Ask HN: Should we collectively stop spell checking and fixing grammar

7 points by sankalpnarula 144 days ago | 22 comments

I know this sounds strange, and this could have been a reddit post, but I have realized ever since I went back to not rewriting things for polish using AI. I have had more positive feedback from the community and any personal/professional email.

people prefer reading short emails which doesn't have to be confusing.

people dont wanna read AI slop. It sounds nice sure, but lately no one cares about the english language being nice

everyone just wants to have a conversation/discussion with an actual human.

I personally am gonna just stop fixing grammar, and not care about it!

Thanks for listening to my rant. Written by a human, who's still in college, and might not get a job. :/ crying in the corner

qup 144 days ago |

I've never had an AI write for me. I don't really understand why people would do that unless English was a foreign language, perhaps--even then, it should be translating, not writing.

It's not that hard to learn your own language. You presumably are using it constantly, every day. It should be a high priority to know how to spell the words you're using, IMO.

I do make occasional mistakes, but mostly from using the "swipe" keyboard on my phone, and failing to catch the mistake.

I don't proofread things like text messages or forum posts--only important emails, or documents that will be posted publicly at my business, and therefore reflect on me.

If I'm not sure about a word I'm using, I either look it up, or rephrase to use words I'm more familiar with.

moomoo11 142 days ago | |

There are people who reply to obvious AI spam bots on X. I think some people are just easily fooled it’s hilarious and sad.

verdverm 144 days ago |

Spelling and grammar errors will hurt you in the job application process. Effective communication is one of the non-technical aspects you are being evaluated on. These mistakes are seen in the broader context of attention to detail and professionalism. You look sloppy, no Ai required.

sankalpnarula 144 days ago | |

But the level of polish which AI generates nowadays, is almost unparalleled. My bigger concern here is what happens to people whose job was to write polished posts.

What this have led to is, even if some blog, article is written by human, if it uses even slightly fancy words, I have a tendency to assume it's human. Are other's experiencing the same?

verdverm 144 days ago | | |

One of the new tasks for interviewers is determining who's using Ai to mass apply, fake their skills, and cheat during testing. Not doing this will make you stand out, but you still have to bring the required skills. Spend more time upskilling than mass applying. A 0.01% apply to interview rate is a sign you are not doing the right things. I've personally never applied to more than 2-3 jobs at a time.

vpaulus 143 days ago |

Just two notices: Sentences should start with a capital letter. The question mark is missing from the end of the sentence in the title.

Croak 144 days ago |

I write most of my stuff in vim so use a neither a spellchecker or grammar-checker. I have found that since I started doing that my spelling has greatly improved. My grammar can be janky sometimes, but I have doubt programs will help with that. If I want to be sure of my spelling I might find some textbox on some website and paste the text there.

cpach 141 days ago | |

If you happen to use Vim, I think it has a built-in spellchecker.

Croak 140 days ago | | |

That's correct, but I haven't set it up for my native language.

al_borland 141 days ago |

Spelling and grammar is fine (which don’t need AI), it’s when AI is re-writing it… or writing it in the first place… that it becomes a problem.

When I’m listening to a presentation or YouTube video, or reading an article or email, and certain AI phrases are used, I’m done. It’s such a turn off.

I’ve started reporting YouTube videos that were obviously written by AI. When someone at work gets up to do a presentation and they start using AI style transitions in their speech, I’m dropping from the call. I don’t need anyone to read their AI results to me. That seems like a colossal waste of time. That person is telling me that they can and should be replaced by AI, because they’ve just publicly shown using AI is all they bring to the table, which isn’t something anyone should want to convey to a large group of people at work.

PaulHoule 144 days ago |

(1) conventional spell checkers still exist

(2) it's ok to ask "is this grammatical?"

(3) I will bounce ideas off chatbots but I think I've used just once AI generated sentence in the last two years. On one hand it is not my voice and it also sticks out like a sore thumb. I mean, if I hear "you're not a fur, you're a therian" another time I'm going to howl at the moon or something.

sankalpnarula 144 days ago | |

TBH, that is not the behaviour, I have observed around me.

Most of my friends, have started using AI to do job applications, where you have to answer 3 questions. 1-2 para each. Even though the probability of you actually getting an interview is less that 0.01%. So is it reasonable to spend 25 minutes per job application. And when all the application answers look the same, wouldn't having an unpolished version stand out?

PaulHoule 144 days ago | | |

I dunno. I'm glad I'm not looking for a job right now.

I think marketing of any kind, including job seeking, is a lot more than most people expect, like 25x more work most of the time. In any normal workplace people hate looking at resumes and interviewing and really feel desperate for it to stop so, if you can stand out, people do respond.

I don't think my experience is transferable, but to me a good job search looks like this:

I spent about 2 years trying to sell people on a vision I had that could have changed enterprise software. And it didn't work out. My wife was angry at me, and then on Jan 1 I rolled my car which left me unhurt but carless.

My wife was really skeptical but my plan was to use my product ideas and the demo parts I had laying around to build an AI that would help me with my job applications. This was when if you told people you were working on AI they thought you were a crackpot or a throwback to the 1970s. My first application was to an AI startup and talked about the AI I made to process job applications and... I got the job.

To be fair I've had other job searches that have gone on for about a year and required a lot of the plain ordinary job-application grind or intensive political work behind the scenes to get the right subunits of a large institution to find the funding to hire me.

I am seeing a real intensification of "FOMO-ism" lately around AI, like a lot of people seem to think that if they don't get ChatGPT to write a seemingly insightful blog post AI in the next 30 seconds they can enjoy being poor for the rest of their lives.

I can't tell you how to be unique, but I can tell you that when so many people are barking up the same tree the rewards of doing anything else are greater than ever.

verdverm 144 days ago | | |

It will stand out in ways that probably get it auto rejected by the ATS

skyberrys 143 days ago |

Spelling and grammar are part of your communication, so failing to use them by choice is an intentional message you are sending. Failing to choose to use them due to laziness or not knowing proper grammar is a message you send without intending it to be the message.

So I would recommend learning to spell check and proof read your writing, because you want to be able to write with intent.

qsera 142 days ago | |

Yes, this is why I use them, but try not to apply the suggestions blindly. So as time goes by I need to depend less on those..

fragmede 143 days ago |

If collectively we do that, then you won't stand out again, so temper your need for external validation and keep some tricks to yourself instead of giving them away to the whole Internet.

jayturley 144 days ago |

It's not the lack of spelling and grammar.

It's the "reduction to the mean" that turns everything into bland corporate-friendly prose like the bulk of the corpus that AI models ingest.

a96 143 days ago |

Absolutely not. Only humans will be hurt by bad output (like this). What we should probably consider is blocking this AI psychosis that some people seem to be having.

austin-cheney 143 days ago |

Why would you have AI write emails for you? This sounds exceptionally bizarre.

fragmede 143 days ago | |

Whether or not you do, having AI write emails for you is being pushed from all angles, so it's not "exceptionally bizarre", even if it is off-putting.

kranirudha 141 days ago |

AI or not, I'd like to read something that makes sense.

You can very well use AI to just fix your spells and grammars instead of asking it to generate something entirely from scratch.

On the contrary, someone can still ask AI to make a few grammatical errors or spelling mistakes so it "looks like" it's human written? I don't think we should go there.