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Comment by idoco | Hacker News Reader

I get the frustration, but I think there’s a hidden assumption in this discussion: that everyone can write well in English.

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.

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If you can't translate your email into a foreign language, how is the AI going to rewrite your incorrect prose into correct prose? it's working on something incorrect. And then after the ai rewrites it, how can you tell if it's saying what you want it to?

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.

>If you can't translate your email into a foreign language, how is the AI going to rewrite your incorrect prose into correct prose? it's working on something incorrect. And then after the ai rewrites it, how can you tell if it's saying what you want it to?

Absolutely this. "Accessibility" and "participation" are great goals on paper, but the tools at hand are likely to introduce confusion because the user fundamentally isn't in a position to judge the quality of the output.

Last year I worked with someone who used AI tools like this, to compensate for their lack of English. It was dreadful beyond belief and basically unworkable.

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.

You somehow assume that being a native english speaker is correlated to being able to write well in english.

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

How are you supposed to communicate clearly if you are relying on an AI to communicate for you? How could you even tell if it properly communicates your ideas if you couldnt communicate them properly in the first place?

AI translation is definitely a great enabler, both for written material and things like live subtitles, but people are already aware that translations are imperfect and can be disputed. Something that anime fans can get very heated about.

English is not my native language yet somehow I share this sentiment towards AI. I'm fine with a spell checker, I don't need whatever I write completely rewritten, thank you very much.

copy and pasting chatgpt code won't make people better programmers and copy and pasting english snippets won't make people fluent in english

it just makes them better at copy and pasting

The proper solution is to work with an editor that asks clarifying question not to rewrite the whole thing into something totally different.

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!

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