I keep getting flagged for AI, but I suck at writing. How can I solve this? | Hacker News Reader

I keep getting flagged for AI, but I suck at writing. How can I solve this?

6 pointsquesobob11 comments

So I write posts in my own language, but admittedly I suck at writing, and I kind of hate my writing voice in general. So then I go to Claude and I just ask it to clean it up. I'm not asking it to rewrite. I'm asking it to fix my spelling, add a comma, do the things that high school English should have taught me but spellcheck ruined me with. I also, more than anything, now use voice-to-text to shout out to Wispr Flow when writing. Sometimes that free thought makes it worse because now I just get to ramble and someone listens to me. All I'm trying to do is clean it up and make it easy to digest on the end, but I keep getting flagged for any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or just for rail on me for sucking. Also, I'm going to see what happens with this post because literally just talking into my computer and going to see if I'm flagged again. No AI was even considered in writing this.

Good writing is rewriting. That said, in my experience the hardest part is writing the first draft, i.e., just getting something down at all. So do whatever you need to do to get your own thoughts on the page (except Claude, obviously), and then proofread, correct, and revise. If you do substantial revisions, then you'll have to do more editing passes. When you do a pass and only make minor changes, that's a sign that you're probably done.

If you think you're just a poor writer...well, you won't get better without doing it a lot, will you? Also consider that AI assistance will actively hamper your growth, and that's considered a feature, not a bug (would the AI labs prefer you to depend on their products, or to outgrow them?).

On spelling and grammar, you can't get flagged as AI for using spellcheck. I don't use grammar checking, but I read somewhere that grammar checking algorithms have gotten good now, so that could be something else to look into (as long as it just highlights potential problems and doesn't rewrite your words).

I think a lot of ESL speakers are too hard on themselves. I have often seen people apologize online and in person and I didn’t think they had anything to apologize for, they wrote/sounded fine.

The only thing I’d say about this post is to maybe break it into some paragraphs so it doesn’t feel like a wall of text.

> I'm not asking it to rewrite. I'm asking it to fix my spelling,

No matter what you demand, LLM will rewritten, no matter how you tell it not to, it will be rewritten. Your only option is to use traditional corrections such as in Word. LLM will not translate as is.

Write the text in Google Docs (or similar) and accept most of the orthography and grammar corrections. Don't use the magic button that use fake pixie dust to transform your text into the professional-AI-zombie style.

(As a sibling comment says, here we are quite tolerant to a few errors. Hi from Argentina!)

I think you will find that a technical audience is much more tolerant of imperfect English than you seem to expect.

Side note. yes, in the past, totally had AI write stuff. Because I'm lazy and it's easy, I've stopped.

I dont understand. Who is flagging and more importantly, why does it even matter?

Ah, the royal road to learning how to write.

When asking AI to improve the text, I ask it for feedback. It might come with suggestions for changed sentences, but I then try to capture the essence of the suggestion while rewriting the sentence myself. Perhaps what the AI wanted was to add a caveat, or use a more careful phrasing.

I then respond with my rewrite and ask for feedback again.

At least this lets me keep the writing mine, while avoiding blatant errors.

That said, I don't do this often, never when replying on forums like this, only when say writing documentation or similar. English is my second language but people will just have to deal with it for the most part.

What's the question?

What results are you expecting from your writing? What are you writing? If you are trying to sell something and you are both bad at writing and use AI you won't sell because there are no audience for bad content or AI slop.

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