Don't pay any attention to people giving you shit for using translation software. A lot of us sometimes forget that the whole world knows a little English and most of us native speakers have a ridiculous luxury in getting away with being two lazy to learn a few other languages.

I think it's good form to mention it as a little disclaimer, just so people don't take it the wrong day. Just write (this post was originally written by me but formatted and corrected with LLM since English is not my primary language).

From what I've seen, people generally do not like reading a generated content, but every time I've seen the author come back and say "I used it because it isn't my main language" the community always takes back the criticism. So I'd just be upfront about it and get ahead of it.

> using translation software

It's clear that this isn't what OP was doing. The LLM was writing, not merely translating. dang put it well:

> we want people to speak in their own voice

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44704054

Part of the problems with using LLMs for translation is precisely that they alter the tone and structure of what you give it, writing using the LLM cliches and style, and it's unsurprising people see that and just assume completely generated slop. It's unfortunate, and I would probably try and use LLMs if English wasn't my first language, but I don't think it's as simple as "using translation software", I've not seen people called out in that way for dodgy Google Translate translations, for example, it's a problem specific to LLMs and the output they make having fundamental issues.

I wasn't annoyed about it, I just said it might be good to mention because people will notice anyway, and at this point there's enough AI slop around that it can make people automatically ignore it so it would be good to explain that. I'm surprised I got downvotes and pushback for this, I thought it was a common view that it's good to disclose this kind of thing and I thought I was polite about it

God forbid people actually learn the language they're trying to communicate in. I'd much rather read someone's earnest but broken English than LLM slop anyway.

It's disingenuous to call LLMs "translation software", and it's bad advice to say "don't pay attention those people".

Even if you don't agree with it, publishing AI generated content will exclude from ones audience the people who won't read AI generated content. It is a tradeoff one has to decide whether or not to make.

I'm sympathetic to someone who has to decide whether to publish in 'broken english' or to run it through the latest in grammar software. For my time, I far prefer the former (and have been consuming "broken english" for a long while, it's one of the beautiful things about the internet!)