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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, this, but also as an adult; When you are a non-native speaker and you use AI to make things more concise and correct. The detector will go off. People may find some wording "AI-ish" (even though I replaced em-dashes with commas and told it to "avoid American waiter-like enthusiasm"). My reaction is: Ok. you want my original? Which is much harder to read and uses 2x the amount of words? Fine.

I mean, what is the problem? It's my report! I know all the ins and outs, I take full responsibility for it. I'm the one taking this to the board of directors who will grill me on all the details. I'm up for it. So why is this so "not done"? Why do you assume I let the AI do the "thinking"? I'm appalled by your lack of trust in me.

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I routinely see people accuse any writing they don't like the style or as being AI generated. There is no possible evidence for this being the case, pple are just dicks.

I've intentionally changed my writing style to be less AI-like due to people thinking I'm just pasting my emails from ChatGPT.

Perhaps it's an artifact of LLMs being trained on terabytes of autistic internet commenters like me. Maybe being detected as AI by Turnitin even has some diagnostic value.

Is it possible the same problems that cause you to write less-readable words also lead you to choose poor AI outputs?

If no, why not?

Personally I would rather read a human's output than their selection of machine outputs.

I guess you've never read the English of a Dutch person ;) During my PhD defense I was told I "should have checked with a native speaker." Pre-LLMs, I'd go to my American colleague and she'd mostly remove text and rewrite some bit to make texts much more readable.

Nowadays, often I put my text into the LLM, and say: Make more concise, include all original points, don't be enthusiastic, use business style writing. And then it will come with some lines of which I think: Yes! That is what I meant!

I can't imagine you'd rather read my Dunglish. Sure, I could have "studied harder", but one simply is just much more clever in their native tongue, I know more words, more subtleties etc. Over time, and I believe due to LLM use I do get better at it myself! It's a language model after all, not a facts model. I can trust it to make nice sentences.

I am telling you my own preferences, as a native speaker of English. I would rather read my coworkers' original output in their voice than read someone else's writing (including a machine edit of their own text).

I doubt that very strongly and would like to talk to you again after going though 2 versions (with and without LLM) of my 25-pager to UMC management on HPC and Bioinformatics :)

I understand the sentiment, even appreciate it, but there are books that draw you into a story when your eyes hit the paper, and there are books that don't and induce yawning instead (on the same topic). That is a skill issue.

Perhaps I should add that using the LLM does not make me faster in any way, maybe even slower. But it makes the end results so much more pleasant.

"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter". Now I can, but in similar time.

As they said, they are telling you their preference, there is nothing to doubt.

Recently there was a non-native english speaker heavily using an LLM to review their answers on a Show HN post, and it was incredibly annoying. The author did not realize (because of their lack of skills in the language) but the AI-edited version felt fake and mechanical in tone. In that case yes, the broken original is better because it preserves the humanity of the original answers, mistakes and all.

Ok, well it depends on the context then and the severity of the AIness (which I always try to reduce in the prompt, sometimes I’ll ask it to maintain my own style for example).

You know maybe it is annoying for native speakers to pick up subtle AI signals, but for non-natives it can be annoying to find the correct words that express what you want to say as precisely as in your mother tongue. So don’t judge too much. It’s an attempt at better communication as well.

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