8 ms·

For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they ca

For quite a while, I like use LLM to refine and fix my grammar issue, but my colleagues and professors reminds me that it was way too obvious. They said they can tolerate some mistakes in my words, but no tolerance for AI generated content.

dang 7mo ago
Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- drittich 7mo ago
  Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself.
  - Freedom2 7mo ago
    For hackers, wouldn't the best part of ourselves be our technical excellence?
    - Nevermark 7mo ago
      Have you tried that line in a bar? More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information. Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.
      - lmz 7mo ago
        > Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension Great. Isn't that part of being anonymous if one so desires? This would have decent potential to avoid stylometry deanonymization, no?
        streetfighter64 7mo ago
        Great? If you're worried that somebody's actively trying to identify your HN comments against some other source of your writing perhaps. But using a LLM to "avoid deanonymization" is about as sensible for some everyday Joe, as wearing a tinfoil hat in public to avoid 5G radiation is.
        lmz 7mo ago
        Yeah it's great if that's what you want to do. Whether it makes sense for any rando to do that is another question.
        streetfighter64 7mo ago
        Whether it makes sense for anybody to do it is the real question. The threat model where this is a useful thing to do doesn't really exist in my opinion, at least not for obfuscating random comments. Perhaps if you're doing some anonymous journalism that's uncomfortable for your country's regime, and you've previously written other stuff using your real name, it might make sense to run your writing through a LLM, maybe. In addition to a bunch of other Snowden-esque countermeasures.
        forevernoob 7mo ago
        Don't you think that as LLMs get better the deanonimization attacks will get easier? Also, a journalist in a hostile regime might be one example, but a user that posted _very_ personal things under an alt account is also another example, and I bet the latter is much more common than the former.
        streetfighter64 7mo ago
        Do you have enemies that would be interested in spending real money trying to link your public accounts to some (possibly existing, likely not) alt accounts with "personal things"? I don't think that's very common. And no, while I'm sure LLMs can be used for stylometry in academic exercises, I don't think they'll really enable any sort of automatic mass-deanonymization of random social media accounts. But who knows, the US government probably has a bunch of new PRISM-like programs going on already, so it might happen.
    - altairprime 7mo ago
      There is value in technical excellence, but it’s not substituable for having and using a voice that isn’t the crowd-averaged AI normal. Better an unpracticed voice than a dull one, etc. (Also, AI is nullifying a great deal of excellence in favor of barely sufficient, just like Java did! so betting on the continued value of technical prowess requires some particular specializations that are not so easily replaced as the high quantity of devopseng cogs turn out to be.)
    - saagarjha 7mo ago
      Only if you’re a very boring person.
    - bruce511 7mo ago
      If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part. When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more. As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on. Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important. I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.
      - PAndreew 7mo ago
        Very well put.
      - prox 7mo ago
        I really love your post, but I do think (and I come from an artistic background) that some skills have their own beauty, like work of art. Some love for creativity and what we create has a meaning of its own. Certainly worthy of an epitaph. It’s why overuse of AI is a bad call imo. You skip a part of the journey. Like Guy Kawasaki says “make something meaningful”. If we are all AIs talking to eachother, everything becomes meaningless, we will become a simulation of surrogates. That said, human compassion, relating to others and everything you mentioned trumps everything else.
        Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
        Sure thing, but at the same time, there's creativity and then there's work; I could creatively write things in C or assembly for the art of it, but that isn't what my employer pays me to do. I could do my job in notepad or `ed` and type every character myself, but that's inefficient. Same goes for art (which is often what it's compared to), some part of art is creative, but the vast majority of art that people get paid salaries for is "just work"; designing a website, doing graphics work for a video game or TV production, that kinda thing. tl;dr, AI won't replace artisans but it's a tool that can help increase productivity / reduce costs. Emphasis on can, because it's a lot more complex than "same output in less time".
    - mikkupikku 7mo ago
      No, that would be my roguish good looks.
    - bayindirh 7mo ago
      This is quite an interesting question, because I believe there's two facets to the surface of the question. Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. You can pique their interest, they may praise you, but if they are informed enough, anything looking like magic can be dissected easily. So technical excellence is meaningless. Given you're interacting with a competent hacker again, everything technical will be subjective. Creating is deciding trade-offs all the way down and beyond. Their preferences will probably lay at a difference balance of trade-offs. Even though you catch "objective" perfection, even this perfection has nuances (see USB audio interfaces. They all have flat response curves, but they all sound different, for example), hence, technical excellence is not only meaningless, it's subjective. On a deeper level, a genuine person who knows its cookies well, even though with gaps is a much more interesting and nicer person to interact with. They'll be genuinely interested in talking with you, and learn something from you, or show what they know gently, so both parties can grow together. They might not be knowledgeable in most intricate details, but they are genuinely human and open to improvement and into the conversation itself, not to prove themselves and win a meaningless battle to stroke their own ego. An LLM generated response is similar. It's lazy, it's impersonated, it's like low quality canned food. A new user recently has written an LLM generated rebuttal to one of my comments. It's white-labeled gibberish, insincere word-skirmish. It's so off-putting that I don't see the point to reply them. They'll just paste it to a non-descript box and will add "write a rebuttal reply, press this point". This is not a discussion, this is a meaningless fight for internet points. I prefer genuine opinions, imperfect replies, vulnerable humans at the other end of the wire. Not a box of numbers spitting out grammatically correct yet empty sentences.
      - sebastiennight 7mo ago
        > Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. I disagree with this and would instead consider that a technical expert (in any field) being impressed with your work can be the most satisfying reward of craft. Laypeople can be awed, but the expert can bestow an entirely different quality of respect to your work.
  - dguest 7mo ago
    It's worse than relinquishing: you get a new voice, that of the person needs an LLM to talk. I have similar reservations about code formatters: maybe I just haven't worked with a code base with enough terrible formatting, but I'm sad when programmers loose the little voice they have. Linters: cool; style guidelines: fine. I'm cool with both, but the idea that we need to strip every character of junk DNA from a codebase seems excessive.
    - speeder 7mo ago
      I worked on a project where having code formatting used was massively useful. The project had 10k source files, many of them having several thousand lines, everything was C++ and good chunks of code were written brilliantly and the rest was at least easy to understand.
    - TheDong 7mo ago
      On code-formatters, I don't think it's so clear-cut, but rather an "it depends". For code that is meant to be an expression of programmers, meant to be art, then yes code formatters should be an optional tool in the artist's quiver. For code that is meant to be functional, one of the business goals is uniformity such that the programmers working on the code can be replaced like cogs, such that there is no individuality or voice. In that regard, yes, code-formatters are good and voice is bad. Similarly, an artist painting art should be free. An "artist" painting the "BUS" lines on a road should not take liberties, they should make it have the exact proportions and color of all the other "BUS" markings. You can easily see this in the choices of languages. Haskell and lisp were made to express thought and beauty, and so they allow abstractions and give formatting freedom by default. Go was made to try and make Googlers as cog-like and replaceable as possible, to minimize programmer voice and crush creativity and soul wherever possible, so formatting is deeply embedded in the language tooling and you're discouraged from building any truly beautiful abstractions.
      - foobarian 7mo ago
        The biggest problem I ran into without a code formatter is that team wasted a LOT of time arguing about style. Every single MR would have nitpicking about how many spaces to indent here and there, where to put the braces, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I don't particularly like the style we are enforcing but I love how much more efficient our review process is.
  - abcd_f 7mo ago
    Also makes it easier to identify your alt accounts ;)
  - oytis 7mo ago
    I've been editing my comments (not in English) with specialized spell-checking services, and I don't think they change my voice in any meaningful way. I suspect when people say they are using LLMs to fix their grammar, it's actually some more than just grammar.
    - dspillett 7mo ago
      There is quite a difference between fixing grammar and the fuller rewording that is often used especially by LLM based writing tools. The distinction is much more of a grey area when you not talking about a language you are fluent in, because you don't know the difference between idiomatic equivalences and full-on rewording that will change your perceived tone⁰ - the tool being used could be doing more than you think and not in a good way. And if you are using the tool, “AI” or not to translate it is even worse and you often only have to do on cycle of [your primary language] -> [something else] -> [your primary language] to see what a mess that can make. I'm attempting to learn Spanish¹ and when I'm writing something, or practising something that I might say, I'll write it entirely away from tech (I have even a proper chunky paper dictionary and grammar guide to help with that!) other than the text editor I'm typing in, and then I'll sometimes give a tool it to look over. If that tool suggests what looks like more than just “that's the wrong tense, you should have an accent there, etc.” I'll research the change rather than accepting it as-is. -------- [0] or even, potentially, perceived meaning [1] I like the place and want to spend more time down there when I can, I even like the idea of living there fairly permanently when I no longer have certain responsibilities tying me to the UK², and I'd hate to be ThatGuy™ who rocks up and expects everyone else to speak his language. [2] and the shithole it has the potential to become over the next decade - to the Reform supporters and their ilk who say, without any hint of irony, “if you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else” I reply “I'm working on that”.
  - bayindirh 7mo ago
    You not only relinquish your voice, but everything standing behind that voice. Thoughts, opinions, perspective, capacity to think, everything.
  - throw0101d 7mo ago
    > Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself. One observation I ran across on the use of the em-dash ("—") was that if AI was given training data from writers that were considered good/great, and those writers tended to use em-dashes, then it would be unsurprising that AI 'learned' to use the character. So the observer said humans should, if they already did so in the past, continue to use the em-dash now and going forward if it was already part of their 'personal style' in writing.
    - sebastiennight 7mo ago
      I've written multiple books, the most recent in 2019. I used to love the em-dash, and considered it the superior form of ellipsis (over the parenthesis, comma or semicolon). I'm not planning on writing new books now, but if I did, I would completely get rid of em-dashes, because of their second-order effect of making the copy AI-written (and therefore less valuable). It's also interesting that using a Skill that discouraged the use of em-dashes, I noticed that Claude's "thinking" internal dialogue actually disagreed with the Skill spec itself ("no, actually, em-dashes are perfectly normal and not a sign of AI writing") and therefore kept the dashes, against the Skill instructions.
  - mlhpdx 7mo ago
    Content is everything. Voice is simply entertainment.
    - davorak 7mo ago
      One example of voice is of retreading old ground over and over, taking a long time to give evidence or get to the point. Content expressed with this voice is hard to extract from the text. Another voice might add citations to every little detail to the point that it is hard to read, but makes a great reference and/or starting point for additional research. Voice is not really separate from content, in part it is the choices of what content to include.
- eleventyseven 7mo ago
  I routinely call out people of writing in an LLM assisted fashion that clearly shows they have just been "vibe commenting". You know, just paste it in and copy the output without even thinking. The people who for some insane reason think they are making a genuine conversation with their copy pasting skills and $20/mo subscription. As if they are like the archive.whatever of the AI era. Because those comments are objectively terrible and contribute little. The ones with all the consultant sycophant speak and distracting prose that comes off the default prompt and RLHF. But that's really what you're now enforcing: writing in an easily detectable LLM prose and voice. LLM detection is very difficult especially at small comment scale texts. There is never proof, only telltale phrases. How will this be enforced? What the heck even is "AI"? The thing that really frustrates me is that I can't put tokens through a transformer in any way in editing my post? I can't have an LLM turn a bare link after a sentence into a [1]? I can't have it literally do nothing more than spell check in an LLM, but could with a rule based model? Or what about other LLMs or SLMs or classic NLP chained together? Or is it just the transformer? And it is officially sanctioned that people ought to be keeping in the back of their mind "does this feel LLMish?" instead of "is this a good comment that contributes to the discussion?" Maybe LLM prose is so annoying and insufferably sycophantic that even if all the content and logic was sound, it still should be moderated completely out. But the entire technological form is profane and unclean? I am 100% not interested in participating in a community that seeks to profile and police the technological infrastructure that its members use. I want my comments judged by the contributions they make and do not make to the discussion. If the LLM makes the comment better, it is good. If it makes it worse, it is bad.
  - calmoo 7mo ago
    I think a more generous interpretation of dang's comment is that it's fine to use LLMs / tools to fix grammatical errors / spellchecking, but a heavier pass where the prose, wording and tone is altered (even mildly) can create a 'slop ambience' over time, death by a thousand paper cuts.
    - eleventyseven 7mo ago
      Slop ambience just sure sounds to me like HN is banning a prose style. I guess I just think that if this is how the rule will be enforced, that is how it should be written.
- booleandilemma 7mo ago
  Hi dang, your algolia link doesn't bring up any results. I get: We found no items matching by:dang "own voice"
  - DrawTR 7mo ago
    Seems to be an accidental dangling s at the end of the comment. Try this? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - booleandilemma 7mo ago
      That works!
    - dang 7mo ago
      Yikes, fixed above now. Thanks to both of you!
- Markoff 7mo ago
  Does this mean (English) grammar Nazis are banned?
  - Markoff 7mo ago
    I see my comment triggered grammar Nazis, so much for posting non-AI generated comments...
  - butlike 7mo ago
    Would the 'G' in Grammar be capitalized since 'English Grammar Nazis' is a proper noun?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- stavros 7mo ago
  Eh, history has shown me that that's incorrect, though. In my culture, we're direct and just say what we want to say, whereas in US culture you have to be very circumspect or you get a bunch of downvotes. I've used an LLM to give me feedback so I can "anglicize" my comments, otherwise I get downvoted to hell. Even in this comment, I initially wrote the start as "you're wrong", but then had to catch myself and go back and soften it to "that's incorrect", even though the meaning is the exact same. The constant impedance mismatch is tiring.
  - NordSteve 7mo ago
    "You're wrong" is a criticism of the speaker, "that's incorrect" is a criticism of the content. Two different things.
    - stavros 7mo ago
      If the speaker says something incorrect, they can't be right, therefore they're wrong. I don't see the difference.
      - Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
        It depends on whether what they say is coming from them or if it's something they are citing; "I am extremely attractive" can be countered with "you are wrong", but "People say I am extremely attractive" cannot be, because I did not come up with the opinion, others did. "They are wrong" is then valid, or "That is not correct" if I have misinterpreted them.
    - jjkaczor 7mo ago
      When it comes to factual information, and not opinion - telling someone that they are wrong is not a criticism. It is fact. Of course - people have egos and emotions, so when they hear someone tell them they are wrong, they will typically take that as criticism about themselves - and not the fact that you are disputing.
      - 7mo ago
- stonecharioteer 7mo ago
  I tell people that when editing posts on my blog, I rely on AI to fix my code blocks if there are errors but I don't use it to fix typos or grammar. I feel like that keeps my blog human.
- wittjeff 7mo ago
  Let me refer you to my buddy Anton, a software developer in Ukraine. He has CP and it makes typing and communicating by speech very slow and tedious. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aYbDLOK14uM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aYbDLOK14uM He has a blog, which I think is particularly relevant to this conversation: https://www.patreon.com/c/GreenWizard/posts?vanity=GreenWizard https://www.patreon.com/c/GreenWizard/posts?vanity=GreenWiza... IMO his writing style is quite melodramatic. I have asked myself, how much of that is his perhaps overly compensatory tendency to project an articulate voice, and how much of it is applied by his AI tools? The last time I saw Anton in person I asked him about his writing process, and he said something like, "I just draft it and then ask ChatGPT to make it sound professional or whatever." So after thinking about it for a while, I have decided that this is his preferred voice, so I'll accept it as his voice. IMO it is not for you to decide how people recast their own voice. Once you adopt that dogma, you're committed to denying other people's experience of discrimination (through the lens of disability's symptoms). Whether or not you participate in that other type of biased discrimination is irrelevant.
  - btown 7mo ago
    For all the challenges that AI poses to online communities, it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible, to participate in those communities in ways they never could before. I think HN is broadly supportive of these voices, and I think that an "unwritten exception" to this rule is implicit here. But I'm in the camp that making an explicit exception for special circumstances would be a meaningful statement that all voices are welcome.
    - devmor 7mo ago
      >it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible Putting aside the example proposed above where typing or dictation may be difficult, "impossible" seems, well, impossible. I am curious how you suppose that someone who cannot type or dictate at all would prompt an LLM.
      - btown 7mo ago
- i_am_a_peasant 7mo ago
  I had a team lead at work be offended by something pretty neutral that i said and explicitly asked me to always use chatgpt when i talk with him lol
- CWuestefeld 7mo ago
  At the margin this is fine. But ensuring that we really understand each other is the most important thing. Especially these days, when polarization is so intense and everyone seems to actively look for faults in what others (seem to) say. When it's a matter of a spelling error or two, no problem. But too often I find I've got to read something multiple times before I have any idea what my interlocutor is saying. Is our hatred of "AI Slop" and greater posting traffic worth handicapping our ability to communicate with each other?
  - toraway 7mo ago
    Using entirely LLM-drafted writing often reduces the amount of effective information conveyed even if the output is perfectly formatted, fluent English. When I receive an LLM written email at work, I start to question every specific detail because I have no idea if it actually came from the writer (and is therefore important), or was inserted as filler by a computer (and therefore irrelevant). It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if everyone carefully edited the LLM output themselves before sending (although voice, tone, emotional context clues would still be elided). But in practice that doesn’t happen, it’s just too easy to click send and the time burden gets passed to the other person.
- mlhpdx 7mo ago
  What about the people who struggle to form coherent prose for mental or physical reasons? The content should be judged for what it contains, not how it was made.
  - dang 7mo ago
    You're getting into the long tail of cases there, which can't be generalized about. We'd need to know about a specific situation in order to say anything.
    - mlhpdx 7mo ago
      Is it a long tail? Let's take me, because I know the subject well. I have poor working memory. Very poor, insomuch as I have to type six digit codes in blocks of three. I can write, of course, and sometimes well. But technical writing requires maintaining both detail and thread and I cannot do both in a sustained way. For a short comment, I'm usually okay. For anything longer, not so much. Is the long tail the whole beast? I think yes. So I write shorthand and use tools to help me, and yes the results aren't always perfect -- but they are my thoughts embodied.
duskdozer 7mo ago
Even if you make mistakes, it often can still be understood. 100% I would rather read your own words, even if they're messy, and ask clarifying questions for what I don't understand
calmoo 7mo ago
If you're referring to speaking in English - in general I think there is a huge amount of flexibility for making mistakes in English. I'm a native speaker, I am so used to hearing various levels of English from different nationalities that i'm almost blind to it. I much prefer to hear someones true voice even if there are a few inaccuracies, so much of a person's personality is conveyed through their quirks and mistakes.
- skywhopper 7mo ago
  I agree with this, and I’d even say that all the grammatical and spelling mistakes, awkward constructions, and labored phrasing is what makes a person’s posts sound like themselves. If people commonly use LLMs to rewrite themselves, then everyone starts sounding the same. And the posts, the users, and the entire site all become a lot less interesting.
  - shmeeed 7mo ago
    I'm absolutely with both of you, but I'd like to point out that non-native speakers often tread a very fine line. They need to fear sounding either too convoluted or a bit of a simpleton. Proficiency levels vary wildly, and not everybody in the audience is as receptive and welcoming to slight mistakes as you are, even tough I have to admit HN in particular is pretty tolerant. I for one don't think I'll ever AI-wash my texts or use AI translations verbatim. If everybody else did, it would certainly be a sad loss of diversity, but IMO it's only going to make the people who put in their own effort stand out more. Hopefully in a positive way. Time will tell if we're a dying breed. I'm afraid the need for anybody to learn foreign languages will be subject to much change and discussion for upcoming generations.
- skipants 7mo ago
  Huh. I have the opposite opinion. I'm monolingual English for all intents and purposes but I gathered that opinion from quite a few sources, including: - We had to take spelling tests in school - English speakers make (generally light) fun of other's spelling or grammar mistakes in a casual setting - In a professional setting, a lot of time is taken to proofread our own emails - There's de jure spellings for every word - Some online communities are really weird about pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes (namely Reddit) Language is meant to be a fluid, evolving thing but I always felt like English was treated the opposite way. Maybe that's also why it's the de facto Lingua Franca. I do think, and hope, that this rigidity will change thanks to AI. I've started to embrace my mistakes. I care a lot less about capitalization and punctuation in my Slack messages, for example.
cobbzilla 7mo ago
You write well enough to use your own voice. I don’t think it is so binary black/white though. I don’t mind if someone who has no command of English uses a translator. But there is a difference between a translator and an AI/LLM.
- brabel 7mo ago
  LLMs work better as translators than any non-AI translators though. Because they are able to translate not just words, but also capture the context of what's being said. If you translate a common phrase like "home, sweet home" to another language, it may or may not make any sense if you translate it word-by-word, like traditional translators would normally do... but LLMs know "what you mean" and will use the equivalent saying in the target language, even if that use entirely different words.
  - ozim 7mo ago
    I think someone who has low level of English will benefit more from trying to write on his own. Unless they don’t care about learning English which shouldn’t be frowned upon.
  - cobbzilla 7mo ago
    I dunno? I think modern translators get idioms nowadays don’t they? If not, they should. how hard is it to recognize common idioms and at least state the literal meaning followed by the semantic meaning? there are at most what, a few thousand per language?
  - watwut 7mo ago
    Human translators did not translated word for word. That part is simply untrue. And LLM does not know context, it makes mistakes a lot more in it. But, it is much cheaper.
    - Xfx7028 7mo ago
      I think he meant non-human translators, like Google translate etc. Those translations were indeed not making any sense sometimes. Although I have heard that they improved Google translate in the recent years.
planb 7mo ago
As a non native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader. I'd never just copy the verbatim LLM output somewhere, it always sounds blunt and not like me, but I gladly apply grammar corrections or better phrasing. I'd normally not do this for a text of this length, but just for fun, here's what ChatGPT suggests: As a non-native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader. I would never copy the output verbatim, because it often sounds blunt and unlike me, but I’m happy to use grammar corrections or improved phrasing.
- Planktonne 7mo ago
  Even in that short comment, the LLM has - Made the prose flatter. - Slightly changed the sense ('gladly' and 'happy to' are not equivalent, and neither are 'search for' and 'help me find') in ways that do add up - Not actually improved anything
  - croemer 7mo ago
    How do you know what the text would have been without LLM assist? Did I miss something? You are so confident in your claims, yet I don't see the non-LLM-assisted version.
    - Planktonne 7mo ago
      You have definitely missed something; the parent comment is literally the the human-created and LLM-generated text next to each other.
      - croemer 7mo ago
        Thanks, indeed I missed this: "here's what ChatGPT suggests:"
    - krisoft 7mo ago
      > Did I miss something? Probably. Planb’s message suggest that the first paragraph is their own writing, the second paragraph tells us that the third paragraph is the llm “improved” version of the first.
aaron695 7mo ago
[dead]
watwut 7mo ago
If it was obvious, then it was doing much more then just fixing your grammar.
- bmacho 7mo ago
  That, or he has been writing LLM-style all this time but with bad grammar. Also to the people saying that they just let LLM replace phrases: that's the worst you can do. LLM style lies mostly in the phrases, they come from a narrow selection that they tend to use
adityaathalye 7mo ago
> ... in experiments in which all outer sensation is withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination. Must quote the last paragraph of Chapter 2: "Hot and Cold media", from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which I've double-underlined. For it simultaneously explains to me; TikTok (quick consume-scroll-like-react-"create" dopamine hit cycles) and LLMs (outsourcing the essential mechanical friction of thinking (which requires all senses, for me at least))... The essential friction of deliberate, first-party speech-making---misspellings and all---is why voice and conversation contains life.
vitro 7mo ago
Forrest would be so silent if only the best birds would sing.
monkeydust 7mo ago
Are people so tuned for this that I need to think about deliberately adding some mstakes into what I write?
- mzl 7mo ago
  No, but a lot of AI-adjsuted wordings have the very idiosyncratic AI-style that is prevalent in the AI-slop that is everywhere, and that style has quickly become associated with writing that is generally void of content and insight. So it is natural to get gut-reactions to the typical phrasings that have become associated with AI.
nebula8804 7mo ago
This appears to be leading to people being super quiet about their AI usage. It really feels as if everyone is using it massively but keeping quiet about it. This is a guess as I haven't gone around and asked every single person about their AI usage. I am reminded about a question I posted in a Vintage Apple subreddit. I described the problem and all the steps I took to try and resolve it. In the middle of the text I also hinted that I asked AI and that it gave be a wildly strange answer which I dismissed but that it gave me hints to continue onwards. The majority of answers were focused around that one sentence and completely ignoring the rest of the post(and even the problem I was posting about). I was ridiculed (sometimes aggressively) for even considering trying the AI. Eventually someone finally answered the question, I thanked them and continued to get downvoted massively. While I get that the vintage community can attract some colorful characters this was an interesting observation at how badly they reacted to the post. I've since refrained from mentioning AI and furthermore, trying to limit my involvement with communities like that and ironically working on better ways to use AI to solve problems so as to minimize dealing with them(finding ways of providing more system level data to the AI in my prompt).
dathinab 7mo ago
through it isn't AI generated content if the content still comes from you
youknownothing 7mo ago
It's interesting you say this, and I wonder how far it gets. I like speaking at conferences and often submit proposals to their CFPs. I sometimes have the temptation to refine my abstracts using AI; not fully generate them, just touched them. But then they don't feel like me and I have a dilemma: shall I submit the 100% mine but perhaps sub-optimal text? or the AI-enhanced one? will the AI-edited one be too obvious and be rejected as AI slop? However, this isn't an entirely new phenomenon. There is a company in Spain called Audens that manufactures croquettes. People prefer hand-made croquettes instead of industrially produced, and they usually can tell the difference by how perfectly regular industrial croquettes are, so Audens developed this method to produce irregular croquettes. Each individual croquette is slightly different, creating a homemade feel that appeals to consumers. If it's too perfect, it isn't human.

dang 7mo ago

Thanks for putting this so nicely! We'd much rather hear you in your own voice, and the cost of a few mistakes is far less than the cost of losing that. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

drittich 7mo ago
Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself.
- Freedom2 7mo ago
  For hackers, wouldn't the best part of ourselves be our technical excellence?
  - Nevermark 7mo ago
    Have you tried that line in a bar? More to the point, Hacker News is much more interesting for encouraging idiosyncratic (i.e. original, diverse, nuanced views of specific) human viewpoints, not just being raw technical information. Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension.
    - lmz 7mo ago
      > Model rewrites remove much of specific human dimension Great. Isn't that part of being anonymous if one so desires? This would have decent potential to avoid stylometry deanonymization, no?
      - streetfighter64 7mo ago
        Great? If you're worried that somebody's actively trying to identify your HN comments against some other source of your writing perhaps. But using a LLM to "avoid deanonymization" is about as sensible for some everyday Joe, as wearing a tinfoil hat in public to avoid 5G radiation is.
        lmz 7mo ago
        Yeah it's great if that's what you want to do. Whether it makes sense for any rando to do that is another question.
        streetfighter64 7mo ago
        Whether it makes sense for anybody to do it is the real question. The threat model where this is a useful thing to do doesn't really exist in my opinion, at least not for obfuscating random comments. Perhaps if you're doing some anonymous journalism that's uncomfortable for your country's regime, and you've previously written other stuff using your real name, it might make sense to run your writing through a LLM, maybe. In addition to a bunch of other Snowden-esque countermeasures.
        forevernoob 7mo ago
        Don't you think that as LLMs get better the deanonimization attacks will get easier? Also, a journalist in a hostile regime might be one example, but a user that posted _very_ personal things under an alt account is also another example, and I bet the latter is much more common than the former.
        streetfighter64 7mo ago
        Do you have enemies that would be interested in spending real money trying to link your public accounts to some (possibly existing, likely not) alt accounts with "personal things"? I don't think that's very common. And no, while I'm sure LLMs can be used for stylometry in academic exercises, I don't think they'll really enable any sort of automatic mass-deanonymization of random social media accounts. But who knows, the US government probably has a bunch of new PRISM-like programs going on already, so it might happen.
  - altairprime 7mo ago
    There is value in technical excellence, but it’s not substituable for having and using a voice that isn’t the crowd-averaged AI normal. Better an unpracticed voice than a dull one, etc. (Also, AI is nullifying a great deal of excellence in favor of barely sufficient, just like Java did! so betting on the continued value of technical prowess requires some particular specializations that are not so easily replaced as the high quantity of devopseng cogs turn out to be.)
  - saagarjha 7mo ago
    Only if you’re a very boring person.
  - bruce511 7mo ago
    If that's true, it would be very sad indeed. Techical excellence is a very low bar to clear. It's so easy even AI can do that part. When I was young, and learning my technical skills, then naturally I was focused on improving those skills. At that age I defined myself by what I did, and so my self worth was related to my skills. And while the skills are not hard to acquire, not many did, and they were well paid. All of which made me value them even more. As I've grown older though I discovered my best parts had nothing to do with tech skills. My best parts (work wise) was in translating those skills into a viable business, hiring the right people, focusing my attention where it's needed (and getting out the way where it's not.) My best parts at work are my human relationships with colleagues, customers, prospects and so on. Outside of work my technical skills mean nothing. My family and friends couldn't care less. They barely know I have drills at all, and no idea if I'm any good or not. In that space compassion, loyalty, reliability, kindness, generosity, helpfulness, positivity, contentment and so on are far (far) more important. I hope at my funeral people remember those things. Whether I could set up email or drive an AI will (hopefully) not even be in the top 10.
    - PAndreew 7mo ago
      Very well put.
    - prox 7mo ago
      I really love your post, but I do think (and I come from an artistic background) that some skills have their own beauty, like work of art. Some love for creativity and what we create has a meaning of its own. Certainly worthy of an epitaph. It’s why overuse of AI is a bad call imo. You skip a part of the journey. Like Guy Kawasaki says “make something meaningful”. If we are all AIs talking to eachother, everything becomes meaningless, we will become a simulation of surrogates. That said, human compassion, relating to others and everything you mentioned trumps everything else.
      - Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
        Sure thing, but at the same time, there's creativity and then there's work; I could creatively write things in C or assembly for the art of it, but that isn't what my employer pays me to do. I could do my job in notepad or `ed` and type every character myself, but that's inefficient. Same goes for art (which is often what it's compared to), some part of art is creative, but the vast majority of art that people get paid salaries for is "just work"; designing a website, doing graphics work for a video game or TV production, that kinda thing. tl;dr, AI won't replace artisans but it's a tool that can help increase productivity / reduce costs. Emphasis on can, because it's a lot more complex than "same output in less time".
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    No, that would be my roguish good looks.
  - bayindirh 7mo ago
    This is quite an interesting question, because I believe there's two facets to the surface of the question. Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. You can pique their interest, they may praise you, but if they are informed enough, anything looking like magic can be dissected easily. So technical excellence is meaningless. Given you're interacting with a competent hacker again, everything technical will be subjective. Creating is deciding trade-offs all the way down and beyond. Their preferences will probably lay at a difference balance of trade-offs. Even though you catch "objective" perfection, even this perfection has nuances (see USB audio interfaces. They all have flat response curves, but they all sound different, for example), hence, technical excellence is not only meaningless, it's subjective. On a deeper level, a genuine person who knows its cookies well, even though with gaps is a much more interesting and nicer person to interact with. They'll be genuinely interested in talking with you, and learn something from you, or show what they know gently, so both parties can grow together. They might not be knowledgeable in most intricate details, but they are genuinely human and open to improvement and into the conversation itself, not to prove themselves and win a meaningless battle to stroke their own ego. An LLM generated response is similar. It's lazy, it's impersonated, it's like low quality canned food. A new user recently has written an LLM generated rebuttal to one of my comments. It's white-labeled gibberish, insincere word-skirmish. It's so off-putting that I don't see the point to reply them. They'll just paste it to a non-descript box and will add "write a rebuttal reply, press this point". This is not a discussion, this is a meaningless fight for internet points. I prefer genuine opinions, imperfect replies, vulnerable humans at the other end of the wire. Not a box of numbers spitting out grammatically correct yet empty sentences.
    - sebastiennight 7mo ago
      > Given you're interacting with a competent hacker (i.e. a person who is into tech not for money and for tinkering), you can't impress them. I disagree with this and would instead consider that a technical expert (in any field) being impressed with your work can be the most satisfying reward of craft. Laypeople can be awed, but the expert can bestow an entirely different quality of respect to your work.
- dguest 7mo ago
  It's worse than relinquishing: you get a new voice, that of the person needs an LLM to talk. I have similar reservations about code formatters: maybe I just haven't worked with a code base with enough terrible formatting, but I'm sad when programmers loose the little voice they have. Linters: cool; style guidelines: fine. I'm cool with both, but the idea that we need to strip every character of junk DNA from a codebase seems excessive.
  - speeder 7mo ago
    I worked on a project where having code formatting used was massively useful. The project had 10k source files, many of them having several thousand lines, everything was C++ and good chunks of code were written brilliantly and the rest was at least easy to understand.
  - TheDong 7mo ago
    On code-formatters, I don't think it's so clear-cut, but rather an "it depends". For code that is meant to be an expression of programmers, meant to be art, then yes code formatters should be an optional tool in the artist's quiver. For code that is meant to be functional, one of the business goals is uniformity such that the programmers working on the code can be replaced like cogs, such that there is no individuality or voice. In that regard, yes, code-formatters are good and voice is bad. Similarly, an artist painting art should be free. An "artist" painting the "BUS" lines on a road should not take liberties, they should make it have the exact proportions and color of all the other "BUS" markings. You can easily see this in the choices of languages. Haskell and lisp were made to express thought and beauty, and so they allow abstractions and give formatting freedom by default. Go was made to try and make Googlers as cog-like and replaceable as possible, to minimize programmer voice and crush creativity and soul wherever possible, so formatting is deeply embedded in the language tooling and you're discouraged from building any truly beautiful abstractions.
    - foobarian 7mo ago
      The biggest problem I ran into without a code formatter is that team wasted a LOT of time arguing about style. Every single MR would have nitpicking about how many spaces to indent here and there, where to put the braces, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I don't particularly like the style we are enforcing but I love how much more efficient our review process is.
- abcd_f 7mo ago
  Also makes it easier to identify your alt accounts ;)
- oytis 7mo ago
  I've been editing my comments (not in English) with specialized spell-checking services, and I don't think they change my voice in any meaningful way. I suspect when people say they are using LLMs to fix their grammar, it's actually some more than just grammar.
  - dspillett 7mo ago
    There is quite a difference between fixing grammar and the fuller rewording that is often used especially by LLM based writing tools. The distinction is much more of a grey area when you not talking about a language you are fluent in, because you don't know the difference between idiomatic equivalences and full-on rewording that will change your perceived tone⁰ - the tool being used could be doing more than you think and not in a good way. And if you are using the tool, “AI” or not to translate it is even worse and you often only have to do on cycle of [your primary language] -> [something else] -> [your primary language] to see what a mess that can make. I'm attempting to learn Spanish¹ and when I'm writing something, or practising something that I might say, I'll write it entirely away from tech (I have even a proper chunky paper dictionary and grammar guide to help with that!) other than the text editor I'm typing in, and then I'll sometimes give a tool it to look over. If that tool suggests what looks like more than just “that's the wrong tense, you should have an accent there, etc.” I'll research the change rather than accepting it as-is. -------- [0] or even, potentially, perceived meaning [1] I like the place and want to spend more time down there when I can, I even like the idea of living there fairly permanently when I no longer have certain responsibilities tying me to the UK², and I'd hate to be ThatGuy™ who rocks up and expects everyone else to speak his language. [2] and the shithole it has the potential to become over the next decade - to the Reform supporters and their ilk who say, without any hint of irony, “if you don't like it why don't you go somewhere else” I reply “I'm working on that”.
- bayindirh 7mo ago
  You not only relinquish your voice, but everything standing behind that voice. Thoughts, opinions, perspective, capacity to think, everything.
- throw0101d 7mo ago
  > Voice is everything. Don't relinquish the best part of yourself. One observation I ran across on the use of the em-dash ("—") was that if AI was given training data from writers that were considered good/great, and those writers tended to use em-dashes, then it would be unsurprising that AI 'learned' to use the character. So the observer said humans should, if they already did so in the past, continue to use the em-dash now and going forward if it was already part of their 'personal style' in writing.
  - sebastiennight 7mo ago
    I've written multiple books, the most recent in 2019. I used to love the em-dash, and considered it the superior form of ellipsis (over the parenthesis, comma or semicolon). I'm not planning on writing new books now, but if I did, I would completely get rid of em-dashes, because of their second-order effect of making the copy AI-written (and therefore less valuable). It's also interesting that using a Skill that discouraged the use of em-dashes, I noticed that Claude's "thinking" internal dialogue actually disagreed with the Skill spec itself ("no, actually, em-dashes are perfectly normal and not a sign of AI writing") and therefore kept the dashes, against the Skill instructions.
- mlhpdx 7mo ago
  Content is everything. Voice is simply entertainment.
  - davorak 7mo ago
    One example of voice is of retreading old ground over and over, taking a long time to give evidence or get to the point. Content expressed with this voice is hard to extract from the text. Another voice might add citations to every little detail to the point that it is hard to read, but makes a great reference and/or starting point for additional research. Voice is not really separate from content, in part it is the choices of what content to include.
eleventyseven 7mo ago
I routinely call out people of writing in an LLM assisted fashion that clearly shows they have just been "vibe commenting". You know, just paste it in and copy the output without even thinking. The people who for some insane reason think they are making a genuine conversation with their copy pasting skills and $20/mo subscription. As if they are like the archive.whatever of the AI era. Because those comments are objectively terrible and contribute little. The ones with all the consultant sycophant speak and distracting prose that comes off the default prompt and RLHF. But that's really what you're now enforcing: writing in an easily detectable LLM prose and voice. LLM detection is very difficult especially at small comment scale texts. There is never proof, only telltale phrases. How will this be enforced? What the heck even is "AI"? The thing that really frustrates me is that I can't put tokens through a transformer in any way in editing my post? I can't have an LLM turn a bare link after a sentence into a [1]? I can't have it literally do nothing more than spell check in an LLM, but could with a rule based model? Or what about other LLMs or SLMs or classic NLP chained together? Or is it just the transformer? And it is officially sanctioned that people ought to be keeping in the back of their mind "does this feel LLMish?" instead of "is this a good comment that contributes to the discussion?" Maybe LLM prose is so annoying and insufferably sycophantic that even if all the content and logic was sound, it still should be moderated completely out. But the entire technological form is profane and unclean? I am 100% not interested in participating in a community that seeks to profile and police the technological infrastructure that its members use. I want my comments judged by the contributions they make and do not make to the discussion. If the LLM makes the comment better, it is good. If it makes it worse, it is bad.
- calmoo 7mo ago
  I think a more generous interpretation of dang's comment is that it's fine to use LLMs / tools to fix grammatical errors / spellchecking, but a heavier pass where the prose, wording and tone is altered (even mildly) can create a 'slop ambience' over time, death by a thousand paper cuts.
  - eleventyseven 7mo ago
    Slop ambience just sure sounds to me like HN is banning a prose style. I guess I just think that if this is how the rule will be enforced, that is how it should be written.
booleandilemma 7mo ago
Hi dang, your algolia link doesn't bring up any results. I get: We found no items matching by:dang "own voice"
- DrawTR 7mo ago
  Seems to be an accidental dangling s at the end of the comment. Try this? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22own%20voice%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - booleandilemma 7mo ago
    That works!
  - dang 7mo ago
    Yikes, fixed above now. Thanks to both of you!
Markoff 7mo ago
Does this mean (English) grammar Nazis are banned?
- Markoff 7mo ago
  I see my comment triggered grammar Nazis, so much for posting non-AI generated comments...
- butlike 7mo ago
  Would the 'G' in Grammar be capitalized since 'English Grammar Nazis' is a proper noun?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
stavros 7mo ago
Eh, history has shown me that that's incorrect, though. In my culture, we're direct and just say what we want to say, whereas in US culture you have to be very circumspect or you get a bunch of downvotes. I've used an LLM to give me feedback so I can "anglicize" my comments, otherwise I get downvoted to hell. Even in this comment, I initially wrote the start as "you're wrong", but then had to catch myself and go back and soften it to "that's incorrect", even though the meaning is the exact same. The constant impedance mismatch is tiring.
- NordSteve 7mo ago
  "You're wrong" is a criticism of the speaker, "that's incorrect" is a criticism of the content. Two different things.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    If the speaker says something incorrect, they can't be right, therefore they're wrong. I don't see the difference.
    - Cthulhu_ 7mo ago
      It depends on whether what they say is coming from them or if it's something they are citing; "I am extremely attractive" can be countered with "you are wrong", but "People say I am extremely attractive" cannot be, because I did not come up with the opinion, others did. "They are wrong" is then valid, or "That is not correct" if I have misinterpreted them.
  - jjkaczor 7mo ago
    When it comes to factual information, and not opinion - telling someone that they are wrong is not a criticism. It is fact. Of course - people have egos and emotions, so when they hear someone tell them they are wrong, they will typically take that as criticism about themselves - and not the fact that you are disputing.
    - 7mo ago
stonecharioteer 7mo ago
I tell people that when editing posts on my blog, I rely on AI to fix my code blocks if there are errors but I don't use it to fix typos or grammar. I feel like that keeps my blog human.
wittjeff 7mo ago
Let me refer you to my buddy Anton, a software developer in Ukraine. He has CP and it makes typing and communicating by speech very slow and tedious. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aYbDLOK14uM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aYbDLOK14uM He has a blog, which I think is particularly relevant to this conversation: https://www.patreon.com/c/GreenWizard/posts?vanity=GreenWizard https://www.patreon.com/c/GreenWizard/posts?vanity=GreenWiza... IMO his writing style is quite melodramatic. I have asked myself, how much of that is his perhaps overly compensatory tendency to project an articulate voice, and how much of it is applied by his AI tools? The last time I saw Anton in person I asked him about his writing process, and he said something like, "I just draft it and then ask ChatGPT to make it sound professional or whatever." So after thinking about it for a while, I have decided that this is his preferred voice, so I'll accept it as his voice. IMO it is not for you to decide how people recast their own voice. Once you adopt that dogma, you're committed to denying other people's experience of discrimination (through the lens of disability's symptoms). Whether or not you participate in that other type of biased discrimination is irrelevant.
- btown 7mo ago
  For all the challenges that AI poses to online communities, it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible, to participate in those communities in ways they never could before. I think HN is broadly supportive of these voices, and I think that an "unwritten exception" to this rule is implicit here. But I'm in the camp that making an explicit exception for special circumstances would be a meaningful statement that all voices are welcome.
  - devmor 7mo ago
    >it does allow people for whom typing and dictation are painful, difficult, or impossible Putting aside the example proposed above where typing or dictation may be difficult, "impossible" seems, well, impossible. I am curious how you suppose that someone who cannot type or dictate at all would prompt an LLM.
    - btown 7mo ago
i_am_a_peasant 7mo ago
I had a team lead at work be offended by something pretty neutral that i said and explicitly asked me to always use chatgpt when i talk with him lol
CWuestefeld 7mo ago
At the margin this is fine. But ensuring that we really understand each other is the most important thing. Especially these days, when polarization is so intense and everyone seems to actively look for faults in what others (seem to) say. When it's a matter of a spelling error or two, no problem. But too often I find I've got to read something multiple times before I have any idea what my interlocutor is saying. Is our hatred of "AI Slop" and greater posting traffic worth handicapping our ability to communicate with each other?
- toraway 7mo ago
  Using entirely LLM-drafted writing often reduces the amount of effective information conveyed even if the output is perfectly formatted, fluent English. When I receive an LLM written email at work, I start to question every specific detail because I have no idea if it actually came from the writer (and is therefore important), or was inserted as filler by a computer (and therefore irrelevant). It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if everyone carefully edited the LLM output themselves before sending (although voice, tone, emotional context clues would still be elided). But in practice that doesn’t happen, it’s just too easy to click send and the time burden gets passed to the other person.
mlhpdx 7mo ago
What about the people who struggle to form coherent prose for mental or physical reasons? The content should be judged for what it contains, not how it was made.
- dang 7mo ago
  You're getting into the long tail of cases there, which can't be generalized about. We'd need to know about a specific situation in order to say anything.
  - mlhpdx 7mo ago
    Is it a long tail? Let's take me, because I know the subject well. I have poor working memory. Very poor, insomuch as I have to type six digit codes in blocks of three. I can write, of course, and sometimes well. But technical writing requires maintaining both detail and thread and I cannot do both in a sustained way. For a short comment, I'm usually okay. For anything longer, not so much. Is the long tail the whole beast? I think yes. So I write shorthand and use tools to help me, and yes the results aren't always perfect -- but they are my thoughts embodied.

duskdozer 7mo ago

Even if you make mistakes, it often can still be understood. 100% I would rather read your own words, even if they're messy, and ask clarifying questions for what I don't understand

calmoo 7mo ago

If you're referring to speaking in English - in general I think there is a huge amount of flexibility for making mistakes in English. I'm a native speaker, I am so used to hearing various levels of English from different nationalities that i'm almost blind to it. I much prefer to hear someones true voice even if there are a few inaccuracies, so much of a person's personality is conveyed through their quirks and mistakes.

skywhopper 7mo ago
I agree with this, and I’d even say that all the grammatical and spelling mistakes, awkward constructions, and labored phrasing is what makes a person’s posts sound like themselves. If people commonly use LLMs to rewrite themselves, then everyone starts sounding the same. And the posts, the users, and the entire site all become a lot less interesting.
- shmeeed 7mo ago
  I'm absolutely with both of you, but I'd like to point out that non-native speakers often tread a very fine line. They need to fear sounding either too convoluted or a bit of a simpleton. Proficiency levels vary wildly, and not everybody in the audience is as receptive and welcoming to slight mistakes as you are, even tough I have to admit HN in particular is pretty tolerant. I for one don't think I'll ever AI-wash my texts or use AI translations verbatim. If everybody else did, it would certainly be a sad loss of diversity, but IMO it's only going to make the people who put in their own effort stand out more. Hopefully in a positive way. Time will tell if we're a dying breed. I'm afraid the need for anybody to learn foreign languages will be subject to much change and discussion for upcoming generations.
skipants 7mo ago
Huh. I have the opposite opinion. I'm monolingual English for all intents and purposes but I gathered that opinion from quite a few sources, including: - We had to take spelling tests in school - English speakers make (generally light) fun of other's spelling or grammar mistakes in a casual setting - In a professional setting, a lot of time is taken to proofread our own emails - There's de jure spellings for every word - Some online communities are really weird about pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes (namely Reddit) Language is meant to be a fluid, evolving thing but I always felt like English was treated the opposite way. Maybe that's also why it's the de facto Lingua Franca. I do think, and hope, that this rigidity will change thanks to AI. I've started to embrace my mistakes. I care a lot less about capitalization and punctuation in my Slack messages, for example.

cobbzilla 7mo ago

You write well enough to use your own voice. I don’t think it is so binary black/white though. I don’t mind if someone who has no command of English uses a translator. But there is a difference between a translator and an AI/LLM.

brabel 7mo ago
LLMs work better as translators than any non-AI translators though. Because they are able to translate not just words, but also capture the context of what's being said. If you translate a common phrase like "home, sweet home" to another language, it may or may not make any sense if you translate it word-by-word, like traditional translators would normally do... but LLMs know "what you mean" and will use the equivalent saying in the target language, even if that use entirely different words.
- ozim 7mo ago
  I think someone who has low level of English will benefit more from trying to write on his own. Unless they don’t care about learning English which shouldn’t be frowned upon.
- cobbzilla 7mo ago
  I dunno? I think modern translators get idioms nowadays don’t they? If not, they should. how hard is it to recognize common idioms and at least state the literal meaning followed by the semantic meaning? there are at most what, a few thousand per language?
- watwut 7mo ago
  Human translators did not translated word for word. That part is simply untrue. And LLM does not know context, it makes mistakes a lot more in it. But, it is much cheaper.
  - Xfx7028 7mo ago
    I think he meant non-human translators, like Google translate etc. Those translations were indeed not making any sense sometimes. Although I have heard that they improved Google translate in the recent years.

planb 7mo ago

As a non native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader. I'd never just copy the verbatim LLM output somewhere, it always sounds blunt and not like me, but I gladly apply grammar corrections or better phrasing. I'd normally not do this for a text of this length, but just for fun, here's what ChatGPT suggests: As a non-native speaker, I sometimes use LLMs to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader. I would never copy the output verbatim, because it often sounds blunt and unlike me, but I’m happy to use grammar corrections or improved phrasing.

Planktonne 7mo ago
Even in that short comment, the LLM has - Made the prose flatter. - Slightly changed the sense ('gladly' and 'happy to' are not equivalent, and neither are 'search for' and 'help me find') in ways that do add up - Not actually improved anything
- croemer 7mo ago
  How do you know what the text would have been without LLM assist? Did I miss something? You are so confident in your claims, yet I don't see the non-LLM-assisted version.
  - Planktonne 7mo ago
    You have definitely missed something; the parent comment is literally the the human-created and LLM-generated text next to each other.
    - croemer 7mo ago
      Thanks, indeed I missed this: "here's what ChatGPT suggests:"
  - krisoft 7mo ago
    > Did I miss something? Probably. Planb’s message suggest that the first paragraph is their own writing, the second paragraph tells us that the third paragraph is the llm “improved” version of the first.

aaron695 7mo ago

[dead]

watwut 7mo ago

If it was obvious, then it was doing much more then just fixing your grammar.

bmacho 7mo ago
That, or he has been writing LLM-style all this time but with bad grammar. Also to the people saying that they just let LLM replace phrases: that's the worst you can do. LLM style lies mostly in the phrases, they come from a narrow selection that they tend to use

adityaathalye 7mo ago

> ... in experiments in which all outer sensation is withdrawn, the subject begins a furious fill-in or completion of senses that is sheer hallucination. So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination. Must quote the last paragraph of Chapter 2: "Hot and Cold media", from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, which I've double-underlined. For it simultaneously explains to me; TikTok (quick consume-scroll-like-react-"create" dopamine hit cycles) and LLMs (outsourcing the essential mechanical friction of thinking (which requires all senses, for me at least))... The essential friction of deliberate, first-party speech-making---misspellings and all---is why voice and conversation contains life.

vitro 7mo ago

Forrest would be so silent if only the best birds would sing.

monkeydust 7mo ago

Are people so tuned for this that I need to think about deliberately adding some mstakes into what I write?

mzl 7mo ago
No, but a lot of AI-adjsuted wordings have the very idiosyncratic AI-style that is prevalent in the AI-slop that is everywhere, and that style has quickly become associated with writing that is generally void of content and insight. So it is natural to get gut-reactions to the typical phrasings that have become associated with AI.

nebula8804 7mo ago

This appears to be leading to people being super quiet about their AI usage. It really feels as if everyone is using it massively but keeping quiet about it. This is a guess as I haven't gone around and asked every single person about their AI usage. I am reminded about a question I posted in a Vintage Apple subreddit. I described the problem and all the steps I took to try and resolve it. In the middle of the text I also hinted that I asked AI and that it gave be a wildly strange answer which I dismissed but that it gave me hints to continue onwards. The majority of answers were focused around that one sentence and completely ignoring the rest of the post(and even the problem I was posting about). I was ridiculed (sometimes aggressively) for even considering trying the AI. Eventually someone finally answered the question, I thanked them and continued to get downvoted massively. While I get that the vintage community can attract some colorful characters this was an interesting observation at how badly they reacted to the post. I've since refrained from mentioning AI and furthermore, trying to limit my involvement with communities like that and ironically working on better ways to use AI to solve problems so as to minimize dealing with them(finding ways of providing more system level data to the AI in my prompt).

dathinab 7mo ago

through it isn't AI generated content if the content still comes from you

youknownothing 7mo ago

It's interesting you say this, and I wonder how far it gets. I like speaking at conferences and often submit proposals to their CFPs. I sometimes have the temptation to refine my abstracts using AI; not fully generate them, just touched them. But then they don't feel like me and I have a dilemma: shall I submit the 100% mine but perhaps sub-optimal text? or the AI-enhanced one? will the AI-edited one be too obvious and be rejected as AI slop? However, this isn't an entirely new phenomenon. There is a company in Spain called Audens that manufactures croquettes. People prefer hand-made croquettes instead of industrially produced, and they usually can tell the difference by how perfectly regular industrial croquettes are, so Audens developed this method to produce irregular croquettes. Each individual croquette is slightly different, creating a homemade feel that appeals to consumers. If it's too perfect, it isn't human.