No worries. The post I replied to was asking if use of ‘grammar improvement services’ (my paraphrase) qualified as AI-assisted writing at HN. All such services cost something; Grammarly makes a lot of money charging businesses, AI consumes watts of power that someone pays for, and even Microsoft Word’s grammar checker spins up the CPU fans on an old Intel laptop with a long enough document. I took from that the generic point that one “pays” for machine-assisted proofreading by one means or another, whether it’s trading personal data for services (Google) or watts of power for services (MSWord et al.) or donating writing samples to a for-profit training corpus (Grammarly free tier) or paying for evaluations where your data is not retained for training (Grammarly paid enterprise tier with a carefully-redlined service contract) and generalized to “pay for machine proofreading”.

Then, I considered whether HN would appreciate posts/comments by a human where they’d had a PR team or a hired editor come in and review/modify/distort their original words in order to make them more whatever. I think that this probably is most likely to have occurred on the HN jobs posts, and I’ve pointed out especially egregious instances to the mods over the years — but in general, the people who post on HN tend to do so from their own voice’s viewpoint, as reaffirmed by the no-AI-writing guideline above. So I decided instead to say “pay a proofreader” because, bluntly, if the community found out that someone was paying a wage to a worker to proofread their HN comments, the response would plausibly be the same mob of laughing mockery, disgusted outrage, and blatant dismissal that we see today towards AI writing here. “You hired someone to tone-edit your HN comments?!” is no different than “You used Grammarly to tone-edit your HN comments?!” to me, and so it passed the veracity test and I posted it.