My elementary school kid came home yesterday and showed me a piece of writing that he was really proud of. It seemed more sophisticated than his typical writing (like, for example, it used the word "sophisticated"). He can be precocious and reads a ton, though, so it was still plausible that he wrote it. I asked him some questions about the writing process to try to tease out what happened, and he said (seemingly credibly) that he hadn't copied it from anywhere or referenced anything. He also said he didn't use any AI tools. After further discussion, I found out that Google Docs Smart Compose (suggested-next-few-words feature) is enabled by default on his school-issued Chromebook, and he had been using it. The structure of the writing was all his, but he said he sometimes used the Smart Compose suggestions (and sometimes didn't). He liked a lot of the suggestions and pressed tab to accept them, which probably bumped up the word choice by several grade levels in some places.

So yeah, it can change the character of your writing, even if it's just relatively subtle nudges here or there.

edit: we suggested that he disable that feature to help him learn to write independently, and he happily agreed.

As a non native English speaker my own words wouldnt be in English. If I express myself in English I soon struggle for the right words. On the other hand I think when I read some English text I'm quite capable of sensing the nuances. So it feels when I auto translate my text to English an than read against it again and make some corrections, I can express my thoughts much better.

My broken english now officially bumps my comments up instead of down. Sweet.

>It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better."

It is definitely not true that it is better for a poster to communicate like an individual when it comes to spelling and grammar. People ignore posts that have poor grammar or spelling mistakes, and communications that have poor grammar are seen as unprofessional. Even I do it at a semi-subconscious level. The more difficult or the more amount of attention someone has to pay to understand your post, the less people will be willing to put in that effort to do so.

Books and newspapers have had editors for centuries. It is just code review for the written word.

[It looks like MS Word 97 had the ability to detect passive voice as well, so we're talking 30 year old technology there that predates LLMs -- how far down the Butlerian Jihad are we going with this?]

I was just re-reading the passage from Plato's "The Phaedrus" on writing & the "art" of the letter for an essay I'm working on, and your remark is salient for this discussion on LLM-style AI and social media at large.

Precisely. As I wrote in my assessment of AI for my workplace;

"Your unique human voice is more valuable than a thousand prompt-driven LLM doggerels."

That's true, but on the flip side I regularly get downvoted because my English is not the best, so say it mildly. So, now I need to be really careful, to a) write in a good English or b) not to be recognised as an LLM corrected version of my English. Where is the line? I shouldn't be downvoted for my English I think, but that is the reality.

Edit: I already got downvoted. :-) Sure, no one can tell exactly why. Maybe the combination of bad English _and_ talking sh*ce isn't ideal at all. :-D Anyways, I have enough karma, so I can last quite a while..

I disagree. HN is going to bury my raw unedited tirade of a comment about those fucking morons that couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. If I send a comment to ChatGPT and open up the prompt with "this poster is a fucking dumbass, how do I tell them this" and use that to get to a well reasoned response because that's the tool we have available today, we're all better off.

The guidelines state:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse > Edit out swipes. > Don't be curmudgeonly.

On the best of days I manage to follow the rules, but I'm only human. If I run my comment through ChatGPT to try and help me edit out swipes on the bad days, that's not ok?

I'm not using ChatGPT to generate comments, but I've got the -4 comments to show that my "thoughts exactly as they have written them" isn't a winning move.

But the problem is that people with poor written language / english skills are 'competing' with people who have superb skills in this domain.

There are people here who sit at a desk all day banging out multipage emails for work who decide to write posts of a similar linguistic calibre for funsies.

Meanwhile you have someone in a developing country who just got off a brutal twelve hour shift doing manual labour in the sun who wants to participate in the conversation with an insightful message that they bang-out on a shitty little cellphone onscreen keyboard while riding on bumpy public transit.

You could have a great idea and express it poorly and be penalized for doing so here while someone could have a blah idea expressed excellently and it's showered in replies despite being in some metrics (the ones I think are most important) worse than the other post.

What's the solution for that?

> It's better to communicate as an individual, warts and all, than to replace your expression with a sanitized one just because it seems "better." Language is an incredibly nuanced thing, it's best for people's own thoughts to come through exactly as they have written them.

This is the opposite of how language works. You want people to understand the idea you're trying to communicate, not fixate on the semantics of how you communicated. Language is like fashion - you only want to break the rules deliberately. If AI or an editor or whatever changes your writing to be more clear and correct, and you don't look at it and say "no, I chose that phrasing for a reason" then the editor's version is much more likely to be understood correctly by the recipient.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't really want to see someone else's stylistic "warts".

I just want clean, easy-to-read content and I don't care about the person who wrote it. A tool like Grammarly is the difference between readable and unreadable (or understandable and understandable) for many people.