuit.

jabroni_salad 2y ago

The AI polish feels like it was written by someone with only an elementary schooler's understanding of how to write a letter. Even in stuffy institutions like banks and insurance companies, corporate email style is very straightforward and, idk, undecorated? You learn pretty quick that people only skim emails and every word beyond your core message creates opportunity for your core message to be skipped over. NOBODY is writing salutations or 'i hope this finds you well' or whatever other garbage chatgpt thinks the first paragraph should be. When I read historical items on lettersofnote I find that even super old business messages are pretty streamlined and only have some crunch because some runner has to physically find the dude you are writing to.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

A huge problem with AI generated content is a reduction to the mean.

ongytenes 2y ago

Soon everyone will be texting, emailing etc with an AI secretary doing it all. "AI take a letter and polish it up for me..." Maybe even video conferences will use 'Polish' to portray a recreated lifelike sophisticated avatar with real time grammar correction. When folks finally do meet in real life, they will discover slobs, socially awkward or tactless idiots instead of the suave intellect portrayed by the AI. LOL

65 2y ago
Person 1: AI, take these bullet points and write an email to Person 2 Person 2: AI, please take this email from Person 1 and convert it into bullet points

crazygringo 2y ago

I think a lot of people miss the point. If you're already an effective writer, obviously AI will usually only make things worse. But for people where English is not their first language (or whatever language you're writing in), polish is a godsend. It fixes your grammatical errors, vocabulary errors, spelling errors, punctuation errors, and all the rest. Obviously it can go overboard in changing your meaning (as any flesh-and-blood editor also might), and presumably over time these tools will get more refined. But for most people who write intelligent comments here on HN, you are not the target audience for this feature. Well, until you have to dust off your high-school French or Spanish or whatever for an e-mail exchange.

robwwilliams 2y ago

Yes amusing, since unsolicited polishing, but I sincerely doubt this was forced on our fine humorist. English to English editing or “translation” from snarky to suave is straightforward to understand and fix. But what about translation by professional human translators between languages? is it really any better at preserving the intent and sub-text? Kundera has an amazing essay—- “The Sentence”—-in his collection of essays “Testaments Betrayed” on the woes of translation of, yes, a single sentence from Kafka’s “The Castle”. As he (or his translator Linda Asher) say: The sentence “describes the coition of K. and Frieda”. Under the bar too ;-) Not a topic I tend to associate with Franz Kafka. When AI systems can match Milan Kundera (translated from the French) then we will have definitely gotten to Pro level. “Write me a brilliant essay in the style of xxxx, on topic yyyy in French, and translate it into Mandarin for grins. I would be a wreck if I had to translate Kundera.

ongytenes 2y ago

Soon everyone will be texting, emailing etc with an AI secretary doing it all. "AI take a letter and polish it for me..." Maybe even video conferences will use "Polish" to portray a recreated lifelike sophisticated avatar with real time grammar correction. When folks finally do meet in real life, they discover a socially awkward, an illiterate or tactless boor instead of the suave intellect portrayed by the AI. Please forgive my comment, I didn't have any polish for it. LOL

GuB-42 2y ago

Why is the author mad? The "polish" button does exactly what you would expect it to do if you understand "polish" as "make polite". If you want to keep your words true and "unpolished", maybe at the risk of sounding rude, then don't use that feature. It is actually one of the first things I used LLMs for, and I still am. Latest example, I received an email from an administration asking me to sign some document, but it contained some incorrect information. I used a LLM to write a nice letter telling them to fix it. I could have just replied "it is not A, it is B", but without some formalism, it sounds rude, and I didn't want to sound rude, I also didn't want to make efforts for that formalism. It may be one of the things LLMs do best, they are like supercharged model letters. Of course I don't do that in informal situations or when I want some emotional connection. By the way, no LLM touched this comment, I don't consider posting on HN a formal situation. EDIT: typoes, but maybe I should have let them in, to show that it wasn't the work of a LLM ;)

bityard 2y ago
> and I didn't want to sound rude I think it's interesting how this has changed. If you go back and look at politically correct corpo-speak from decades past, it was bland and impersonal but aimed to be direct, clear, and reasonably concise. These days, it's still impersonal but now couched in platitudes, apologies, and excessively polite language in an attempt to avoid possibly offending anyone in any conceivable fashion. I'm worried that we'll get to a point in regular work communications where responding to a question with a simple and succinct "yes" instead of, "Great idea, I think that is an absolutely perfect plan and you surely deserve a call-out at the next all-hands meeting for coming up with the idea to fix that problem in the team's code!!!" will get you put on an HR watchlist for being difficult to get along with.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  From my experience with LLMs, it matches your description of "corpo-speak". I think it is the right balance of politeness. The result is usually rather simple, and when it is not, that's because it wants me to add extra information, which is often a good idea, not because of too much politeness. It is not at all like you say in the end, way more boring and that's the point. But out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT for some appropriate formula for a use case like yours and I got "Sounds good to me! I accept your suggestion—let's move forward with it." Of course, there is some formalism here, in day-to-day communication with people you know, I found it to become less formal over the years. "ok" is fine now when it wasn't before. I think because test-based instant messaging is now commonplace.

hulium 2y ago

Even though I am not a fan of it, I can see how some people might want to use AI to improve their grammar, maybe because they are afraid to leave a bad impression. But why would anyone put AI generated images into an Email?

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

While I find AI to be quite useful in many contexts, I 100% agree with this assessment, and I loath all these SV bubble-dwellers who think our lives should be airbrushed and "polished" for presentation. I think a bunch of Google's Gemini ads highlighted how clueless they were on this subject. Like one of their very first Gemini announcements highlighted how you can get AI to write a caption for your social media photos of your dog. God forbid you actually use your own brain to write an actual human caption (flaws and all) for photos of your dog. Google also highlighted how their Pixel camera AI features can "correct" photos of your kids making funny faces in family photos, because how awful would it be if you didn't look like some sort of Stepford family. I was glad Google finally got a ton of pushback against their ad about using AI for a young girl to write a fan letter to her Olympic idol. Seriously, fuck off with that. Makes me wonder if these marketing folks are actual humans in the first place.

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ergonaught 2y ago

I’m pretty close to wildly unprofessional raging at coworkers sending me LLM-written emails/Slack messages. So far the 21st century seems to be a mad dash to see who can turn off their brain the most.

whoomp12342 2y ago

polishing you means snap back to the mean. AI will not make you extrordinary

babl-yc 2y ago

The first rule of working on Gmail is DO NOT change the interface. The second rule is if you insist, please let us turn off your dumb AI feature.

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soerxpso 2y ago

What's really annoying is how its idea of "polishing" is just making the email worse. Who could possibly benefit from the recipient needing to sift through more boilerplate to find the actual content of the email? 15 years ago I might have imagined that an email sent by a robot would be extremely efficient, including only the relevant information, in order of importance. In 2025 it's apparently the opposite; we're trying our best to communicate effectively and an AI is nagging us to include an extra paragraph of flirtation.

unsupp0rted 2y ago

I’d rather get the bland polished version than the “I’m so silly/sarcastic/eccentric” version. Although ideally there’d be an AI setting that makes it both polished and terse.