What if English is my second language? Undoubtedly being well spoken is associated with higher class. Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.

What you really have to ask is will this community be less inclusive because English isn't your first language, I'd say "no" and I hope most would agree.

> Your arguments will come of as stronger to the reader.

That is persuasian, not authenticity, to the OP's point.

Typed without a spellchecker :).

That's fine. Your arguments will not come of stronger to the reader, they are strong or they are not and we're all clever enough to read through the occasional grammar error.

And that's where I think the guidelines could be expanded a bit more to restore the balance. Something along the line of 'HN is visited by people from all over the world and from many different cultural and linguistical backgrounds. Please respect that and realize that native English and Western background should not be automatically assumed. It is the message that counts, not the form in which it was presented.'.

Do the best that you can unassisted. There is a chasm of difference between someone coming into English from another language, and someone using Google Translate to submit a post originating another language. French aphorisms are a stellar example of this: I’d rather read “A bird in the bush may not fly into oven” and have to parse out the meaning, than have some AI translate it as “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”; sure, there’s an iffy [the] grammatical moment at ‘fly into oven’, but it’s such a distinct phrase and carries a lot more room for contextual nuance than having an AI substitute in an American aphorism with machine translation allows for.

(For example: If I’m trying to express a point about how we shouldn’t assume that dinner isn’t “her duty” but is instead “our duty”, a French-like aphorism expressed in English literally as “the chicken won’t fly into the oven unprompted” could plausibly be AI-translated instead as “don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, doing catastrophic damage to the point. To a machine translator those two aphorisms are not distinctive; but they are, even if it’s a weird expression in common U.S. English.)

You make errors and weird constructiona like we all non-native do and maybe eventually learn a bit more of English in the process. Or not. English dominance as the world's... lingua franca (ahem) deserves to have it bastardized ;)

Humans have a tendency to ascribe intelligence to how well spoken a person or thing is—hence all the personification of LLMs.

Honestly I saw a similar answer on a post talking about AI Translation in github comments.

Post the translation as best you can manage, and below it put the same comment in your original language. If someone has qualms with your comment having broken english/mistranslations they are welcome to run bits of original language themselves.

We're all here to talk about tech, and we aren't all perfect little english robots.

> 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.)

This is an angle for people who default to AI-edited written speech that I've tried to be more empathetic to. I think it depends on your audience, but in professional writing that isn't published publicly (i.e. communication with your colleagues, design docs, etc.), or even the "rough draft" form of something that will be published, I think starting with your own words comes across as way more authentic.

I've seen enough GPT-generated slop that I find its style of writing very off-putting, and find it hurts the perceived competence or effort of the author when applied in the wrong context. I'm not sure if direct translation tools serve a better purpose here, but along with the other commenters, I personally find imperfect speech that was actually written "by hand" by the author easier and more straightforward to communicate with despite the imperfections. Also, non-ESL speakers make plenty of mistakes with grammar, spelling, etc. that humans are used to associating with "style" as authentic speech.

It can also become a crutch for language learners of any age / regardless of their primary language, that inhibits learning or finding one's own "style" of speech

This effect is very rapidly vanishing. Well written English is starting to be seen as snobbish and AI-slop especially with younger generations growing up with AI.

The human touch of someone’s real voice myself, rather than a false veneer will carry more weight very soon.

Then it’s even more likely the LLM will change your words to something you don’t intend. And you will never get better at writing English if you turn it over to an LLM.

Luckly, something with the English language makes it that especially native speakers quite often have atrocious grammar: They're - their - there mistakes, who/m, the list goes on.

Funnily enough, I've noticed myself getting worse with they're/their the more is use English (which is my third language).

That'd be a "style-over-substance" fallacious argument. Or one could be hoping for a halo-effect to cloud the reader's opinion of their comment because some piece of software made it read like Enron-marketing-hogwash-speak.