Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. But mostly, it can sometimes be a useful tool, and the fact everyone is shoving it in my face reeks of desperation.

The tech industry is in real trouble.

- apologizes

- implies the recipient was "promised" this email as a "response" to something

- blames a hectic schedule

- invites questions

None of this was in or was even implied in the original. This is not a "polished" version, it's just a straight-up different email. I thought that style transfer while maintaining meaning was one of the few things LLMs can be good at, but this example fails even that low bar.

This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.

I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose.

On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting that exists solely to provide evidence for compliance reasons, something out of the CIA's sabotage field manual that David Graeber has probably written about. But is now a thirty second exercise in uploading a transcript to ChatGPT, prompting for three evidentiary bulletpoints, and pasting the output in a wiki no human will ever read.

No doubt the recipient will also be using some form of AI summarization that strips away all that added "polish" - making the whole exercise entirely redundant!

It just feels absurd.

It feels like the whole world is turning into an HR department premised on the ideological axiom that killing one man is a murder but killing a million is a statistic.

One time, I couldn't remember the name of the album I wanted SIRI to play, so it kept picking the wrong one. After the fifth or so time, I told Siri, "you're killing me Siri" and it called 911.

The future sucks.

'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting.

- Always capitalize "I" and derived words like "I'm"

- Sentences should start with lower case letters unless they start with “I”

- Replace explicit punctuation callouts with the actual punctuation

- No period at the end of the message, but leave periods between sentences

- Do not remove commas

- Do not change sophisticated words to more common ones

Return only the result. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edit.'

[0]: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

Yes yes, languages and translations are a potentially valid use case, but irrelevant for the vast majority of people I communicate with.

Even in stuffy institutions like banks and insurance companies, corporate email style is very straightforward and, idk, undecorated? You learn pretty quick that people only skim emails and every word beyond your core message creates opportunity for your core message to be skipped over. NOBODY is writing salutations or 'i hope this finds you well' or whatever other garbage chatgpt thinks the first paragraph should be.

When I read historical items on lettersofnote I find that even super old business messages are pretty streamlined and only have some crunch because some runner has to physically find the dude you are writing to.

Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first.

It’s fair to dislike how AI flattens unique voices, but for a huge part of the world, it’s not erasing personality—it’s making participation possible.

I personally do not want you -- for any value of "you" -- to use an AI to "polish" any writing sent to ME. I want the author's actual thoughts, not their thoughts massaged by an LLM.

It is actually one of the first things I used LLMs for, and I still am. Latest example, I received an email from an administration asking me to sign some document, but it contained some incorrect information. I used a LLM to write a nice letter telling them to fix it. I could have just replied "it is not A, it is B", but without some formalism, it sounds rude, and I didn't want to sound rude, I also didn't want to make efforts for that formalism. It may be one of the things LLMs do best, they are like supercharged model letters.

Of course I don't do that in informal situations or when I want some emotional connection. By the way, no LLM touched this comment, I don't consider posting on HN a formal situation.

EDIT: typoes, but maybe I should have let them in, to show that it wasn't the work of a LLM ;)

So far the 21st century seems to be a mad dash to see who can turn off their brain the most.

> "why would I want to translate my email into Polish?"

But what about translation by professional human translators between languages? is it really any better at preserving the intent and sub-text?

Kundera has an amazing essay—- “The Sentence”—-in his collection of essays “Testaments Betrayed” on the woes of translation of, yes, a single sentence from Kafka’s “The Castle”.

As he (or his translator Linda Asher) say: The sentence “describes the coition of K. and Frieda”.

Under the bar too ;-) Not a topic I tend to associate with Franz Kafka.

When AI systems can match Milan Kundera (translated from the French) then we will have definitely gotten to Pro level. “Write me a brilliant essay in the style of xxxx, on topic yyyy in French, and translate it into Mandarin for grins. I would be a wreck if I had to translate Kundera.

Sometimes I don't want to waste my time crafting a professional e-mail to a bunch of jerks full of themselves. Maybe I want to write it as it comes off my brain, and let my digital scribe to reformulate it so that the people reading it feel respected/validated/flattered. Am I putting up a fake identity then? Am I presenting an illusion of professionalism? Maybe writing "Best regards" instead of "Bye" is the facade of professionalism in the first place.

Many people didn't think about what they are trying to convey (or self-analysed how they present themselves) when drafting correspondence in the past; now, many people think just as not-hard and often continue, like before, to neglect to meaningfully proofread whatever they had the LLMs generate for them before hitting Send.

Of course, I don't like it. But in some ways, it's just not a whole lot different from what it was before in that you can often still tell apart the people who care to be articulate from those who don't. Though, I feel bad for people disproportionately waylaid by the new paradigm like the bug/security responders on the curl project.

At a high level I see convergence of styles, topics, behaviors to a generic form, both in "AI" and social media. Which to me suggest that the "AI" solutions are doing exactly what we would do ourselves, just faster.

Probably related to why I can copy a piece of code from elsewhere (with sufficient work to verify it does what I expect and only what I expect) but I don't copy a quote and use it as my own. My words are my words. My code doesn't have the same guarantee.

So no, thank you. Correct my textbook punctuation mistakes, and leave my wordy and "not positive enough" sentences to me.

>You have an individual and unique way of speaking and writing? You're going to wish your e-mail finds people well, corporate-monkey.

When I'm communicating with a non-native speaker, I intentionally use shorter / easier to translate words and sentences, and I give them more leeway with word usage / don't expect them to use the right words all the time. And that's fine! Communication still happens! We manage!

But if a non-native speaker starts running their text through an AI it makes communication harder, not easier. I can't tell if their word choice is intentional or if the AI did it. A tiny mistake I can understand gets expanded into multiple incorrect sentences.

Lack of comprehension on what other people said was a big issue. But also having four incomprehensible paragraphs thrown at me for what could be six words (not infrequently based on a misunderstanding of a very basic simple sentence).

I'm not a native speaker either, but the only way to learn a language is to actually use it. For better or worse, English is the modern world's lingua franca.

It's how well you know english that's correlated to being able to write well in english instead.

it just makes them better at copy and pasting

For published work, if it's not worth editing then it's not worth reading (I would go further personally and say that most publish, edited and peer reviewed work, in your area of interest isn't worth reading anyways)

For unpublished work, like an email, ask the AI to translate the passage while maintaining style and tone. It will still flatten it, but not as much as the complete dogshit I read in the article.

Communication is a job requirement, faking it with AI is going to go about as well as someone faking programming skills. Not very!

These are things that I _used_ to simply ask a search engine, before Google results became 99% SEO-optimized blogspam and therefore useless for actual knowledge-seeking.

I think an important part of overcoming AI skepticism is to understand (at a very high level) how it all works so that you understand its limitations and know when you can and cannot trust it.

It does seem, to me, that the benefits are there, but not to the extend that the AI companies would have me believe.

I like doing the things that AI is supposedly good at. I like learning, I like understanding what I am doing, I like the satisfaction of finally getting to a solution after banging my head against the wall for hours. I like the occasional sensation of being hopelessly lost and finding my way to the light. I like writing text and code. I'm not terribly bored by boilerplate. I like going down rabbit holes and experiencing happy accidents. I can't in good conscience sign my name to something that I did not create and do not understand deeply enough to explain to anybody who asks. I like doing the hard thing.

The immediate response I'm sure that I will get is some variant of "well everybody else is using it as a force multiplier and the way you do it is making the job take too long." And maybe that's true. Maybe I don't care. I am a person who takes pride in my craft. I enjoy the act of making things. Some people don't, I guess.

The day may come where I am viewed as a dinosaur, where the way I work becomes fundamentally incompatible with the way the industry works. And if that day comes, bluntly, fuck the industry. I'll go fix air conditioners instead.