> What if English is my second language?
Write it broken.
Broken and true is more authentic than polished and approximately so. When I see an AI-generated comment or email, I catch myself implicitly assuming it is—best case—bullshit. That isn’t the case if the grammar is off. (If anything, it can be charming.)
> Broken and true is more authentic than polished and approximately so.
From the perspective of someone reading the comment, I'll take “inauthentic” but actually comprehensible over “authentic” but incomprehensible any day.
Also, using bad grammar as a heuristic for humanity will just end with LLMs being prompted to deliberately mess up their grammar, and now we're back to square one, with the state of the written word even worse off than it was before.
Well... for myself personally, that works, but only up to a certain level of broken. Past that I quit reading.
That may be a defect in me. Maybe I should make a stronger effort on such comments. But I suspect I'm not the only one who does that, and at that point it becomes an issue that affects the community as a whole.
Personally, I enjoy reading through comments that are obviously from non-native English writers. They often include idioms or sentence constructions from their native language, which is fun to see.
Besides, this isn't an English poetry forum. Language here is like gift wrapping for an idea: pleasant if pretty, but not the most important thing.