Hacker News Reader

Comment by beernet | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a post-LLM world. They’re basically wrapping an LLM in a "professional" skin and calling it an expert review. The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent. We’re reaching a point where AI is just reviewing other AI-generated text, creating a feedback loop of pure mediocrity. Copium for middle management, if you ask me.

View on HN

Grammarly even from the start was very distracting to me even as a someone using english as a second language to communicate. I have developed my own taste and way of articulating thoughts, but grammarly (and LLMs today) forced me to remove that layer of personality from my texts which I didn't wanted to let go. Sure I sounded less professional, but that was the image I wanted to project anyways.

Unrelated but surprising to me that I've found built-in grammar checking within JetBrains IDEs far more useful at catching grammar mistakes while not forcing me to rewrite entire sentences.

JetBrains’s default grammar checking plugin[1] is actually built on languagetool[2], a pretty decent grammar checker that also happens to be partly open source and self-hostable[3]. Sadly, they have lately shoved in a few (thankfully optional) crappy LLM-based features (that don’t even work well in the first place) and coated their landing page in endless AI keywords, but their core engine is still more traditional and open-source, and hasn’t really seemed to change in years. You can just run it on your own device and point their browser and editor extensions to it.

[1] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12175-natural-languages... [2] https://languagetool.org -- warning: is coated in somewhat-misleading AI keywords [3] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

> The problem is that once you start letting an AI "expert" dictate tone and logic, you effectively lobotomize the writer’s original intent

Isn't that what grammarly has always been, since long before the invention of the transformer? They give you a long list of suggestions, and unless you write a corporate press release half of them are best ignored. The skill is in choosing which half to ignore

I disagree. You write when you have something to say. A service like Grammarly tries to help you convey what you want to say, but better. What you want to say is still up to you.

Words paint the picture, but the meaning of the picture is what matters.

That's a tiny fraction. Most people write because they're told to write.

Are you talking about children or students? I think most people write because they want to communicate.

Children and young students, certainly. Adult students: almost 100%. If writing is your job, then by definition, and your problem is more often finding something to say, not writing it.

You’re not counting all the office workers who have to write reports or emails, or all the scammers who write those websites to manipulate SEO or show you ads.

If you fall into the camp of office workings needing to write reports or emails, maybe think twice about putting your name on AI garbage.

Everyone should think twice about putting their name on AI garbage, or garbage of any kind. But wishing doesn’t stop it from happening, especially when companies are explicitly selling you on doing just that. Remember the Apple Intelligence office ads?

It's great. Now that fancy writing is cheap and infinite, fields whose entire scholarship value was in obscurantist jargon bending have to actually start to turn on their brains and care about making more sense than an LLM can.

> … have to actually start to …

Or do they?

Maybe not. But academia is going to change. Status will still have to be allocated by some mechanism but the classic journals and reviews based system will crumble under the weight of LLMs. Of course this will upset a great many of people who enjoy the current state of things.

What fields rely only on jargon manipulation to produce papers?

I would think that most people can think of some. Maybe those who can't are part of one.

That's a beautiful Kafkatrap you've constructed. Not much of an argument though. Maybe there's another explanation for this though. Perhaps you think you know much more about different fields than you actually do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com