[kshacker]

I do this so many times. Type in a large amount of text and the only thing final in my mind is para breaks and the idea per paragraph. And then give it to AI saying "sending to director", "sending to friends on WhatsApp group", "sending to colleagues" and it does an awesome job of bringing the "AI polish" and then you edit or negotiate line by line or para by para on what you want to keep.

[dang]

Yes, this is certainly common, and opinions and tastes differ about the outcomes—as they should, because we are all still in the early stage of sorting through the best way to use these tools. I think it's also already clear that "best way" means something different in different contexts.

Where some people are getting into trouble, at least in the HN context, is underestimating the impact that this has on their text. There's a big perception gap between the author's view ("fixed up the grammar a bit") and the reader's view ("this sounds entirely like an AI wrote it") in many cases. So many, in fact, that I feel I can say something about it. I'm no authority on any of this and don't want to sound like one, but this is such a common pattern at the moment that I feel confident reporting it. How it will change over time, I have no idea.

(I also don't want to sound anti-LLM - we rely on these tools heavily, they're amazing, they've already improved HN, and they show every sign of high potential to improve it further. The bottleneck isn't the LLMs, it's how quickly we can figure out how to use (and test) them. We just don't use them to process any text that we put on HN itself.)

[AndrewDucker]

Unfortunately, the "AI Polish" is really obvious and offputting to many people.

[kshacker]

And that is sad. I had speech impediment while growing up, but somehow I was able to focus on writing and used to write real well, first technical (sciency) stuff and then general thoughts too. Despite having never spoken english for conversation till the age of 16 or 17, someone decades later speculated that I was an english major because I could communicate really well (and I did use some heavy but very very context appropriate english words). Nowadays ... while I do use AI now and then to clean up my text, I have been accused of being an AI more than I can count :) You put in the effort and get accused of being chatGPT.