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Comment by eivanov89 | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author and I'm not native speaker, so please bear that in mind. However, I admit I've used AI for grammar and style. IMHO, the post is not fiction, I just wanted to communicate the ideas as clearly and effectively as possible.

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Just don't. Your older posts are perfectly fine and much preferable to the most recent two.

Frankly speaking, you are the second (with this thread, the third) one, who says that. So, it looks that I really should write myself again with just grammar checks, not the style.

What I've done a few times is have the AI provide feedback, and then I rewrite myself based on the feedback. So I don't use what the AI suggests directly, just the essence if I agree.

That's a good approach. My sin is that if I like the sentence, I keep and don't rewrite. Because if I see it is good, I don't feel I should. And probably I don't see that "prose" is bad each time it is indeed bad.

Maybe you should just patch a grammar problem instead of rewriting the whole sentence. (I'm not blaming you but just sharing my experience, I suspect your first language might be a Slavic one like mine.)

Thanks for sharing. I didn't expect my slavic accent to be so strong to be visible in text and even pass through AI edits :)

Well, to be completely honest with you, it is obvious in your comments here. But my point was, keeping your Slavic accent and fixing the most glaring places with the help of AI is probably better than letting AI rewrite large portions of your text into "Better English". People do hate the AI accent these days, you know.

TBH, your username gives that part away atleast. My mind went to slavic when I saw the "ov" - it might be factually wrong, but thats waht happened.

You are right :)

It's easy to falsely assume readers expect you to be native, or that they are even native English speakers themselves

Or that they want AI text over imperfect English

I wonder what would happen if you just told the AI to speak in broken english...

Hilarity may ensure.

Fair enough.

If you're going for just grammar and spelling, Grammarly has been around for ages and doesn't try to rewrite everything. I'm a native speaker and I don't trust any LLM to retain my style because diffing paragraphs or reworking sections is tedious as hell. I'm reeeeeally lazy and the only workflow I am tempted to do is a rough draft from an LLM, a full rewrite from me, and something like Grammarly for small mistakes. Anything over a single iteration feels like pulling teeth because it's never as subtle as you tell it to be. It truly feels like giving a typewriter to monkeys.

TBH I don't think it's that bad: the article is not hard to read and pretty informative (and is not just a copy + paste from a prompt), it's just got a hint of that tone which can grate just because it's rendered so cliche by LLM writing.

Thank you, that's actually was my actual attitude: found interesting things -> used AI to polish notes and quick draft -> "Hey folks, here is a cool thing I've found".

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