sReinwald • today at 12:30 PM

Any single LLM-edited comment reads fine in isolation. The uncanny valley kicks in when you read thirty of them in a row and they all use the same "it's not X, it's Y" construction. The problem isn't that LLM prose sounds inhuman but that it sounds like one human writing everything. Homogeneity at scale becomes an uncanny valley.

This happens because most people just paste a draft and say "make this better" with zero style direction. The model defaults to its own median register, and that register gets very recognizable after you've seen it a hundred times.

But this is a usage problem, not a fundamental one. I actually ran an experiment on this — fed Claude Code a massive export of my own Reddit comments, thousands of them across different subreddits, and had it build a style guide based on how I actually write and argue. The output was genuinely good. It sounded like me, not like Claude. The typical Claude-isms were just about gone.

I wouldn't expect most people to do that. But even a small prompt adjustment makes a real difference. Compare "improve this email" to something like:

    Your job is to proofread and edit the following email draft. 
    Don't make it longer, more formal, or more "polished" than it needs to be. 
    Fix anything that's actually wrong (grammar that changes meaning, tone misreads). 
    Leave stylistic roughness alone if it fits the voice. 
    If the draft is already fine, say so.

That preserves voice way more than the default "Hello computer, pls help me write good" workflow.

But if we're being honest, most people don't care about preserving their voice. They need to email their professor or write a letter to their bank, and they don't want to be misunderstood or feel stupid.