I think it would be more successful if the tool was labeled "Make more persuasive" or "Manipulate"
I do not want AI to "polish" me
21–30 of 276 posts
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#22I get the frustration, but I think there’s a hidden assumption in this discussion: that everyone can write well in English.
Only about 5% of the world’s population are native English speakers, but more than twice that number use it daily. For many, AI rewriting isn’t about losing personal style—it’s about making sure they can communicate clearly in a language that isn’t their first.
It’s fair to dislike how AI flattens unique voices, but for a huge part of the world, it’s not erasing personality—it’s making participation possible.
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#23I actually use LLMs to unpolish dictation results from MacWhisper[0] to match the way I write in chats. MacWhisper lets you set a prompt to automatically post-process your transcribed output. Here is my prompt:
'You are a professional proofreader and editor. Your task is to rewrite this dictation with more casual capitalization and punctuation so it can be used in a chat setting.
- Always capitalize "I" and derived words like "I'm"
- Sentences should start with lower case letters unless they start with “I”
- Replace explicit punctuation callouts with the actual punctuation
- No period at the end of the message, but leave periods between sentences
- Do not remove commas
- Do not change sophisticated words to more common ones
Return only the result. Do not add any explanations or comments about your edit.'
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#24As a tangent, the other day I read a post of a person who used to be close to Elon Musk and was giving their account of that relationship, and it was translated to Polish via DeepSeek.
It was not idiomatic Polish - very far from it really, so I guess depending on the model used here, the result could have been equally disappointing if it was really trying to Polish that email.
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#25AI does not want to do anything, whatsoever.
It's owners, however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths.
Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#26> It’s like my whole computer is a toddler screaming “LET ME DO IT!” every time I try to create something.
Every autocorrect or auto suggestion ever has felt like this to me, but the volume has been turned up to 11. The otherwise drab Adobe Reader is covered with colorful sparkly buttons and popups suggesting I need not even read the document because it can give me “insights.” First, no you may not ready my proprietary document, nor do I suspect most people using this particular software - I only have it for digital signatures - have permission to share IP with a third party. But mostly, it can sometimes be a useful tool, and the fact everyone is shoving it in my face reeks of desperation.
The tech industry is in real trouble.
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#27There is no way in hell anyone who knows me would get that email and not think I’d been abducted This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.
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You have to look at it holistically.
This is the current modern Human:
1. Born into the beast, enters social media by 5-7 years old
2. All math and writing is done for you (becoming illiterate)
3. You don't have to spell ever again (becoming illiterate)
4. You cultivate a virtual persona since childhood (becoming vain)
5. Did your life really happen if it wasn't posted online (the digital existentialist crisis -- do you even exist if you aren't part of the hive?)
Then add more shit to this like, I dunno, no jobs, swipe left and right to find your soul mate ...
Yeah and then you finally get ... you and me, the whole fuck it, I don't care anymore.
Feeding apathy with AI will not end well, we have to care. Look at our kids today, we screwed them.
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#28My mother is a first-generation immigrant. Her writing isn’t ideal, but AI allows her to communicate articulately in a way, where before she might have been discriminated against
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#29Digital culture was fake and performative and insincere enough before Turboclippy: fuck that with something sharp. It feels like the whole world is turning into an HR department premised on the ideological axiom that killing one man is a murder but killing a million is a statistic.
I truly appreciate the term Turboclippy and will be using it from now on
Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me
#30There is no way in hell anyone who knows me would get that email and not think I’d been abducted This person cares about not putting up a fake identity. That's pretty cool, but social media has exposed that a large number of people are perfectly fine presenting an illusion. People will have no shame passing off well written things as an output of their talent and hard work. Digital makeup has no bounds.
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The whole AI discussion reminds me of David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" book. If the content doesn't matter, why not have an AI generate something polite and meaningless? Why not save effort managing your inbox full of meaningless emails by having the AI summarize them? It might lose some of the details, but they didn't matter. And so more and more of the white collar world gets replaced by AI .. until it actually disrupts away all the bullshit jobs entirely.
Edit: comments describing exactly this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42865225