I would like to see this more. As a heavy user of LLMs I still write 100% of my own communication. Do not send me something an LLM wrote, if I wanted to read LLM outputs, I would ask an LLM.
But that is translation, not “please generate a pull request message for these changes.”
Using Google Translate probably means you're using a language model in the end anyways behind the scenes. Initially, the Transformer was researched and published as an improvement for machine translation, which eventually led to LLMs. Using them for translation is pretty much exactly what they excel at :)
I've done this kind of thing, even if I think it's likely they speak English. (I speak zero Japanese here.) It's just polite and you never know who's going to be reading it first.
> Google翻訳を使用しました。問題が発生した場合はお詫び申し上げます。貴社のウェブサイトにコンピュータセキュリティ上の問題が見つかりました。詳細は下記をご覧ください。ありがとうございます。
> I have found a computer security issue on your website. Here are details. Thank you.
Same with grammar fixes. If you don't know the language, why are you submitting grammar changes??
I have read text where people who aren't very good at the language try to "fix it up" by feeding it through a chat bot. It's horrible. It's incredibly obvious that they didn't write the text, the tone is totally off, it's full of obnoxious ChatGPT-isms, etc.
Just do your best. It's fine. Don't subject your collaborators to shitty chat bot output.
If you think that every language level is always sufficient for every task (a fluency truther?), then you should agree that somebody who writes an email in a language that they are not confident in, puts it through an LLM, and decides the results better explain the idea they were trying to convey than they had managed to do is always correct in that assessment. Why are you second guessing them and indirectly criticizing their language skills?
I have no idea what you're talking about with regard to being a "fluency truther", I think you're putting words into my mouth.
LLMs can do a lot of proof checking on what you've written. Asking it to check for logical contradictions in what I've stated and such. It will catch were I've forgot things like a 'not' in one statement so one sentence is giving a negative response and another gives a positive response unintentionally. This kind of error is quite often hard for me to pick up on, yet the LLM seems to do well.
The times I've had to communicate IRL in a language I don't speak well, I do my best to speak slowly and enunciate and trust they'll try their best to figure it out. It's usually pretty obvious what you're asking lol. (Also a lot of people just reply with "Can I help you?" in English lol)
I've occasionally had to email sites in languages I don't speak (to tell them about malware or whatever) and I write up a message in the simplest, most basic English I can. I run that through machine translation that starts out with "This was generated by Google Translate" and include both in the email.
Just do your best to communicate intent and meaning, and don't worry about sounding like an idiot.
I wish that was true.
Simply put you seem to live in a different world where everyone around you has elegant diction. I have people I work with that if I could I would demand they take what they write and ask "would this make sense to any other human on this planet".
There are no shortages of people being lazy with LLMs, but at the same time it is a tool with valid and useful purpose.
It's actually kind of a weird "of two minds" thing. Why should I care that my writing is my own, but not my code?
The only explanation I have is that, on some level, the code is not the thing that matters. Users don't care how the code looks, they just care that the product works. Writing, on the other hand, is meant to communicate something directly from me, so it feels like there's something lost if I hand that job over to AI.
I often think of this quote from Ted Chiang's excellent story The Truth Of Fact, The Truth of Feeling:
> As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”
But there is obviously some kind of tension in letting an LLM write code for me but not prose - because can't the same quote apply to my code?
I can't decide if there really is a difference in kind between prose and code that justifies letting the LLM write my code, or if I'm just ignoring unresolved cognitive dissonance because automating the coding part of my job is convenient.
If you are using LLMs to precisely translate a set of requirements into code, I don't really see a problem with that. If you are using LLMs to generate code that "does something" and you don't really understand what you were asking for nor how to evaluate whether the code produced matched what you wanted, then I have a very big problem with that for the same reasons you outline around prose: did you actually mean to say what you eventually said?
Of course something will get lost in any translation, but that's also true of translating your intent from brain to language in the first place, so I think affordances can be made.
> They asked you because they wanted your human judgment.
Then, of course, I review the output and make some manual edits here and there.
That last thing is the key in both written communication and in code, you HAVE to review it and make manual edits if needed.
In my opinion it really devalues the message they're sending. I immediately get this dismissive rolleyes feeling when I see it.
like in that joke with the mechanic which demands $100 for hitting the car once with his wrench
I only use LLM to write text/communication because that's the part I don't like about my work