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I do not want AI to "polish" me

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Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#241

Post by halostatue »

XorNot wrote: post #58
sneak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow I don’t have this problem with notepad.exe or vim or pandoc or imagemagic or textedit.app or resolve or blender. Maybe it isn’t the tech industry, and just consumer-facing apps.

Open source has been looking better and better lately because it's not in a mad rush to bolt "AI" features onto it (an LLM will do something) and then shove a huge amount of interface in your face to try to get you to use it. On some level it's enormously baffling that this was the thing they decided they needed to do...conversely Adobe Reader on my phone won't shutup about liquid mode either (which uploads to Adobe…

I will simply point you to the iTerm2 AI kerfuffle (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40458135) as proof that some in open source _are_ in a mad rush to bolt on completely unnecessary "features".

It was a bad choice that never should have been implemented as "enabled but not configured", and I have moved away from iTerm2 as a result. I am sure that others have as well. (The grudging move to make it a separately downloadable plugin was good, but too late IMO.)

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#242

Post by dml2135 »

cowfriend wrote: post #114
danparsonson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on - we've been doing this since way before crypto was a thing. We knew about climate change in the 80s.

We knew about climate change in the 1880s. There, fixed it for you.

We knew about global warming in the 1880s?

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#243

Post by casey2 »

idoco wrote: post #22

I 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 flatte…

The proper solution is to work with an editor that asks clarifying question not to rewrite the whole thing into something totally different.

For published work, if it's not worth editing then it's not worth reading (I would go further personally and say that most publish, edited and peer reviewed work, in your area of interest isn't worth reading anyways)

For unpublished work, like an email, ask the AI to translate the passage while maintaining style and tone. It will still flatten it, but not as much as the complete dogshit I read in the article.

Communication is a job requirement, faking it with AI is going to go about as well as someone faking programming skills. Not very!

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#244

Post by normalaccess »

encipriano wrote: post #238
normalaccess wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only have the people changed but it is the belief of the elites at the top that humanity is entering a new era of hack-ability. They want to use these AI systems to rewrite humanity into their vision of the future. Yuval Noah Harari talking about how the new "gods" are the data-centers and how free will is dead in the age of AI. https://youtu.be/QuL3wlodJC8

When was free will proven to be a thing to begin with

Well, for the purpose of this conversation the people at the top of the food chain believe free will exists. They also believe that they can eliminate it with AI and Biomedical manipulation.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#245

Post by the_snooze »

SkyBelow wrote: post #151
thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #11

I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates. I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose. On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting…

I was thinking about the authenticity of my writing earlier this week and wondering why I have no problem accepting code from an AI and committing it, but I find the idea of passing off an AI's writing as my own feels not just wrong, but immoral on the level of purposeful plagiarism. I feel a distinct difference, but I'm not particular clear why. I'm okay with sharing AI writing, but only when I've clearly communicat…

It's probably because communication is a complex dance between humans, where you're constantly signaling that you're part of some group with the other person. Think of any profession or team, where members share common ways of speaking: jargon, inside jokes, terms of art, terms of endearment, etc. It's useful for cohesion, trust, and efficiency because you're assured that the person you're talking to is indeed "one of us."

If you use an AI to communicate, then you either fail to mimic those group membership signals and you look like an idiot. Or you succeed and show that a machine can fool humans at this game. Any grifter can come along and establish trust in a group by relying on this tech. This dance that humans have been doing since the dawn of time suddenly breaks down, and that doesn't feel good.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#246

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

shagie wrote: post #195
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a dystopia where the resistance is using text-in-text steganography to coordinate, so unpolished communication is flagged for extra scrutiny because all those stylistic choices might be hiding something.

Ever read The Freeze Frame Revolution? Though, its stenography is a bit more obvious given the "you've got to be able to read it". The kindle version of the book starts with https://imgur.com/uIBjwlQ This would give you the opportunity to have another ending to the book.

I love The Freeze Frame Revolution, and yeah I was planning on doing something similar. I figure I'll publish an app that OCRs the text and displays the hidden message, and make the book read differently based on whether you can or can't see the messages.

Then readers can use the app for hiding their own messages to each other also.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#247

Post by ajmurmann »

thrwaway1985882 wrote: post #11

I've only recently started using AI, and have discovered my use or rejection of it is predicated on my feelings for the task. This argument of "authenticity" really resonates. I'm a manager, so when I'm sending emails to a customer or talking with one of my reports, I care deeply - so you might get some overwrought florid prose, but it's my overwrought florid prose. On the other hand, I have to lead a weekly meeting…

I wonder how people feel about "dumber" tools like hemingway.app that make mechanical suggestions for readability like suggesting simple synonyms and highlighting sentences that are too long. I've used it for writing documents that important and I knew a lot of people would read.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#248

Post by soerxpso »

What's really annoying is how its idea of "polishing" is just making the email worse. Who could possibly benefit from the recipient needing to sift through more boilerplate to find the actual content of the email?

15 years ago I might have imagined that an email sent by a robot would be extremely efficient, including only the relevant information, in order of importance. In 2025 it's apparently the opposite; we're trying our best to communicate effectively and an AI is nagging us to include an extra paragraph of flirtation.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#249

Post by immibis »

kqr wrote: post #13
pipeline_peak wrote: post #7

The irony is that someone would just use an AI to summarize the long winded polished version.

I have noticed many news outlets presenting articles with an "AI summary" on top. Often the article is copied right off of a newswire service, with some elaborations woven in. I have a feeling the thing the LLM is summarising is increasingly something another LLM has previously expanded. What if we just wrote articles well, such that (a) they were not filled with fluff, and (b) the summary would be to only read the f…

News outlets rely on you scrolling down the whole article so they can show you more ads.

Re: I do not want AI to "polish" me

#250

Post by immibis »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #209
MrMcCall wrote: post #25

AI 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 c…

If AI gets us back to nuclear power, LLMs will have done more for climate change than all climate activists, ever, combined.

Not for geopolitical stability, though. What did we learn about making the entirety of human civilization dependent on a constant supply of rare materials hostile countries dig out of the ground?

And what happens when they run out? Back to carbon fossil fuels?

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