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Comments (140)

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  treenode
  AI writing sucks. The punchy words, the hyperbole, the monotony and pervasiveness are all exhausting. But I can’t deny there’s one upside. People who grew up speaking and living in other languages, people whose english is poor, finally have a level playground. It’s a great equaliser of our english writing privilege.The thing that worries me most is that it's going to redefine the way we write. We absorb language. To compensate for all this AiSpeak I consume, I need to read more literature.What’s human writing going to look like in a few years if this trend doesn’t stop? I believe that the LLMs will catch up soon and introduce more variance and fewer words designed for impact in their language, delivering us from this AiVerse into one where AI writing is almost indistinguishable from human writing. But until then, we must read more.
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  borski
  I find that AI is very useful for getting me past the 'blank page' writing block, but inevitably it writes in ways I would never, and so I end up editing it heavily. But, for me, a boy with ADHD, editing something is infinitely easier than writing it from scratch.I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writing well, or clearly expressing what I mean... it has been the inertia of putting words on a page at all.(and an LLM had nothing to do with this comment :P)
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  phillipclapham
  I think there's a useful distinction nobody here is making: there's a difference between using AI as a writing tool and using AI as a thinking tool.Most people in this thread are talking about the output stage. You know: polish my text, fix my grammar, generate my message. That's where you lose your voice. But the blank page problem borski describes isn't really a writing problem, it's a thinking problem. Once you know what you want to say, saying it tends to be the easy part for us writers (sometimes lol!).The most useful thing I've found is using AI to figure out what I actually think, using it for rubber ducking, exploring angles, stress-testing arguments, and then closing the tab and writing it myself. You get the cognitive help without losing the (or your) soul. I've output more writing in my own genuine voice in the last year than I did in several years prior, and it's because I use AI for clarity instead of replacing my output.
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  pmoati
  I totally agreed with you. I'm French (nobody is perfect ^^), I'm not so fluent in english and I'm dyslexic, that why I often write my message, then I ask to Claude to translate it in english because i'm feeling I will lose the credibility of my message if there is too much mistake... But you're right, so this message is not translated by LLM :D
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  arjie
  I really don't mind text filtered through an LLM per se. But I prefer high signal-to-token so to speak. The way humans talk and write means that the seemingly extraneous text they add often provides an interesting insight into the thought patterns of the person, and therefore mistakes or even pointless monologues can be interesting.This is not always true. Once there was an online reaction to short content that made people treat "long-form" content as desirable entirely due to its length. I rather like reading books and the New Yorker's fiction section when I still subscribed, but much of this "long-form" content was token-expansion of a formulaic nature which I did not enjoy. LLMs have mastered this kind of long-form token-expansion.This is assuming people are using an LLM in good faith, obviously. One day, perhaps LLMs will learn to express what someone is saying in an elegant way that is enjoyable for people like me to read. But even then, I will have the difficulty of distinguishing whether this is a human speaking through an LLM in good faith or a human who has set up a machine that is set up to mimic a human.The latter is undesirable to me because I have access to the best such machines at a remarkably low cost. Were I to desire a conversation with an LLM, it is trivial for me to find one. I'm not coming here for that[0].A sufficiently insightful LLM which prompts my thinking in certain ways wouldn't be unwelcome to me, I suppose. I have a couple of my friends for whom I still go on Twitter to read what they say even after I have stopped using the site routinely. If I found out the posts were entirely an LLM I think I would still read them simply because I find the posts useful and with sufficiently high signal-to-token.0: Certainly, if every place only spoke about things I was interested in and never in things I was not interested in, I wouldn't need separation of interest spaces at all. But the variation of interest vectors for different humans has made this impossible.
• wafflebot
  "Semantic ablation" is the term I learned for this right here on HNhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088
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  Leomuck
  I very much agree with this. I had several experiences where I wanted to express something in a very particular way, told a LLM about it, and what came out was just so generic that it really wasn't authentic. It didn't represent me at all, not the morals I have, not the way I talk, not the way I want to express things. I do think more and more that authenticity and character are what we need to preserve with all power we have if we don't want the internet to become just a gateway for generic back and forth. After all, the internet was introduced so humans could connect and share.
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  stingraycharles
  Yeah, some colleagues started using ChatGPT for internal communication as well. While we don’t like to mandate or prohibit anyone from using any tools, we did need to make it really clear to everyone that this is not productive. Grammarly to make small corrections to external recipients is fine. Using ChatGPT to “polish” your message is not. If you’re not sure about your English abilities, we offer you free English lessons and encourage giving each other feedback during chats.LLMs shouldn’t be used for communication at all if you want any form of authenticity.
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  charlie0
  This is starting to become my latest pet peeve, people using Claude to write their messages in Slack. I'm going to just stop communicating via text with these people.It's one thing to have Claude polish a message and another thing for it to write out an entire message.
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  solatic
  The way the post is written, I wonder if the author is working for a company going through a growth spurt and where, through sheer size, everything is becoming more "corporate".There's a huge difference between having AI clean up a text you send privately to someone you have worked closely with for years, versus a broad spectrum text sent by a VP to hundreds of people or more. The first case is reprehensible, for the reasons the author lays out. But as for the second case, corporate doublespeak has been a meme since long before the advent of AI and it would remain even in some AI-pocalypse. Just because your boss puts out sanitized language in a mass communication, doesn't inherently mean your boss won't still be present and real with you in a more private setting.
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  DrammBA
  It feels so disrespectful sometimes too, having to read a long paragraph that conveys so little meaning knowing full well the original prompt was probably very short and I'm now wasting extra time parsing the hollow LLM text expansion.
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  am17an
  Working in open source, I've now heard a wide variety of disabilities that people have and they have to be aided by an LLM for writing even descriptions of their PRs.
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  eterevsky
  I don't often use AI to cleanup my texts, but when I do, I fully own the output. I make a conscious decision whether to leave in every AI suggestion or not. The final text _is_ what I want to say.
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  santamex
  I havily use llms for internal communication. I receive docen request per day from colleagues asking me very specific stuff by mail or teams about processes, setups, master data, my particular experiences with approaches, for contacts within our big corp or just general knowledge questions and how I would recommend to tackle certain problems: Setting up conditions in sap, where to find certain info or just send them current setups. Also they ask me about strategic advices. I use my personal knowledge base to automatically prepare drafts of the answers based on previous answers to other colleages. Before the llm time I could barely help all of then. I got more productive by x-times. I then digest the emails again back to my knowledge system. People have no problem with receiving obviously llm written answers. But because of the particular domain knowledge they know it can only come from me. Excuse my writing, this did not went though the same system :)Edit: And now I forgot the most important. When the knowledge the llm retrieved is insufficient to answer colleagues question or the agent skill can not execute the requested task from my colleague, it asks me just for the missing info or skill and with me (the human) in the loop work is done x times faster. Eventually it will replace me and all my colleagues one day. Looking forward to do other stuff then
• Peteragain
  I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't want that "made better".
• bushido
  I've seen this come up in a few comments, so I'm just adding it to a separate one in case it helps folks.Something I have seen a lot of people talk about in the comments here, as well as do in practice within my company and friends, family, etc., is that they say something and then let Claude or GPT rephrase it to be added as a prompt that they'll then use.In my experience, this will almost always bring about worse results than if you communicated directly with the LLM. I believe this happens because of a few reasons.1. LLMs tend to do word inflation in that they'll create plausible-sounding prompts, but the words that they introduce have a higher propensity to create worse cookie-cutter results from other agents, coding assistants, writing assistants, or any other form that has been used.2. By putting a layer in between what we're saying and what the LLMs interpret, we're not honing our ability to articulate and prompt better and wholly depend on the intermediary getting better or being able to interpret better, which does not translate well in practice.3. Anecdotal, but in my case, when I was doing this myself, it was because I assumed I was harder to understand and not articulate enough to get good results. So I tried speeding up the results by trying to use an intermediary. What I learned, though, was training myself to be articulate and to not doubt myself was easier than getting results from the LLM interpreters.of course with anything, ymmv.
• II2II
  > When you run your message through an LLM, it will inevitably obscure what you actually wanted to say; we choose words for a reason after all - even if they’re sometimes not the right words.We may choose words for a reason, but sometimes we choose the wrong words. Sometimes it may be closely spelled words, and you choose the incorrect version. Sometimes it may be because our understanding of the definition of a word is wrong. Either way, it can be problematic when you say one thing when you meant to say something else.Now I grew up in the olden days. I reach for a dictionary in such cases. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why people would reach for an LLM. LLMs can examine an entire document at once, it will catch errors that you are not familiar with, and it will catch a much larger range of errors. Is it perfect in doing so? Of course not, but it is better than nothing.
• stephen_cagle
  I largely reached the same conclusion recently => https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-...
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  ahf8Aithaex7Nai
  That’s exactly why I’ve refused to use autocomplete on smartphone keyboards from the very beginning. I want to express myself in my own words.In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.
• devsda
  Imagine going to work or a social meeting where everyone looks and sounds the same(or just a limited set) all with the same perfect tone, body language and communication style. Sounds like a nightmare and I would find it hard to relate and get that "perspective", when there is nothing to differentiate a person.I guess everyone using LLMs for text is similar to that. If everyone uses the same LLM style, its hard to understand where the other person is coming from. This is not a problem for technical and precise communication though(the choice of LLMs in that context has other risks).It is also strictly not an LLM capability problem because they can mimic or retain the original style and just "polish" with enough hints but that takes time, investment and people go through path of least resistance. So, we all end up with similar text with typical AI-isms.There are other reasons to dislike LLM text like padding and effort asymmetry that have been discussed here enough.
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  weinzierl
  I feel the same and I experience less pressure when writing because for the first time it seems being a bit sloppy can be advantageous.The only thing is that my anecdata contradicts it. My AI cleaned up writing seems to fare much better and this seems to be true across all channels. To be clear I do not mean AI generated just AI cleaned, that is spelling, punctuation, grammar mainly, the occasional word order change.In the end it's about getting the message across first and "get to know me" second and proper and clear expression helps a lot with the first.
• jonasmalaco
  Wouldn't the sender be the better judge of the accuracy of what they wanted to communicate? If they feel the LLM version more closely matches their intent, then we should accept it.There are good arguments to get to know someone "mistakes and all", I just don't think this is a particularly good one. No matter how much you (think) you know someone, they probably know them(selves) better.
• diego898
  “running your texts through the genericizer” - what a lovely way to put it!
• quectophoton
  I think there was an SMBC comic about this topic, but I don't think I can find it, and the site doesn't exactly make it easy. I don't even remember if it was pre-2020 or not.It was about how people would get a thing (a robot?) that would repeat whatever they said but in a more fancy way (or something along those lines), to make them sound smarter. Then the people would start depending on these robots to communicate at all, to the point their speech degrades and they start making unintelligible noises that the robots still translate into actual speech.EDIT: Found it, from 2014: https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
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  dexterlagan
  I used to use LLMs to 'clean up' my own writings, and in the end I agree with the author here: it doesn't really help. The reader will have this impression of 'too perfect', and will have a diminished feeling of value, of honesty. I think we would benefit from a standardized way of signaling text and content that is exclusively human. Say, some sort of logo that says 'genuine', 'untouched by the hand of AI'. I'll be thinking about a way to do this.
• Scrapemist
  When I wrote a snarky mail to the MD and I couldn’t suppress my anger, Claude did a great job smoothing it out while keeping it pointy.
• RamblingCTO
  AI flattens everything I think. Not sure how to articulate it properly, but it reduces depth of any kind somehow
• kingkongjaffa
  AI writing makes me irrationally angry, when I use AI and tell it to avoid everything from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing and it does improve things. Banning em-dashes, and it's not x it's y false equivalences.And I use it for myself and what I send to others is 99% written by me.For people who treat writing, especially business writing as a craft to communicate ideas, seeing AI slop is just like nails on chalk board.I've copies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style and https://workingbackwards.com/ and I've been trying to shift us from a slides-first culture or a quick-email-first culture to a serious writing-first culture.I genuinely care about this stuff. Thoughtlessly blurting out pages and pages of vanilla unedited LLM output seems disrespectful to the reader.As writer you're saying: I didn't care enough to craft my message personally, here read this generated content I haven't even seriously edited.And for the reader it's saying the same: This guy sent me a document to read, I need to sift through it to figure out if there's any actual merit or novel ideas or actional information here.The asymmetry of effort is disrespectful IMO.
• anon
  undefined
• Scrapemist
  Once asked Claude to guess what the prompt was that generated a mail. Didn’t work unfortunately.
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  altilunium
  Last time I did that, I got pointed out as an ESL and got insulted and laughed at.
• kashyapc
  I recently heard a new (to me) excuse:When in the middle of a group text-chat, someone replied with AI-generated blather. It was dead-clear with the usual sterile vocab, structured buzzphrases, and other LLM "tells".I politely called him out and asked to use his own voice. In public he insisted that it was his voice and that he used AI only for "formatting". But in private he admits that he created a "gem to assist with multicultural comms", which generated the text. He claims he did it because "not everyone can take the native American English well". A load of bovine manure. I nicely told him to cut this crap and just write as it comes to him. (Basic spell- and grammar-check is fine.)
• stavros
  I tried to say this on another thread, where it got the reception I expected, but I'll say it here too: People say "let me get to know you, mistakes and all" and then downvote me. If you want me to not run my comments through an LLM, stop reacting badly to the delivery.
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  jay_kyburz
  There are two ways to write an email. One is to keep it short and to the point that so there are obviously no errors, the other is to waffle on and obfuscate the message with an LLM so that the reader's eyes glaze over...or something like that.
• Havoc
  In emails...whatever. I can tell it's there but fine whatever, we're just trying to get a message across LLM or otherwise.But this was the first year I saw it in performance review write-ups which frankly was jarring. Here is feedback supposedly 1:1 that massively affects this person's life and their perception of "worth" so to speak...and it's just AI.Notably it was split by geography. EU countries closest to organic, india slop trainwreck, US in the middleSorta made me conclude "ok i guess that's the end of performance reviews that vaguely mean anything & actually get read"
• keiferski
  Yet another example of “visible AI usage” becoming a negative label.“Powered by AI” is a trendy marketing term on every website today. In a couple years it’ll be considered blasé, and while AI features will still exist, they’ll be called something like automation or workflows.
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  anal_reactor
  I use ChatGPT for communication. It started with "please fix typos" and now it's "write me a slack message about this and that". This is mostly an effect of the communication environment we created - taking risks is rarely rewarded, and mistakes can be very costly. Remember, you're always one misunderstood message away from being fired. Of course there are people whom I trust and I'd never offend them with AI-generated slop, but the rest of the humanity - it is what it is, LLMs help me a lot.
• jc-myths
  [dead]
• sapphirebreeze
  [dead]
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  rexpop
  > It robs me of getting to know you.Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. There is a threshold between all that I share with the world and the rest of me. Hell, not every person gets the same picture, and that's deliberate and healthy--my customers don't get to know what my proctologist knows. My mother doesn't get to know what my wife knows.You don't get to know all of me, because I don't trust you.This post comes across as sweet, and innocent. It also comes across as absurdly self-entitled, and it's not an OK posture to take towards the world. It's not OK when the police take this posture, it's not OK when private companies take this posture, and it's not OK when strangers on the internet take this posture.You are entitled to withdraw from relationships that don't fulfill your emotional needs. A reasonable audience for this missive is your girlfriend, your child (who relies on you), or your employer (to whom you are vulnerable).