Polish hides your voice. If your composition skills are lacking and you feel that hinders your self expression, set aside some time to improving them: write a short (15 minutes) blog post about some HN topic to yourself in a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.

AI is being used as a substitute for skills development when it costs nothing but time to get better. If you’ve reached a plateau with the above method, go find an article or book or interview about editing, pay attention to it and take notes, rinse/repeat.

Spellcheckers will catch grossly obvious errors, but not phonetic typos. AI grammar tools will defang, weaken, soften, neutralize your tone towards the aggregate boring-meh that they incorporated at training time.

Each person will have to decide whether they want individuality or AI-assisted writing for themselves. Sure, some will get away with it undetected, but that’s a universal statement about all human criteria of any kind, and in no way detracts from the necessity of drawing a line in the sand and saying “no” to AI writing here.

Consider the Borg. Everyone’s distinctiveness has been added to the Collective. The end result is mediocre (they sure do die a lot), inhuman (literally), and uniform (all variation is gone). It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

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ordu 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> a word doc editor of some sort (Word, Gdocs, LibreOffice, etc); then enable Review Changes and annotate your post for 10 minutes; then, review and accept your changes individually and re-read what you’ve written.

Pffff... I'm not going to install LibreOffice for that, or to figure out how to make Gdocs to work with uBlock.

There is a much easier way. Open LLM chat, type there "Proofread please for grammar, keep the wording and the tone as it is, if it doesn't mess with grammar. Explain yourself." and then paste your text. I don't really know what the tools you mentioned do, but any "free" LLM on the Internet will point to things like missing articles, or messed up tenses in complex sentences.

You recommend choosing self-improvement, but I just don't believe I can figure out how to use articles. With tenses I think I can learn how to do it, but I'm not going to. I remember there is some obscure rule how to choose the right tenses, but I was never able to remember the rule itself. I'm bad with rules, it is the reason I chose math as my major. There are almost no rules in math, you are making your own rules. The grammars of languages are not like that, they have rules which can't be easily inferred, you need to remember them. Grammars have exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions, and in any case they are not the rules, but more like guidelines, because people normally don't think about rules when they are talking or writing.

No way I'm starting to learn rules now, I'd better continue to rely on my skills. But LLMs can help me see when my skills fail me.

> It’s your right if you desire to join the Collective and be a uniform lego brick like the others, but then your no-longer-fully-human posts are no longer welcome at HN.

I believe you (as most of fervent supporters of the rule here) gone too far onto philosophy with this, too far from the reality and practice. You can't detect AI in my messages, because they are mine. Even when I ask LLM to find words for me, it is me who picks one of the proposed alternatives, but mostly I manage without wording changes. I transfer the LLM's edits by hand by editing the source message, so nothing unnoticed can slip into the final result. If I took the effort to ask an LLM to proofread, it means I care about the result more than usual, so I'm investing more effort into it, not less.

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RealityVoid 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm bad with rules, it is the reason I chose math as my major. There are almost no rules in math, you are making your own rules.

There's what now? I do think math is flexible but it feels like there are plenty of rules, depending on the context.

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altairprime 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

An AI may be able to teach you basic grammar but it’s not going to teach you to develop your voice. By design and content training set, an AI today can only pressure you towards the mean of whatever criteria you specify, not away from it. Developing your voice by doing your own proofreading pressures you away from the mean, by helping you double down on what you value most and by choosing which grammatical rules to disregard and when disregarding them is more in-tone for yourself than adherence. I can’t stop you and I won’t remember your handle after an hour has passed (being nameblind is interesting online), so you’ll probably go unnoticed by me, sure. But I still won’t equate regressing to the AI mean with personal growth away from the average masses.

	▲	ordu 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> An AI may be able to teach you basic grammar but it’s not going to teach you to develop your voice. Well, no one can help you to develop your voice. If it is your voice, then it have to be your own creation. I think we are at agreement here. > Developing your voice by doing your own proofreading pressures you away from the mean, by helping you double down on what you value most and by choosing which grammatical rules to disregard and when disregarding them is more in-tone for yourself than adherence. Oh... If I wanted to become a professional writer, then I'd agree with you. Maybe... You see, I don't use LLM to fix my writing in Russian, because with Russian I'm totally in control of my grammar, I know when I deviate from it and if I do, I do it consciously. But with English I don't know. Sometimes I can see that I don't know how to follow English grammar in some particular case, and sometimes I don't even notice that I don't know. So, returning to your argument, if I wanted to become a famous English writer, I think I'd choose to write a lot and discuss my writing with LLM, and I'd do it for hundreds of hours. LLM are unbelievably useful for digging into language nuances. Before LLMs I had urbandictionary, but it could help with specific phrases, not with choosing between "I took the effort to ask an LLM" and "I took the effort of asking an LLM". I wouldn't have a clue that there is any semantic difference. But LLM can point to it, and it can explain the difference, and give me more examples of it. Or it can point that "you recommend to choose" is not good, because of "something-something" I don't remember what, but it boils down to "you just have to remember, that the right way to use the verb 'recommend' is 'recommend choosing'". I don't see the difference, I can't choose to disregard it, because I have no opinion on if it is good or bad. If I wanted to become an English writer, I'd spend hundreds of hours with LLM, just to get an ability to see as many differences as it is possible, to get an idea of what I value most, and which grammatical rules I like to disregard. But even after that, I think I'd continue to use LLM. It can provide unexpected takes on what you feed into it. ... Hmm... I should try it with Russian. In Russian I can pick a style for my writing and to follow it (in English I can't control the style consciously), I can (and do sometimes) turn grammar inside-out, make it alien, readable for a native speaker, but in weird ways readable (a bit like letters written by Terry Pratchett heroes like Granny Weatherwax or Carrot)... I wonder, if I can employ LLM to make it even more weird. > I still won’t equate regressing to the AI mean with personal growth away from the average masses. I can't obviously judge in which direction LLMs are changing my English, so I can't even give you an anecdotal counter-evidence to your statements about regression to AI mean, but I'm still sure that I'm not regressing to the mean. You see, I pick when to follow LLM advice and when not to. I'm choosing what to change. The regression to the mean you are talking to is going on in a high dimensional space, you can regress on some dimensions and continue to deviate from the mean on others as much as you like. I don't like to deviate on grammar dimensions (at least without knowing about my deviations), I was born in a family of a teacher and an engineer, which were all into to be educated and the familiarity with the grammar was one of the important part of it, and I was born in USSR, where the proper grammar was enforced in all media to the extent that make me laugh and rebel against grammar (after all the decades passed, lol). But I can't allow myself to just ignore grammar, I was taught in a way to use it properly. So I decide to use LLM. I'm too lazy to do it each time, or even every second time, but still I use it and learn from it. The prospect to regress to the mean by using LLM seems very unlikely to me. I don't regress with all the propaganda around me when regressing is the most safe thing to do really, so mere LLM stand no chance to achieve it.