alt.hn

3/30/2026 at 7:03:18 AM

I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era

 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-definitely-missing-the-pre-ai-writing-era

by joozio

3/30/2026 at 8:46:50 AM

I want to emphasize a thought you expressed:

> "..but maybe it's a good thing that most of us don't allow this technology to reframe our thoughts."

No, you're not the only one experiencing this: I too had the same concerns as you: with every new thought, every new creation, I had to ask the AI's opinion, as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI (...just to be safe, you never know...).

The only way to regain your creative ability is to write down your thoughts yourself, read, reread, rewrite, correct, express your opinion...

What AI can't do is convey emotions.

by aledevv

3/30/2026 at 9:30:55 AM

depending how hard the "the brain is a muscle" saying applies, there is no way using LLMs/chatbot systems/AI is not going to deteriorate your brain immensely.

by Amekedl

3/30/2026 at 4:57:15 PM

when i was younger, we didnt have cellphones. i had ~20-30 phone numbers memorized, at least. i also used to remember my credit card number. my brain has not deteriorated now that i have offloaded that to my phone.

point being: it depends on how you use it. if you offload critical thinking to ai, you will probably (slowly) atrophy your critical thinking muscles. if you offload some bullshit boilerplate or repetitive tasks or whatever, giving you more time overall to do the critical thinking part, you will be fine.

by john_strinlai

3/31/2026 at 3:54:52 AM

> my brain has not deteriorated now that i have offloaded that to my phone.

Is there empirical evidence that you haven't? You wouldn't necessarily be the best judge

by sumeno

3/31/2026 at 12:45:28 PM

do you want a reference from a published journal or something? links to my last mri? how do you want me to answer this?

bring some empirical evidence that using ai rots the brain, and in the meantime, i will think about whether or not its worth trying to answer your request in earnest.

by john_strinlai

3/31/2026 at 7:31:20 PM

There is no way for you to know that you aren't slightly less sharp having offloaded the memorization of those phone numbers. Who is the judge? It's a nonsensical question from a scientific perspective because it's impossible to prove either way.

We could speculate that simple acts like memorizing phone numbers probably do make the average person slightly sharper, in a similar way to trivial brain games helping to stave off alzheimer's.

by bigmadshoe

3/30/2026 at 6:33:18 PM

In I,Robot, Will Smith prefers to drive himself because he doesn't trust AI. But we are moving towards self driving as it would be more safer. Would you trust a calculation more if it was done by hand using log tables? Having vehicles allowed us to create sports like dirt bike riding or monster truck racing. Yes something is lost but something is also gained. We move up the layer of abstraction.

by ghywertelling

3/31/2026 at 3:43:54 PM

That is not the same situation. Writing is a thing we do to communicate with other people, and to engage our own thinking. It's creative, it's exploratory, and it's a human-to-human practice. It is a top-level abstraction. The only higher you could possibly go is beaming your thoughts directly into someone else's brain.

Also it irks me to compare writing to a calculator's log function or a self-driving car. There are absolute correct/perfect outcomes in those situations (the log function produces the correct number, the car drives you to your destination without injury or unnecessary danger). That is not the same for most things AI is attempting to be used for.

by wsve

3/31/2026 at 6:06:42 PM

Creating graphic arts is also a form of communication. But Procreate makes it easier, even for novice to create amazing art. Consider an aircraft, the pilot is given just few knobs to fly the plane but it still takes you from one location to another. The aircraft is indeed very complex than the knobs given but we can hide most of that complexity underneath the knobs assuming happy path flights most of the time. The higher abstraction I am talking about is the future jargons themselves. AI will allow us to create far more complex stories. Imagine one complex jargon represented by a mandelbrot fractal (to paint a picture of the complexity involved), another represented by burning ship fractal. What kind of operations can I do with these two complex ideas. Can I explore a complex conceptual space with it? We would just say to the AI, subtract one fractal from another and it would handle the details (the definitons, references, related ideas in a free form manner). This is exploration itself. Procreate gives you brushes. AI gives you something similar in conceptual space.

by ghywertelling

3/30/2026 at 4:40:10 PM

If your body is in good shape, stopping exercise won't make you deteriorate that quickly. What I wonder is, will people get in good shape in the first place.

What I mean is as someone with lots of experience, I don't care about me not learning about the basics anymore as much as someone in their 20s and 30s maybe should.

by barbazoo

3/30/2026 at 5:25:44 PM

I think this is backwards.

Not sure what you mean by quickly. Back when I was in racing shape, if I stopped my training plan for as little as two weeks, (probably less actually, but I'm being conservative here) I would have a measurable drop in fitness.

Now, as someone who regularly walks the dog and bikes to work, I've got "less to lose" and probably wouldn't deteriorate as much.

by recursive

3/30/2026 at 5:30:54 PM

Aerobic fitness is hard to shake, but neuromuscular changes can be lost very quickly

by justonceokay

3/30/2026 at 5:33:12 PM

And here I was thinking how clever an example I was giving :)

by barbazoo

3/30/2026 at 5:29:55 PM

See the recent article suggesting use of navigation apps may correlate in populations to increased Alzheimer’s. Will it happen to you? Maybe, maybe not. Life’s a box of chocolates!

by justonceokay

3/30/2026 at 10:03:40 AM

A friend described it as "there's no blank page any more".

by stavros

3/30/2026 at 8:19:23 PM

I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”¹, using AI to do the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend the day watching television and playing video games and getting dumber by the minute.

I would go a step further, in fact, and when I’m writing something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a reminder to not do that,³ although I’m far from immune myself (looking at my comment history, it’s upsetting to see the same verbal tics repeated when I have something to say).

⸻

1. If you don’t know a word well enough for it to come to mind when you’re looking for a word for something, you may not know it well enough to use it in your writing.²

2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that’s just out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but even that I try to avoid.

3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had published a creative writing book which was largely based on his former students’ transcriptions of his lectures. During the lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.

by dhosek

3/30/2026 at 11:37:46 PM

> As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”

I don't think cheating is the right word here (ironically), which I think you are kind of acknowledging by putting it in quotes.

Based on your footnote, it sounds like you are more concerned that using a thesaurus is more likely to end with a worse result, since you are likely to use the incorrect word, or to use the word incorrectly.

This sounds more like the opposite of cheating; cheating is about unfairly getting a better result, but this concern is more about accidentally getting a worse result.

by cortesoft

3/31/2026 at 2:45:17 AM

If you make it worse, it's cheating and getting caught. Sometimes you might luck into a correct usage of a word, but like using a LLM, the nuance of that word choice is not part of your thinking, so it's a loss of information that you did to try to appear to be a better writer.

by foxglacier

3/31/2026 at 3:34:45 PM

Does learning/using new words make you a worse writer?

The handful of times I've used a thesaurus is usually 'for aesthetics', in that the word/phrase I have in mind clashes with the flow of the text. I know what I want to say, and I know how I can say it, but I _also_ know that I can jostle the wording around so that the rhythm doesn't deteriorate.

by 0_gravitas

3/30/2026 at 9:25:43 PM

Why is it upsetting to see the same patterns repeated when you have something to say?

by Liftyee

3/31/2026 at 2:28:54 AM

Because I’d like to think that I am a more creative writer than that.

by dhosek

3/30/2026 at 4:42:20 PM

AI for editing is garbage. Chat to it to get ideas maybe, but in its current incarnation it’s just going to degrade anything you filter through it.

by piker

3/30/2026 at 4:59:57 PM

I work mostly on the tech side of things but my corporate limitation has always been writing up documentation, communicating/translating to stakeholders, and recalling everything relevant when writing PR descriptions. AI has been a breath of fresh air. I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before. I still maintain my own writing for more casual things like social media (HN included) and low stakes Slack conversations but AI for getting across ideas and then proofreading it is great.

by hectdev

3/30/2026 at 9:51:32 PM

"I actually communicate more information efficiently than I would have ever put the effort into before"

- this is subjective and evidence seems to point to the opposite in my view. In reality most people who think they communicate better with AI don't actually read what the AI has written for them and just puke it out on the world, expecting their readers to do the work.

The Ai almost always writes boring, repetitive garbage and very, very often includes redundant information. But saying it creates more efficiant communication is a great excuse for being sloppy and lazy.

by Morromist

3/31/2026 at 3:09:17 PM

Which one is it? Subjective or evidence based? I'm sharing what I know is true for my experience as well as the fact that I proofread what I send with AI and am aware of how terse I usually am.

by hectdev

3/30/2026 at 11:28:07 PM

I have had the same experience, personally. i.e. asking Claude to simplify things for c-suite has gotten (1) extremely positive feedback from c-suite and (2) actually relevant conversation about decisions. It's certainly not a one-shot but iteration with Claude is so fast that it takes just a few hours vs plotting weeks about how to clarify technical decisions. But Intend to work in a "try it this way" sort of iteration where I need to rewrite things and see what they look like. But using Claude/ChatGPT for options about whether things make sense is very helpful (for me). The speed of iteration is great.

by fluidcruft

3/31/2026 at 2:39:44 PM

The C-suite are barely human, so robot-speak appeals to them.

by Chinjut

3/30/2026 at 5:57:19 PM

I was asked to write user stories about a complex topic where I’m the SME at work. I spent two hours info dumping everything I knew about the project, everything the AI wouldn’t have any context for, using Cursor to add related projects to the workspace, tagging specific files where we’d implemented similar things with our styles, noted all the quirks of the system and how it works and where to find relevant information. I spent a lot of time on it, and then asked it to reach out using cli to grab relevant information from our infra, and write stories about how we’d accomplish everything I intend to get done. I then spent another few hours reviewing the 45 or so stories that conversation generated. It was similar to how I’d talk to a new contractor I’m onboarding to work on the work.

I have a deep knowledge of the information, have done the process we’re doing on two previous projects, but organizing all the stories would have been an absolute nightmare. I still spent half a day on this, I’d guess the fatigue from the boring parts would have made this take a week or maybe two, just because I was doing the parts I enjoy (knowing things and describing them) and I was able to offload the parts I’m not great at (using a lot of boilerplate language to organize the info I knew into scrum stories). Then I had a meeting, reviewed the stories with my coworkers, we had a discussion, deleted two or three of them that we determined weren’t necessary, and fixed up one or two where I’d provided insufficient information about some context surrounding coloring of a page.

It burned through a ton of Opus 4.6 tokens, looked through a ton of code (mostly that I’d written, pre-LLM), but has been amazing for helping me move into a lead position where grooming stories and being organized has always been my weakest point.

Also, when I wrote a postmortem for a deploy that had some issues, I wrote it all by hand. You have to know when the tools help and when they will hinder.

by wincy

3/30/2026 at 4:52:55 PM

I thought it's quite good. Of course, I'm not taking 100% of output, but it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!).

Can you please share what and how gets degraded? Sometimes I don't like a phrase it selects, but it's not common

by ArcHound

3/30/2026 at 4:57:53 PM

Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots. In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead.

by piker

3/30/2026 at 5:11:18 PM

AI can take a rough draft, clean it up and shorten it as much as you want. The suggestions very often expose ambiguities in the original text. If you think the LLM got it wrong, it’s nearly often the LLM overreading some feature of the original that you failed to catch, which is precisely what you’d want out of your proofreader.

Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all loved the idiosyncratic failures of convention and meaning which went into highly identifiable personal styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.

by unyttigfjelltol

3/30/2026 at 5:27:17 PM

> Well, for one example, it inhibits your desire to improve against those very blind spots.

I'd contend this is not true. Even professional authors go to an editor who identifies things that need to be fixed. As the author of the text and knowing what it should be, it can be difficult to read what you wrote to find those mistakes.

> In exchange for that your audience gets 3-4x length normalized bullshit to read instead.

This is not at all what is implied by having an AI act as an editor. Identifying misplaced commas, incorrect subject verb agreement (e.g. counts), and incomplete ideas left in as sentence fragments.

You appear to be implying that the author is giving agency to create the content to the AI rather than using it as a tool to act as a super-charged grammerly.

by shagie

3/30/2026 at 5:52:57 PM

> Even professional authors go to an editor who identifies things that need to be fixed.

Yes, and these people are good at it. What’s your point?

If you need grammar checking, there are thousands of apps including word processors, web browsers and even most mobile devices that will check your inputs for grammar and spelling mistakes as you type. All of that without burning down the rainforests or neutering your thesis.

by piker

3/31/2026 at 12:47:16 AM

I believe you are confusing what an editor does and proofreading.

In the time before LLMs, for some of my occasional blog posts I'd first post it to whatever messaging system my colleges used and ask them to read over it. Identifying that "this word is confusing in this context" or "you're using jargon here that I'm unfamiliar with" is helpful. There's also stylistic items of "this sentence goes on for far too many words and thoughts without making a single punctuation mark indicating where it is complete or delineating two or more different ideas leading the reader to have to keep back tracking the thought to try to keep it all in their mind which can be confusing and makes it more difficult to read."

Proofreading tools pick up some typos and punctation errors in that previous bit. https://imgur.com/a/oqqoEGV None of them called out its structure.

Compare with https://chatgpt.com/share/69cb180e-2090-832f-838e-896a3cab4e... ... which did call it out.

    The overly long example sentence introduces unintended humor or self-parody, which may dilute the seriousness of the point.
Now, one could argue that taking its advice for the structure and that I have incompletely formulated some arguments would change the tone of my writing. However, any changes that I make are changes that I intend to make and are not the result of the LLM rewriting my words.

My thesis remains intact.

by shagie

3/30/2026 at 5:23:24 PM

> it takes care of my grammar blindspots (damn you commas and a/an/the articles!)

There are plenty of pre-LLM tools that can fix grammar issues.

> Can you please share what and how gets degraded?

I'm not the person you asked, but IMO LLMs suck the style and voice out of the written word. It is the verbal equivalent of photos that show you an average of what people look like, see for example:

https://www.artfido.com/this-is-what-the-average-person-look...

As definitionally average the results are not bad but they are also entirely unremarkable, bland, milquetoast. Whether or not this result is a degradation will vary, of course, as some people write a lot worse than bland.

by georgemcbay

3/30/2026 at 6:20:12 PM

In many kinds of writing, perhaps most, communicating your state of mind to the reader is a primary goal. Even a smart LLM fundamentally degrades this, because to whatever degree that it has a mind it isn't shaped like yours or mine. I've had a number of experiences this year where I get to the end of a grammatical, well-structured technical document, only to find that it was completely useless because it recited a bunch of facts and analyses but failed to convey what the author was thinking as they wrote it.

(Of course, that may well be exactly what you're looking for if you're writing an audit report or something.)

by SpicyLemonZest

3/30/2026 at 5:41:42 PM

>damn you commas and a/an/the articles

This sounds like an ESL issue. LLMs are good at proof reading ESL-written English text. They are not as good at proof reading experience English writers.

by viccis

3/30/2026 at 8:11:18 PM

AI for editing is good and have many useful cases. The part where it fails is that the tone/style of the writing gets overtaken and reads like all other AI edited writing. But the quality of the edit is good, its just not in your style. When everyone sounds the same then there is no uniqueness. But using it edit legal letters, software documentation etc are very good use cases, using it to explain your ideas in a blog not so much.

by pizzly

3/30/2026 at 7:03:45 PM

It’s kinda useful to me for the following three reasons:

- spelling - grammar or weird grammar as English is not my native language - read proofing and finding things that do not make sense in terms of sentence structure

I do not use it for ideas, discussing the writing, or anything else because that beats the purpose of writing it myself (creative writing).

by pryelluw

3/31/2026 at 12:30:58 AM

It sucks the soul out of the human expression.

by d2ssa

3/31/2026 at 3:57:04 AM

Depends on how you use it. If you say "reword this to sound <whatever your goal is>" then it does suck. But if you say "This is what I wrote. My intention is so-and-so. The audience is <audience>... Please mention and add suggestions for how to fix typos, poor wording, unclear expression, etc.

Then you get back what it thinks is wrong and you're in charge of editing in its suggestions. If you let it edit for you you're more likely to just create slop.

---

Here's an example. My actual text is:

> I want to make it clear that I'm not hunting for things to be angry at, these are issues I've encountered in actual codebases.

If go through the route of prompting it to re-write, it changes it to:

> I’m not looking for things to be angry about—these are issues I’ve encountered in real codebases.

The em dash is a clear give away that it's AI, but it's also soulless.

If I ask it to tell me what's possibly wrong about it I get that there's a comma splice (never knew the term, I'm not a native speaker) and "about" is better than "at". So I do a minor change:

> I want to make it clear that I'm not hunting for things to be angry about. These are issues I've encountered in actual codebases.

by xdennis

3/30/2026 at 5:26:48 PM

Only if you don't understand how to control AI. If you understands how it works and have the skills to ride it like a wild horse, you can make yourself a 10x developer. Its maybe a bit of an insult, but you seriously have to change that mindset. AI is not going to be worse tomorrow. It will get better and it will dramatically change our life as developers. Code will no longer be a prominent thing we are working on in the near future.

by holoduke

3/30/2026 at 9:55:48 AM

Not joking, buy and read books. Old books are only written by people. (and the help of an editor)

by everdrive

3/31/2026 at 12:47:57 AM

Nothing has made me want to read classic literature more than AI. For the first time in probably over a decade I even went to my local used bookstore with a list of books to buy, but sadly none of them were in stock. I have had a bit of luck at little free libraries though.

by hoherd

3/30/2026 at 10:07:43 AM

Fun fact: Editors are usually also people. Except for that one dog I met during a cold winter's day in 1987 in a run-down London pub.

by shafyy

3/30/2026 at 10:21:03 AM

On the internet, no one knows you're an editor

by incognito124

3/30/2026 at 10:54:58 PM

Can you explain the reference? It whooshed me.

by scorpionfeet

3/31/2026 at 1:32:14 PM

Haha, no reference. I just made something up and tried to be funny.

by shafyy

3/31/2026 at 3:27:18 PM

I tried figuring out the reference with Gemini, and it said this:

The immediate reply to that comment is: "On the internet, no one knows you're an editor." This is a direct play on the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." By setting the anecdote in 1987 (a few years before the World Wide Web was publicly available), the commenter is implying that back in the analog days, if a dog wanted to be a writer or an editor, they couldn't hide behind a screen—they had to sit in a smoky London pub and do business face-to-face.

Which makes a lot of sense actually. I would imagine that's what the replier to you thought you meant.

by Mentlo

3/31/2026 at 5:24:50 PM

Hahaha great story. But that's not what I had I thought about at all.

by shafyy

3/30/2026 at 4:49:39 PM

No way, bro! I'm no longer an editor, though.

by taneliv

3/30/2026 at 4:42:02 PM

Or read magazines and newspapers from reputable publications. My grammar and writing have improved tremendously from reading quality magazine articles, e.g. stuff from The Atlantic or The NY Book Review or whatever.

Both magazines and books are valid forms of information consumption and books are not the only way to improve your writing, reading, and understanding of the world.

by 65

3/30/2026 at 5:39:22 PM

I wouldn't count on current stuff in those publications being free from AI. We're seeing it in peer-reviewed paper submissions so why not in literary forums?

If you limit yourself to stuff from maybe five years ago or older, yeah it's going to be human-written and human-edited (ghostwriting still possible).

by SoftTalker

3/30/2026 at 8:53:13 PM

AI is much better at generating text that resembles scientific papers than it is at literary writing. Even if they're not all flagged as AI, the incidence will be much lower because they're simply bad writing. They won't make it out of the slush pile at places like GP listed.

by Miraste

3/30/2026 at 4:35:41 PM

I actually find Gmail a better editor/grammar check then LLMs. It makes isolated simplifications/corrections that imo have minimal style impact and just focus on clarifying phrasing.

by solomonb

3/30/2026 at 8:01:24 PM

Yeah Gmail got crazy good in the last 3 months, pretty sure it's LLM driven too but it went from 90s MS Word to better than Grammarly recently IMO

by sixhobbits

3/31/2026 at 5:55:30 AM

After COVID six years ago I kind of lost my ability to write concisely and clear. I always loved to compose, to fantasize, but now I feel like an impared one. Now writing any text is a painful process to me: I grab one paper, do freewriting (when one writes w/o stop everything that comes to ones mind) , then mark the bulletpoints and nice formulations (if present, of course). Sometimes, when I want to sharpen the text, I ask questions to it, I critisize it violently. Then I close the original, and rewrite everything from scratch by hand. Handwriting enforces human, naturally lazy creatures, to be concise in their formulations. After 3-4 iterations, I get a text of asatisfactory quality.

It is very unfortunate that we start value creativity and imagination only when we lose them. Although a good pill for creativity in my case is ... boredom and routine. I cant stand doing the same thing again and again in the same fashion. Maybe you might give it a try :)

by ForgotMyUUID

3/30/2026 at 5:29:51 PM

>I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting)

Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort put in by the author?

This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.

by boca_honey

3/30/2026 at 6:46:08 PM

There are some people that believe that writing is an act of creative expression. In other words, that writing is primarily about the act (and as such, it's a quite selfish activity). Editing destroys the expressive act and must be avoided.

These people's writing is usually incoherent and they are very proud of it. If you've ever read a bad new-age self-help book you've probably encountered writing like this.

Good writers understand that writing is about communication. The initial act of writing (ie, word puke) is worthless. What matters most is a piece of writing's ability to communicate clearly.

This writing is usually pleasant, concise, and clear.

by elbasti

3/30/2026 at 7:50:52 PM

I 'm sure you consider your opinion to be correct, but there is something to writing being an act of creative expression. It's fine for it to be a selfish activity. Diaries are this way, for example, and the negativity you point at other people's hobbies is unfortunate.

There's something to the idea that if the writer is writing with the intention of publishing it, that should be edited. But if you're writing for yourself, and happen to simply keep your writings somewhere public, some other person's desire for you to edit more is a measurement of that other person's feeling of entitlement.

I have about as much desire to read some publisher's edited version of Anne Frank's diary as you appear to have to read the original.

by margalabargala

3/30/2026 at 8:59:21 PM

Franks diary was edited, both by herself and later publishers.

by encom

3/30/2026 at 11:54:07 PM

Some argue that her father’s editing was detrimental, that it removed some of her voice and her experience. I think there’s something to editing out the more… problematic parts of a pubescent child’s diary. I would have been mortified if my thoughts of that nature were published, and the censorship allowed the diary to reach a more broad audience in e.g. grade schools. But at the same time, I do understand the wish to see the full, authentic story.

by arijun

3/31/2026 at 12:16:26 AM

Sure, it was edited. The point is, there exist those of us who have desire to read the unedited version.

by margalabargala

3/30/2026 at 11:43:16 PM

By her father, not herself. She sort of died before she had an opportunity to edit her writings for publication.

by mhurron

3/31/2026 at 12:00:56 AM

https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/anne-frank-...

> But the manuscript that Otto Frank pitched to Dutch editors didn’t contain his daughter’s entire diary. Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others ­– for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.

https://www.history.com/articles/anne-frank-diary-hidden-pag...

> Frank’s candid words on sex didn’t make it into the first published diary, which appeared in English in 1952. Though Anne herself edited her diary with an eye to publication, the book—released eight years after her death from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15—contained additional cuts. These were only partially restored in 1986, when a critical edition of her diary was published. Then, in 1995, an even less censored version, including a passage on Frank’s own body previously withheld by her father, was published.

https://research.annefrank.org/en/gebeurtenissen/b0725097-67...

> In response to Minister Bolkestein's appeal on 28 March 1944 on Radio Oranje to keep wartime diaries and letters, Anne Frank decided to rewrite her diary into a novel: "Imagine how interesting it would be if I published a novel of the Secret Annex, from the title alone people would think it was a detective novel."

> Anne rewrote and edited her diary on loose sheets of duplicator paper. On Saturday 20 May 1944, she wrote: "Dear Kitty, At last after much contemplation I have begun my 'the Secret Annex', in my head it is already as finished as it can be, but in reality it will be a lot slower, if it ever gets finished at all." Anne's rewritten version, known as Version B, ends with the diary entry of 29 March 1944.

by shagie

3/31/2026 at 3:17:09 AM

Thank you, I remember reading this background as well.

There is no 'unedited' version of Anne's diary, as Anne herself intentionally edited and re-edited her work during her time in the Annex. A remarkable young woman. What was published to readers are various versions that have additionally been further somewhat edited by others and in places censored, with the trend being towards gradually less censorship over time.

by pryce

3/31/2026 at 3:32:08 AM

Actually, unless they are self-published, most "new-age self-help" books are pretty thoughtfully edited. They are persuasive writing, whose goal is to convince you to believe in a framework that is not supported by evidence. Dismissing them for being incoherent is actually a mistake, in that it shows a lack of understanding of their appeal.

Though, I must admit, I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-help" books, so I took a guess.

by throw4847285

3/31/2026 at 4:34:03 AM

> I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-help" books

They're using it as a pejorative, so it's a blanket term meaning "books with ideas I don't understand and therefore dislike".

by margalabargala

3/31/2026 at 12:42:52 PM

I agree that many of the books they're likely talking about are bad, but at least be correct about what makes them bad!

by throw4847285

3/31/2026 at 2:03:52 AM

> There are some people that believe that writing is an act of creative expression.

I think "some people" might be underselling it, as evidenced by the borderline innumerable fiction books in existence?

> and as such, it's a quite selfish activity

"quite" seems a bit harsh, surely "writing because you enjoy it" is pretty far down the list of all "selfish" activities? I'd imagine many authors also write because they think others will enjoy their works.

by throwaway0123_5

3/31/2026 at 4:44:30 AM

Creativity and concision are not mutually exclusive. Read Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. Their books are concise, almost spartan, clear and pleasant to read, and undeniably creative.

This style of writing is deceptively simple, of course, and devilishly difficult to produce.

by chongli

3/31/2026 at 1:52:37 AM

You may find that there is a continuum between textbooks and poetry; and that some folks want things that are further over towards the prose and poety side, some of us enjoyed reading Kerouac, we don't care about perfection so much as feeling a piece channel the spirit of the person who wrote it. What is being communicated is not always just the raw parsing of the text but something more, a gestalt of what it meant for the author to be writing that particular kind of thing at that time, in their lives and in history.

"Good writers" are... a matter of taste

by mikestorrent

3/31/2026 at 4:24:21 AM

But Kerouac didn't just crap his thoughts onto the page.

He edited his work heavily to achieve just the stream of consciousness feel he wanted.

by deanishe

3/30/2026 at 5:41:04 PM

"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special"

- the article, clearly expressing the intent of its own mistakes and contextualizing them in the era of LLM-borne "perfect" text

by ianseyer

3/30/2026 at 8:16:17 PM

"I think that is the beauty of writing, the raw , unedited emotions of the person behind every words either for entertainment or educational purposes, is what makes it special"

This is not the beauty of writing. Everyone's writing needs editing. The "raw unedited emotions" are not something anyone wants to read, and this article is no exception.

The author tells us that English is their fourth language, which is certainly impressive. However their writing is messy and poorly constructed. It's difficult to read, and not at all enjoyable. The choice is not between doggerel like this, and LLM empty perfection.

by plasticeagle

3/30/2026 at 9:10:25 PM

I feel like French must be their first !

by projektfu

3/30/2026 at 6:00:44 PM

I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).

I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enjoy stream-of-consciousness poetry or unhinged personal blog posts. It's fine.

But most of us (I think) read for our own gain, expecting substantial / stimulating text that is ideally well researched and serves a clear purpose.

Something like that needs an editor, effective proofreading, and quite some time of work and rework.

by boca_honey

3/30/2026 at 6:09:44 PM

At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I actually feel reassured when I see something like a "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely influenced by the author's thoughts.

Five years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by the same.

by tadfisher

3/30/2026 at 11:53:47 PM

An editor's role is not fixing typos and grammar (that's the proofreader's job). The editor helps you order your thoughts, pointing out inconsistencies, redundancies, or general lapses in reasoning. When I talk about "unedited," I meant without a clear point, repetitive, unreferenced, etc, etc.

I have nothing against LLMs for proofreading. I'm actually using one now to fix my grammar because English is my second language. I won't let it change my points, though... it's just for cleaning up without having to spend 3x the time on a comment, editing out minor mistakes.

I'm aware this might make my posts feel less natural, but I think it's a good middle ground.

by boca_honey

3/30/2026 at 9:17:03 PM

> why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).

This is a specifically funny question because every Masaokis video is better than every MrBeast video

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OERZ8Pqs9iU

by jrflowers

3/30/2026 at 10:09:01 PM

Here's a possibly fun topic to navel gaze on...

Compare thoughts on this notion of AI and authenticity in writing to the way things like auto-tuners and sequencers have been perceived in the music world.

Like there are some esoteric corners of the Jazz space where musicians seem to try to emulate a sequencing machine and play perfect notes, will there be writers trying to emulate the clean AI performance? :-/

by saltcured

3/30/2026 at 7:14:14 PM

While I can get behind the sentiment I hope bad writing doesn't become the standard for anti AI. A simple grammar check would have greatly improved this post.

by ollysb

3/30/2026 at 7:48:07 PM

AI has plenty of training data on poor writing. If people start looking for bad grammar and typos to identify human articles, generative AI is certainly capable of spitting out prose that looks poorly edited.

I kind of hope the anti-AI-writing stuff passes and we can focus on what makes writing good or bad again instead of “this is clearly AI” posted in response to every blog. I actually don’t care if it’s AI but I do care if it’s worth reading and pleasant to read.

by dpark

3/31/2026 at 4:22:04 AM

When most of the AI written blog posts are just written via a "write a blog post about X" prompt. I don't see any value in reading any of it. If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks of a given subject I'd just ask it directly.

by JDups

3/30/2026 at 9:10:00 PM

> I actually don’t care if it’s AI but I do care if it’s worth reading and pleasant to read

I do care if it's AI. It makes it automatically not worth reading imo

by bluefirebrand

3/31/2026 at 1:12:28 AM

Seemed like satire to me. The author is pretty intentionally oblivious, and even suggests that other people see flaws in their writing that they don’t see. Also, the most egregious errors are right after comments about grammar and such.

by prewett

3/31/2026 at 3:32:38 AM

Writing is editing.

by throw4847285

3/30/2026 at 6:08:44 PM

The relative value of those things are shifting. As the cost of polished LLM drivel falls to zero, some might prefer even the most unedited, off-the-cuff human writing to the slop.

by kristjansson

3/31/2026 at 3:32:03 AM

I have stopped spell checking, grammar checking, and generally doing a lot of editing of my writing so that it feels more authentic. I have also had to give up my habit of prolific use of emdashes.

by trollbridge

3/30/2026 at 7:36:42 PM

What if the reality is that both are worthless? LLM slop is of no value, but human slop doesn’t gain value because fingers typed it.

by alex43578

3/31/2026 at 2:21:18 AM

It depends on the purpose of the reader. I can learn a technical topic from an LLM but not what another person genuinely thinks. I certainly can't convince it of anything nor befriend it.

by fc417fc802

3/30/2026 at 7:57:33 PM

I mean there's lots of room at the bottom. but part of the reason LLM slop seems to me so objectionable is its sameness; it's obviously drawn from the same thin manifold of the language. A human articulating their own thoughts, however those may be rendered on the page, at least realizes their own idiosyncratic region of the language. Writing one's own thoughts in one's own words declares the existence of one's own language, consonant with but distinct from all the others. Asserting one's individual voice and style, even if the content is worthless and the aesthetics objectionable maintains diversity in face of the LLM monoculture. We lament the lost apples, even the bitter ones; we don't ask the birds to each justify their differences.

by kristjansson

3/30/2026 at 7:20:59 PM

Indeed. I for one enjoyed this piece. Yes, it had errors and lots of odd grammatical choices, but the reading remained affordably challenging and the prose had a newness to it.

by dsign

3/30/2026 at 6:45:25 PM

[flagged]

by balkanist

3/30/2026 at 4:38:13 PM

What does it say about me that when I run my writing through one of those "detect if AI" tools I seldom see a value of less than 70% confidence that the writing was AI generated?

by aidenn0

3/30/2026 at 4:48:10 PM

I know this is a spicy take, but it probably just means you're more eloquent in your writing than most netizens...

And that's not really a hard bar to clear if you look at how people write comments online (including places like GitHub).

Anyone that uses punctuation, and capitalises words, probably automatically gets past the 70% confidence line.

by spoiler

3/30/2026 at 7:22:53 PM

It baffles me when I see ostensibly smart people refusing to click shift. Especially programmers. I know you can do it! I've seen you use curly brackets!

by podgietaru

3/30/2026 at 7:32:11 PM

AI detectors don't work.

by charlieflowers

3/30/2026 at 6:45:53 PM

What it says (and this fact is not popular around here) is that you write better than the average person.

by bluebarbet

3/30/2026 at 5:18:17 PM

Simple: The derived variance in your word usage and sequences, is outside the mean distribution range, that would be labeled as AI generated, given this specific evaluation algorithm

It’s not nondeterministic

you can probably do the shannon entropy calculation yourself if you understand what the evaluation algorithm is

That said…if the evaluator is non-deterministic, then there’s no value in the estimate anyway

by AndrewKemendo

3/30/2026 at 4:45:21 PM

It probably means that your writing stylistically is close to the vector-space average of "good" writing, which is what AI produces.

FWIW, your comment history here does not look like AI at all to me, and I think I have a very (maybe too?) high sensitivity to AI slop.

by rogerrogerr

3/30/2026 at 4:59:36 PM

I haven't tried my HN comments; I've only tried things spanning more than a few sentences and that I've put more effort into. I only discovered this when my son put an e-mail I wrote to his teacher that he was CC'd on into the tool on his school iPad.

by aidenn0

3/30/2026 at 5:20:00 PM

have you tried pangram? it's basically the only good AI detector, and they have nearly 0 false positives

by crthpl

3/30/2026 at 5:44:21 PM

> and they have nearly 0 false positives

I really don't see how this can be possible unless they're accepting abysmal recall? Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental here, but the idea that AI and non-AI assisted text can be separated with "nearly 0 false positives" just says to me that it's really just a filter for the weakest, most obvious AI generated text. Is that valuable?

by ttamslam

3/30/2026 at 7:38:58 PM

Pangram's explicit pitch is extremely low false positives, accepting that a higher rate of false negatives is acceptable.

by levocardia

3/30/2026 at 4:45:41 PM

try it with something published before 2022. do you still get the same results?

I really doubt those tools are good for anything

by ilogik

3/30/2026 at 4:49:29 PM

about you? not much. but i wouldnt spin up a blog, or even longer comments here, if you want to keep your sanity.

the amount of "that is obvious ai slop" comments i see on mine or other people's genuine non-ai writing has discouraged me from sharing anything more than roughly a paragraph for probably the rest of my life.

by john_strinlai

3/30/2026 at 7:39:58 AM

This is exactly same struggle for me. Writing technical content about PostgreSQL and balancing my voice without sounding like LLM written is genuinely difficult.

As English is not my first language, I do run into problem where the line between fix my clumsy sentence and rewrite my thought is very thin. Same with writing "boring" technical explanation and more approachable content. I'm getting pushed back for both.

by radimm

3/30/2026 at 4:55:08 PM

I’ll take a clumsy sentence written by a non-native speaker any day over LLM generated mush. At least I know you chose those words specifically so it gives me some insight into your state of mind and intended meaning.

Any native English speaker who doesn’t live under a rock is very accustomed to reading and hearing English from non-native speakers and familiar with the common quirks and mistakes. English is quite forgiving as a language, we understand you. When in doubt, simplify it.

by nkrisc

3/30/2026 at 5:46:11 PM

> English is quite forgiving as a language

it's a couple mutually-conflicting languages in a trenchcoat; forgiveness and flexibility are perhaps its defining properties.

To the broader issue: "polish" (in any language) is only valuable insofar as it makes the ideas clearer, attests to innate qualities of the author and/or the investment of their time, or carries its own aesthetic value. As LLMs make (a certain kind of polish) cheap to produce, the value of the middle category attenuates to nothing.

by kristjansson

3/30/2026 at 8:40:41 AM

In some specific work contexts, such as writing pull request descriptions, not sounding like AI is something I've given up on trying to optimize. It's simply not worth the effort for me being non-native and writing detailed PR descriptions being so arduous, and the agent already has full context anyway. Obviously any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out but I don't care anymore about the AI voice.

by rane

3/30/2026 at 5:49:38 PM

> any fluff or inaccuracies are aggressively weeded out

this work is paramount. Without clear evidence of human filtering, a long, well formatted message/PR/doc is likely to reduce my estimate of the value/veracity/relevance of its content.

by kristjansson

3/30/2026 at 4:48:57 PM

This. My personal style have always been llm-like, including the generous use of em-dashes, and "not-only-this-that" style mannerisms. It' increasingly difficult to retain reputation.

by voxleone

3/30/2026 at 7:55:48 AM

Don't want to sound like an llm? Don't read llm content. Remove yourself from places where you might be liable to read it.

by asdff

3/30/2026 at 10:04:47 AM

If you strictly read printed books only and am never exposed to online content, you'd think em-dash is a signal for human writing.

by raincole

3/30/2026 at 10:26:14 AM

No you'd not think that. The thought of something not being human written didn't even occur to anyone before decent LLMs came around.

by KeplerBoy

3/30/2026 at 8:19:04 AM

It's not that simple. LLMs were trained on lots of writing, and the "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.

For years, even before LLMs, there have been trends of varied popularity to, for lack of a better word, regress - intentionally omitting capitalization, punctuation, or other important details which convey meaning. I rejected those, and likewise I reject the call to omit the emdash or otherwise alter my own manner of speaking - a manner cultivated through 30+ years of reading and writing English text.

If content is intellectually lacking, call that out, but I am absolutely sick of people calling out writing because they "think it's LLM-written". I'm sick of review tools giving false positives and calling students' work "AI written" because they used eloquent words instead of Up Goer Five[0] vocabulary.

I am just as afraid of a society where we all dumb ourselves down to not appear as machines as I am of one where machine-generated spam overtakes all human messaging.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1133/

by Arainach

3/30/2026 at 8:40:54 AM

Well that isn't what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting people ditch x. Reddit. Probably also ditch hn in the next couple months. If you can run a headless agent to post somewhere, just don't bother visiting that site, honestly a great rule of thumb right there.

That should leave you with media sources like nyt and your local library, which seems healthier to me. And maybe it might encourage a new type of forum to emerge where there is some decentralized vetting that you are a human, like verifying by inputting the random hash posted outside the local maker space.

by asdff

3/30/2026 at 10:10:10 AM

On HN o Reddit you can occasionally read genuine opinions from real people. On newspaper 100% of text is trying to manipulate you.

by raincole

3/30/2026 at 9:10:43 AM

> like nyt

I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.

by jcgrillo

3/30/2026 at 10:03:55 AM

The bad part is that people may start writing a bit worse on purpose, just so they don't get read as AI.

by annie511266728

3/30/2026 at 9:27:12 AM

> "LLM voice" resembles in many ways good English prose, or at least effective public communications voice.

It does not resembles that. It is usually grammatically correct writing, but it is also pretty ineffective writing bad writing with good gramar.

by watwut

3/31/2026 at 2:13:38 AM

i think it depends on what is meant by "good" or "bad". llmism may not be substantive writing, but it's approachable writing. a McDonald's lunch of familiar prose with likewise nationwide popularity and nutritional value.

by enmerkar

3/30/2026 at 4:46:20 PM

One of the most common criticisms is the use of the emdash. This is a classic bit of English prose that is not problematic except as a stereotype used to dismiss writing for form rather than for content.

Let's grab a few books off the shelf (literally).

Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has four emdashes on the very first page:

> It is also the story of a book, a book called THGTTG - not an Earth book, never...

Isaac Asimov's classic The Last Question: three emdashes on the first page (as printed in The Complete Stories, Volume I)

> ...they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves: Three emdashes on page 1

> Much like its subject, The Navidson Record itself is also uneasily contained -- whether by category or lection.

Robert Caro, Master of the Senate: Five emdashes on page one

> Its drab tan damask walls...were unrelieved by even a single touch of color -- no painting, no mural -- or, seemingly, by any other ornament

Other pages 1s:

* Murakami - 1Q84: 1

* Murray/Cox - Apollo: 1

* Meadows - Thinking in Systems: 1

* Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear/Volokhonsky translation): 4

* Caro - The Power Broker: 5

* Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach - 3

Honestly, when I started this post I expected to have to dig deeper than page 1. The emdash is an important part of English-language literature and I reject the claim that we should ignore all writing that contains it.

by Arainach

3/30/2026 at 6:05:02 PM

No one is asking that we reject all prose with emdash. Not all emdash-users are LLMs, but many LLMs are profligate emdash-users, so adjust your priors accordingly.

Secondarily, I think there's a part of the discourse missing: the presence of a syntactic emdash in a sentence on the internet is not itself a strong signal of LLM-writing - but the presence of an actual emdash glyph (—) should raise some eyebrows, esp. in fora that aren't commonly authored in rich text editors (here, twitter, ...)

by kristjansson

3/30/2026 at 8:15:47 PM

Before LLMs, the em-dash glyph was a decent tell simply that... the author was using a Mac, because it's a simple and easy-to-remember (or even guess!) key-combo on there. Not that you can't type it on other keyboards, but the Mac one for whatever reason had a combo of users-who-wanted-to-type-it and layout-that-makes-it-easy that resulted in a high proportion of correct em-dash employers being Mac users.

(option-underscore, or option-shift-dash if you prefer to think of it that way)

On iOS, you can type it by simply holding down on the "dash" button then selecting the em-dash from the list of options it presents. It may also correct double-dash to em-dash a lot of the time, not sure.

I have used the correct em-dash everywhere I can for over a decade, which amounts to nearly everywhere.

by genthree

3/30/2026 at 5:25:28 PM

When a drunk chef dumps way too much salt into my ramen, the fact that good ramen also contains (more tastefully applied) salt redeems nothing!

by dematz

3/30/2026 at 1:25:29 PM

I feel like asking it to polish or rewrite is going too far. Using it for a grammar/spell checker or thesaurus is fine, though. At least that preserves ones voice.

And I've definitely used it when I can't remember that one stinking word that I know exists and is perfect for this occasion.

by beej71

3/30/2026 at 5:21:49 PM

> one stinking word

"hey robot give me every word even mildly related to $SOME_SENSE_ON_THE_TIP_OF_MY_TOUNGE" is a wildly satisfying and underrated experience.

by kristjansson

3/31/2026 at 7:17:36 AM

The funny thing I recognized is that I don’t care posting what AI created. It is something someone did and if it meets certain criteria I post it - but extremely rarely and not on HN.

On the other hand I am way stricter and harder on myself when writing.

This is something I observed for example.

I don’t use AI for writing. Since I mainly read classics regarding belletristic I don’t fear being served AI generated content.

I still don’t see why or even how to write with AI creating large bodies of text like a book for example.

It is like ghost writing. In the best case it is good one, but style changes due to LLM model changes can kill a book because the tone suddenly is a totally different one.

by _the_inflator

3/30/2026 at 8:05:18 PM

> And for people who successfully taken back their creative writing skills, how did you do it?

“AI is one possible reference for my actual writing”. Generate info and perspectives, but only ever write stuff yourself. Something about this for me forces me to stay in my own “”writing voice”, at least personally, for the various places I use AI tech in. I think of the tech as a chess engine; they are better than any human player but I use them to help me gain perspective rather than cheat. Otherwise, why bother playing chess?

by malwrar

3/30/2026 at 10:20:02 AM

If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do either atrophies. You'll become dependent on outsourcing for both.

You're trading ability and competence for convenience.

by heavyset_go

3/30/2026 at 5:12:32 PM

For some reason I read that as "If you outsource your thinking and skills, your ability to do apostrophes."

by tonyedgecombe

3/30/2026 at 7:25:07 PM

I am definitely missing the pre-AI w̶r̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ era

by Ancalagon

3/30/2026 at 8:20:29 AM

I never use an LLM to paraphrase my own voice as a matter of principle, but I’ve still been repeatedly accused of doing so because I happen to always have written structured posts, used “smart quotes,” and done that negative comparison thing (it’s genuinely not just fluff, it’s a genuinely useful way to— ah god damn it). Sigh.

by thepasch

3/30/2026 at 11:01:25 AM

Right. The LLMs' quirks aren't bad in themselves, they're bad when they're in every damn paragraph. They're mostly things that in moderation actually improve writing, and that if you see them once (without the knowledge that they're things LLMs do) would rightly tend to make you think better of the author. And so, of course, in RLHF training they get rewarded, and unfortunately it's not so easy for an LLM to learn "it's good to do this thing a bit but not too much.

The structured thing you mention is the one that bugs me most. I genuinely think that most human writing would be improved by having more of the "signposts" that LLMs overuse. Headings, context-setting sentences, bullet points where appropriate, etc. I was doing "list of bullet points with boldfaced intro for each one" before the LLMs were. But because the LLMs are saturating their writing with it, we'll all learn to take it as a sign of glib superficiality and inauthenticity, and typical good human writing will start avoiding everything of that kind, and therefore get that little bit harder to read. Alas.

by gjm11

3/30/2026 at 1:31:13 PM

I refuse to cater to the "em dashes are AI" crowd.

And I was just noticing that my home-built blog render pipeline produces dumb quotes and that was embarrassing to me. Needs to be fixed.

(Counterpoint, dumb quotes are 7-bit clean and paste nicely... Hmm.)

by beej71

3/30/2026 at 9:12:28 AM

I feel ya. I've never been accused of using an LLM, fortunately, but depending on the context I do use “smart quotes” (even in „Dutch” or »German«) and the em-dash obviously… (And that ellips fella there. It's just so simple to type with a compose key set up.)

by Freak_NL

3/30/2026 at 4:51:34 PM

I thought the guillemet was French rather than German and the other way around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Summary_table

by shagie

3/30/2026 at 5:22:17 PM

German uses both kinds depending on the style and writer's preference. French has the guillemets the other way around.

(That Wikipedia table shows that too by the way.)

by Freak_NL

3/30/2026 at 6:14:32 PM

It's absolutely shocking how many people think that inverting all the quality metrics that we've traditionally used "because LLMs" will lead to good things. Nothing about this will end well.

by tomku

3/30/2026 at 9:10:13 AM

Same here, I've always used em dashes and have been called out on negative comparisons – I didn't even know they were an LLM thing. Should I read more LLM to know what phraseology to avoid, or will doing that nudge me towards sounding more LLM? :-(

by internet_points

3/30/2026 at 4:48:59 PM

I am not a native speaker, for anything like HN comments I don't use AI, but I see no harm in using AI in correcting grammar and maybe some wording, but the ultimate change shouldn't be a copy-paste replacement, it should be well thought through by the author.

by nikitadotla

3/30/2026 at 8:02:12 PM

I certainly miss the pre-AI reading era.

So much content is just straight copy/pasted from the LLM now. Articles, blog posts, linked in posts, reddit comments, etc. Even just using the LLM for 'editing' tends to shift the voice to an obvious LLM voice when used naively. It is getting worse too. Last week a co-worker sent me a screenshot of Claude for me to review their "work", which was just whatever Claude made up.

Usually, if something is very obviously unfiltered LLM output, I just stop reading.

I do use LLMs for writing myself. They are useful, but are poor authors.

by time0ut

3/30/2026 at 9:49:36 AM

Are grammatical errors and typos fashionable now? Reading this post it seems the anti-thesis in the LLM era is not to edit at all, but rather write down a stream of consciousness to make it "personal".

by stabbles

3/30/2026 at 4:41:19 PM

I've started letting some run on sentences remain because it feels closer to how humans think and usually write. Letting typos go seems silly though.

by chorkpop

3/30/2026 at 9:51:46 AM

Definitely think it is. It will be glorious. We will focus more on content than on just aesthetic as people try to signal that they are not llm

by simianwords

3/30/2026 at 11:17:59 AM

I feel like having to signal that you're a human detracts from the content side of things. Proper spelling and grammar, good style etc. are there to help you convey your ideas more accurately. Resorting to a stream of consciousness style of unrefined writing makes it apparent that you're a human, but the downside is that your text is bad.

by fleebee

3/30/2026 at 2:40:55 PM

Style is entirely subjective, and not every text is looking for a refined reader.

by ikr678

3/30/2026 at 10:50:51 AM

Oh no, I have had enough of people with quirky (i.e. cringey) writing on the internet. It started with those who refused to use their shift key and it's quickly devolving into something that makes you shiver when you read it. (Not to mention how easy it is to use a system prompt to make an AI write in whatever style you like.)

by nslsm

3/30/2026 at 7:11:27 PM

Flaw become aesthetic all time. People faked butt bandage follow Sun King fashion. Ugly as sin, still aesthetic.

by mandolingual

3/30/2026 at 8:14:58 PM

lol

by simianwords

3/30/2026 at 9:20:04 PM

Kurzgesagt typically does STEM focused videos... they've got a new channel "After Dark" which focuses on history and historical figures. Their first one: Kurzgesagt After Dark The Final Days of Louis XIV - https://youtu.be/bIwX4QuL90k?si=9WLbzKqxo08KCDum&t=564

> And though the operation was done in secret, a new fashion sweeps the court: Bandages wrapped around everyone’s buttocks.

by shagie

3/30/2026 at 11:53:00 AM

I see loads of LLM articles where it's been prompted to never capitalise, avoid full stops, pepper in spelling mistakes, etc. it sucks.

by rozab

3/30/2026 at 1:20:30 PM

When writing letters of recommendation now, I write in a more human tone to avoid sounding like a bot with a line of explanation at the start. Not an error in the sense you mean, but an error in tone for a letter of recommendation, certainly.

by beej71

3/30/2026 at 5:13:31 PM

I don't know but capitalisation seems to have gone down the shitter.

by tonyedgecombe

3/30/2026 at 10:11:59 AM

Maybe it is.

Just like hand made items are popular for their imperfections.

by GuB-42

3/30/2026 at 11:25:35 AM

An awful lot of stuff in the "hand made" aesthetic are made by machine and factory too, and I suspect a similar thing will happen to any popular writing aesthetic that attempts to avoid being automated away.

Personally, I'll just continue to use my own voice. I try to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, and proof-read my writing before posting.

It's not perfect, and my writing can at times be idiosyncratic, but it's my voice and it's all I've got left.

But don't be mistaken in thinking that those mistakes make it better, it just makes it mine.

by xnorswap

3/30/2026 at 10:02:54 AM

I mean yes? I am more likely to read and trust something that is not written or cowritten by ai.

I want real humans giving real human opinions not ai giving their best opinion on what is the most "rewarding" weighted opinion

by jofzar

3/31/2026 at 1:01:47 AM

I appreciate not having to read this guy again.

by xianshou

3/30/2026 at 6:34:09 PM

I miss the text only reading era. This is a blog and should not need to have JavaScript enabled to render text to a page. I would rather not have to be annoyed by flavor of the month duplicate scroll bars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups 5 seconds in, scroll to the top pop-ups, idle overlays, highlight helper bars that break copy paste, etc. This blog didn't have all of those but had some. I'm sure the metrics look great because I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript and realizing it doesn't load anything at all. A third time re-enabling JavaScript and then deleting all the annoying elements, and then a fourth time to make sure my cosmetic filter is applied correctly. 4x the interactions! Must be doing something right.

by jhhh

3/30/2026 at 7:29:24 PM

I appreciate the sentiment, but this remark is far too common here. It does not address the content of the post and could apply to any submission from LessWrong. The author of the post has made none of those technical choices.

by kohllision

3/30/2026 at 8:05:16 PM

Funny, I assumed it was a subtle critique of how change always elicits haters. Though now I realize it was an honest non-sequiter to complain about his pet issue?

Honestly not sure anymore.

by narcindin

3/30/2026 at 8:28:47 PM

You are not alone! There is in fact a whole dedicated rule about this on hn:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Clearly doesn't really move the needle much but sometimes it helps to tap the sign at people.

Charitably, we are all on our own timelines of getting to HTML zen, and its hard not to shout from the rooftops when it clicks for you and you have your plain text RSS setup on Gnus all chugging along nicely.

by beepbooptheory

3/30/2026 at 11:59:21 PM

Agreed. When I redid my portfolio site recently, I specifically sought out a static site generator that wouldn't require JS, and picked a basic no-frills prebuilt theme. But I found out the theme didn't handle disabled JS gracefully.

The fussiest part of the whole site setup was getting light/dark mode to work in what I thought was the most obvious way. To me, if a website has light and dark modes, it should default the user's device's preferred color scheme, and as an added bonus for users with JS enabled, you might also have a toggle button. But by default, the theme just started in light mode no matter what until you clicked the toggle button, and they also didn't bother to make the button hidden if JS is disabled.

Same with the button for the built-in search feature; it would be visible even if it couldn't work. It's not that it was terribly hard to modify the theme and fix this – add `class="nojs"` to the body HTML, add a JS one-liner to remove nojs, and add a CSS rule to hide the buttons if they're inside `body.nojs`. It was just disheartening to see that this was the theme's default. Anyone making a website these days has to make extra effort to support what should be considered normal browser behavior.

by hayleox

3/30/2026 at 10:58:36 PM

I long for the days of hand written scrolls. Fresh papyrus adorned with the latest calligraphy and stamped with a warm wax seal…

by nyfresh

3/30/2026 at 7:09:19 PM

> I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript

Had to?

by lelandfe

3/30/2026 at 7:21:22 PM

They gave enough detail that its clear from context what 'had to' meant.

by burnished

3/30/2026 at 6:07:49 PM

Every now and then when I'm reading something, the writer will use a turn of phrase, a specific word, a metaphor, etc, that is unusually clever, or allows me to see the concept in some obtuse light. Or even, they are just able to choose the right words to make something sound musical or rhythmic in some pleasant way. It's intellectually delightful to come across these in writing.

I've never been surprised at AI writing. Emotion the biggest part of communication and these grey boxes have none.

by mlsu

3/31/2026 at 4:08:27 AM

the typos-as-authenticity thing is kind of funny because AI can just be told to write with typos. the real signal was never the errors, it was always whether the ideas feel like someone actually thought them.

by vicchenai

3/30/2026 at 8:34:19 AM

I have been writing stuff for a long time; my first internet experience was posting on forums about a Gameboy Advance game. Then in other forums, for a philosophy degree, and professionally as a copywriter and technical writer. I’ve been meaning to write up a post of my thoughts on writing and AI, but there things I’ve been thinking recently are:

1. There was a lot of slop pre-AI. In fact I’d say the majority of published writing was bad, formulaic, and just written to manipulate your emotions. So in some sense, I don’t really think pre-AI slop had more value. It’s just cheaper to make now.

2. AI has prompted me to study more off-beat writers that followed the rules of language a little less frequently. This includes a lot of people from circa 1890-1970, when experimenting with form was really in vogue.

3. Which brings me to my third point, which is that no matter how much the AI actually knows about writing, the person prompting it is limited by their own education and knowledge of writers. You can’t say, “make me a post in the style of Burroughs” if you don’t know who Burroughs was, or what his writing style was. So in a sense there is an increased importance to being educated about writing itself. Without it you’re limited in your ability to use AIs to write stuff and in your awareness of how much your non-AI written work is influenced by AI writing.

by keiferski

3/30/2026 at 5:54:16 PM

>Although 80 % of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run in a LLM enginee for grammar and vocabulary cross-check, made it failed the "probable written by AI " metric; and it was rejected.

should be:

>Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI" metric, and it was rejected.

  1. 80 % -> 80%
  2. in -> through
  3. a LLM -> an LLM
  4. enginee -> engine
  5. cross-check -> cross-checking
  6. cross-checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma)
  7. made it failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word "made")
  8. probable -> probably
  9. by AI " -> by AI"
  10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the clauses)
That's ten corrections that are fixing straightforward typos and/or grammar and vocab mistakes in one sentence. Most are fairly objective, though I can understand different opinions on 2, 7, or maybe 10.

Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially when you were told not to use any AI!) to edit for a while. Given that English is not your first (or even second or third) language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with French prepositions.

by viccis

3/30/2026 at 7:40:36 PM

Typos and minor grammatical errors within a well-reasoned piece are aesthetic now, means you didn't run it through an LLM...

by levocardia

3/31/2026 at 1:55:16 AM

This is 2000s era middle school level English or below. I get not stressing things like judicious use of parentheticals and comma splicing, but if it's just stream of consciousness motor mouthing run on sentences, it gets fatiguing to read.

by viccis

3/31/2026 at 1:26:47 AM

[flagged]

by wowwbro

3/31/2026 at 1:52:47 AM

Elaborate

by viccis

3/30/2026 at 11:57:52 PM

Relevant to the headline, though less relevant to the actual article, I miss the pre-AI youtube era. I search for educational videos for my kids and videos that are from the last couple years are likely AI slop. Some are pure slop, just terrible. Others are also slop (no visible narrator, pronunciation mistakes an AI would make, repeating stock footage) but are actually well done enough to be educational. However, I don't want my kids watching these even if they are educational because it could lead them to think that the style of video is not bad. I want them to have an attuned radar to that kind of junk.

For now, I just keep scrolling until I find something from before 2020, which is much more likely to be purely human-made and edited.

by apparent

3/30/2026 at 1:55:51 PM

I've been a Grammarly customer for quite some time, and I have tried the AI suggestions, but it always loses something and ends up with a whiny, apologetic tone.

AI always seems so verbose and wordy.

by CrzyLngPwd

3/30/2026 at 10:35:55 AM

I think that AI will accelerate an already existing trend that pre dates AI meaning the global regression to the mean we're seeing in any creative field, from design to videogames, from cars to fashion.

by epolanski

3/30/2026 at 1:27:32 PM

Agree. This also ties into the hypothesis that we're hitting a local maximum in terms of the state of the art in creativity as we offload that work.

by beej71

3/30/2026 at 4:56:37 PM

I find this similar to when photography was invented and painters moved away from realism trying to find originality and creativity and they produced modern art which for many of us just looks silly.

by MyHonestOpinon

3/30/2026 at 6:20:21 PM

The first sentence makes no sense.

by zwischenzug

3/30/2026 at 8:34:15 AM

Are there any good writing LLMs out there?

I get that the mainstream ones have been RLHF'd to death, but surely there must be others that are capable?

by amelius

3/30/2026 at 8:51:09 AM

https://hemingwayapp.com/ gives you advice about your writing.

This is called Hemingway because he was apparently good at communicating efficiently which made him a popular author.

by shaoner

3/30/2026 at 10:18:00 AM

What happens if you take the output of a mainstream LLM and send it through this app? Would that solve the issue of the original article?

by amelius

3/30/2026 at 12:52:12 PM

This is an interface, not an LLM. Do they say which LLM they use? Many of these are interfaces to one of the big three model providers. Others run through OpenRouter to use one of the better open models, all of which have their own quirks.

by Kye

3/30/2026 at 8:40:04 AM

Can't you just... not do this?

I never passed any AI writing as my own. I would feel utterly awful. Also, I love tweaking words until they sound perfect.

The number of people who just nonchalantly admit that AI writes their messages is honestly scaring me.

by bananaflag

3/31/2026 at 5:00:32 AM

same here , the thought process required while coding is getting dead

by maneprajakta

3/30/2026 at 10:01:38 AM

It’s largely a problem of how these tools are packaged, but while it’s certainly nice to have an LLM check your spelling, or review your grammar or style or usage, you should never allow them to actually edit your document directly.

First of all, they will make substantive changes you didn’t intend. The meaning will get changed, errors will be introduced. Tone will be off, and as the author says, your voice will disappear. There is no single “correct” way to write something. And voice and tone are conveyed with grammatical and usage variation. Don’t give that up to a robotic average.

Secondly, you will never improve, or even maintain, your own writing skills if you don’t actively engage with the suggested changes. You also won’t fully realize half the purpose of writing, which is to understand the topic better yourself. Doing the work of editing your piece will help you understand the subject even better. If you just let the machine “fix” your errors, you’ll become a worse writer and less of an expert over time.

by skywhopper

3/30/2026 at 5:14:55 PM

I am sorry but perhaps some use of AI or grammar-check would help? A lawn that's not overly manicured has its charm, but if it has one too many barren patches of clumps of overgrown grass, it doesn't appeal as much? This essay feels a bit like that.

by ChaitanyaSai

3/31/2026 at 12:23:31 AM

I start feeling this for coding.

I didn't expect AI to write 95%+ of my code, but here we are.

I can't say whether I feel worried or not. I am trying now to gamify manual coding by having to review and edit a random file from my work codebases a day and still do occasional leetcodes and katas.

But overall I enjoy coding less for sure. I can't think of the last time I spent heavy time focusing on a refactor or lower level design abstractions.

I don't think I will be still coding 5 years from now. The joy is just not there.

by epolanski

3/30/2026 at 10:34:03 PM

Also the pre-video audio era

by ahhhok

3/30/2026 at 6:38:55 PM

I'd push back on the author and ask him really if his writing is getting worse or his standards have increased, leading to undue stress that might throw the flow state off.

by joemazerino

3/30/2026 at 5:44:13 PM

Once I think something is AI I just can’t read it anymore. It isn’t out of principle or anything, I just become so distracted by the idea that I can’t focus or derive any benefit or pleasure from continuing.

by nsxwolf

3/30/2026 at 3:29:07 PM

For the most part, AI writing is pretty bad. It reads like a highschool kid trying to hit a minimum word requirement.

by josefritzishere

3/30/2026 at 4:34:34 PM

> It means, I passed the text.

Ha. Well I guess you did, _this time_.

Can we not just ask an AI to correct our spelling mistakes and leave the rest alone?

by kerblang

3/31/2026 at 1:58:54 AM

mood

by boxedemp

3/30/2026 at 7:33:38 AM

Yeah, now it's "Here's what nobody else talks about" and "Here's the kicker" all day long.

by pypt

3/30/2026 at 8:27:09 AM

> This post, is written without any tools assistance I just wrote what my brain is instructing to type (might not reread it before posting).

How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it?

(Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)

by andai

3/30/2026 at 9:00:18 AM

Because they're self-aware perfectionists and are actively working to stop it, because they reach for all kinds of tools like grammar checkers and AI, but they're aware that using those will make the post lose "their" voice, or the human element of the post.

And that's, I think, a valid choice; you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry? That's for formal writing, and blog posts are not formal.

by Cthulhu_

3/30/2026 at 10:03:02 AM

Reading what you write for editing does not make a text lose your voice. If anything, it amplifies it, you get to ensure that what you intended to say was said.

Not reading what you write smells more like laziness.

Same thing for spell checks, grammar checks, and even AI usage. If you use things lazily, the result will be lazy as well.

Instead of asking for an AI tool to write your thoughts in your place, you can write it yourself and ask it to criticize your text, instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.

But that of course would require more work. Asking ChatGPT to produce a text based on a lazily written, bullet point list of brainfarts is probably easier.

by surgical_fire

3/30/2026 at 11:33:41 AM

Great! That's a good thing. Embrace being human sometimes.

Plus, "lazy" would actually be just using AI to edit the writing.

by jychang

3/30/2026 at 12:51:03 PM

> instruct it to not rewrite anything, only give you an overall picture of text clarity, sentiment, etc.

LLM cant really do that. It can help you produce correct sentence where you struggle to create own, but it does not have capabilities to do what you suggest.

by watwut

3/30/2026 at 5:14:04 PM

It sounds like you haven't tried.

LLMs definitely can do this. The output tends to be overly positive though, claiming that any sort of rough draft you give them is "great, almost ready for publishing!". But the feedback you can get on clarity, narrative flow, weak spots... _is_ usually pretty good.

Now, following that feedback to the letter is going to end up with a diluted message and boring voice, so it's up to you to do with the feedback whatever you think best.

by jmmv

3/30/2026 at 8:34:28 PM

Btw, this is precisely what I implied.

I never ask the LLM to evaluate my text in terms of being good or bad. Instead I try something like this:

"In this section I tried to explain X, I intended to sound in Y and Z fashion, and I want a reader to come out with ateast W impression. Is the text achieving these goals? Do I communicate my ideas clearly and consisely, or are they too confuse and meandering?"

I typically get useful feedback. I preface specifically asking it to not rewrite, simply pointing the bits that it finds faulty and explaining why.

Of course the prompt is different is I am writing, for example, technical documentation, or if it is an attempt at creative writing.

by surgical_fire

3/30/2026 at 1:44:41 PM

What? LLMs are very capable of doing sentiment analysis. Hell, it's basically one of the things it actually excels at - understanding tone, nuance, context, etc.

I used it many times for exactly this, with good results. It points out ambiguous contructs, parts that are dissonant from the tone I intend, etc.

I have no idea why you think that LLMs can't do that lol

by surgical_fire

3/30/2026 at 1:58:28 PM

Sentiment analysis for the purpose of categorizing reddit comments, sure. For the purpose of giving you advice about nuance, overall clarity and tone of own long test, no.

by watwut

3/30/2026 at 2:08:17 PM

I tried it myself, and it did actually a good job.

There's nothing magical about a long text you write yourself vs a stream o reddit comments in a thread. It's all sentiment analysis on text. It can extract ambiguity, how ideas are connected in the context, categorize and summarize, etc.

You should try it and see it for yourself. Feed it some large text of a single author and ask it to do those things, see if the results are satisfactory.

by surgical_fire

3/30/2026 at 10:27:28 AM

[dead]

by fallinditch

3/30/2026 at 9:23:31 AM

If you use grammar checker as a grammar checker, it wont make you loose your voice. It will make you use correct grammar.

> you can choose to use all the tools and make something gramatically and stylistically as close to perfect, but who would want to read something as dry

If it is dry, then it is not stylistically perfect. Per definition, dry writing is just an imperfect writing. Stylistically perfect writing does not have to be dry and usually is not dry.

What happens here is that people use "stylistically perfect" when they mean "followed a bad stylistic advice".

by watwut

3/30/2026 at 10:28:04 AM

I see both sides here. Wanting to preserve your natural voice is valid, but editing and using tools don't necessarily take that away. In fact, they can help make your intended message clearer. It probably comes down to how much control you keep over the final result rather than wheater you use tools at all.

by jerukmangga

3/30/2026 at 10:48:41 AM

What annoys me here is that people say "I use AI as style checker to make my writing better" or claim that good writing is unfairly judged as being by AI ... and then proceed to describe inferior writing results they achieved with AI. None of what author wrote there signals that the way he uses AI made his writing better. His use of AI made his output inferior. And not just in a the "loosing own voice" way worst, but literally in the "the final text is less effective writing".

I do not mean this comment to be kick against AI. It is very good for some stuff, it is less good for other stuff. What annoys me is someone calling output superior while actually complaining about it being inferior.

Hey, maybe that llm needs to be used differently to achieve actually good writing results.

by watwut

3/30/2026 at 11:28:55 AM

lose!

by vixen99

3/30/2026 at 9:27:56 AM

There is no reliable way to detect AI writing. It probably trains on texts known to be AI, on texts known to be written by humans, then classify the text according to this training.

The problem is that it has a pretty high false positive rate. Maybe it thinks it's AI because there are absolutely no spelling mistakes. Or maybe you're French and you use latin-roots words in English that are considered "too smart" for the average writer.

And the problem is that people run those tools, see "80% chance to be written by AI", and instead of considering that 20% is high enough to consider you don't know, will assume it's definitely written by AI.

by eloisant

3/30/2026 at 12:35:45 PM

Exactly. Depending on what nutrians I've been consuming, the Indians/intelligence in my head could also be artificial. Perhaps that's why I fail those captcha tests most of the time.

by tosti

3/30/2026 at 8:30:54 AM

What makes you think that? I presume that's just the authors (sarcastic) way to say "beware: may contain typos and grammatical errors".

by whilenot-dev

3/30/2026 at 9:08:39 AM

There are a bunch of typos in there which jar a bit ('deterioted'), but I guess that makes sense for this specific article.

Personally, I would recommend them to simple use any old editor with spellchecking enabled. That suffices for most writing where you just want to keep your own voice. To me, the red crinkly line just means that I should edit that word myself. In the rare case where I'm stumped on the spelling I'll look at the suggested edit of course, but never as a matter of course.

by Freak_NL

3/30/2026 at 11:07:02 AM

The problem here, the overarching issue is that the subject complaint about AI slop is actually a bigger issue that has been plaguing America in particular for many years now, and of which the AI slop era is only a current top. The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.

Computers, digital text, and digital information distribution/transportation have made writing and thoughts cheap. Arguably due to what we are surely all aware of, humans rarely value that which is cheap, whether monetarily or in effort and consequential qualities. What people seem reluctant or maybe unable to acknowledge is that predating the current AI Slop, was what could be called Human Slop, low quality, low effort, careless output that was cheap; regardless of whether AI slop now outperforms.

It is why you are justified in pointing out that even in the post complaining about AI Slop, the human has apparently abandoned what would have been common practice in just the recent past, using basic spellcheckers or simply reviewing what was written and also practicing with deliberation; the art and skill of writing, grammar, and sentence structure.

No one is perfect and that is also what makes anything human, somewhat inexplicable and random variation. However, it takes a certain refinement before unique human character becomes a positive quality and is not just humans being sloppy ... human slop.

by roysting

3/30/2026 at 7:11:03 PM

> The qualities of American writing have clearly been on a precipitous decline for a very long time now, predating AI slop and even spell checkers and computers.

https://www.literaturelust.com/post/what-writers-need-to-kno...

> Every NYT bestseller from 1960 to 2014 falls in the seventh-grade level spread, from 4th to 11th.

> ...

> Since 2000, only 2 bestsellers have scored higher than 9th-grade readability.

> ... ...

> The bestselling authors of our time are writing at the 4th-grade level.

> > “8 books tie for the lowest score,” a 4.4, just above 4th-grade level. Prolific, well-known authors with huge sales: James Patterson, Janet Evonvich, and Nora Roberts.”

> These three authors have written a combined total of 419 books.

by shagie

3/30/2026 at 11:56:02 PM

Whenever I read something from roughly the first half of the 20th century (I'm not sure where the cutoff point is, it seems to the 1960s), I'm struck by the quality of the writing. I'm not sure what happened, but it's pretty clear that at some point we stopped taking ourselves seriously.

We see the same thing in how people dress. People used to write "respectably", and they used to dress the same, and in TV interviews they spoke with great care and deliberation.

Then we threw all of it down the toilet.

by andai

3/30/2026 at 10:01:16 AM

> Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)

Grammarly has seriously started rewriting whole paragraphs recently, I have been having to reject more and more "prompts" where in the past I would accept them almost by default because they actually were Grammer checks.

by jofzar

3/30/2026 at 7:00:30 PM

Yes, these people are so unbelievably stupid that think others more intelligent than them can't tell when they use AI to write their stuff. And then they act so annoyed when they get exposed... It's unbearable.

The article here is still full of AI slop, and so many people in the comments are defending the author. Blows my mind.

by Karuma

3/30/2026 at 8:34:12 AM

[dead]

by emptyfile

3/31/2026 at 12:50:06 AM

I am and I'm not.

Making idiotic churn documents (resumes tailored to job) is perfect LLM churn. They use onerous AI on their side.

Dealing with that dumbass cow-orker? Theyre getting LLM tone.

But writing for HN and Masto? Thats more fun. I'll do it myself.

by mystraline

3/30/2026 at 8:07:19 PM

This writing is terrible. I can't read it. But are people really unable to write without wanting to put it into an LLM? I haven't done a single piece of natural language writing with an LLM. The thought has never even crossed my mind. Why would I? Surely to give the LLM context of whatever I want to write about would amount to, you know, writing it down? Just write that "prompt" in your blog and send it. No need for LLMs.

by globular-toast

3/30/2026 at 6:16:52 PM

wrong, or at least, slightlywrong, but not, lesswrong

you are missing the writing era, which is gone. whatever we have now will slowly congeal into cold grue that will get a name or names

the madness of bieng chastised for speakerphoning and disturbing people gulping the slop

what do we call that?

by metalman

3/30/2026 at 9:29:12 PM

bad English, bad writing, stopped reading fast.

by syngrog66

3/30/2026 at 8:23:11 AM

There is no grandiose "AI era". Or it started like in 1950s already.

What it is going to be is a 'Slop Decade' - a much better label if you insist on having one.

by dude250711

3/30/2026 at 12:20:54 PM

I remember taking a machine learning course in which the instructor explicitly warned us to make wise fiscal decisions, based on the assumption that ML funding follows a hype-driven boom/bust cycle.

"Save during the summers and you'll make it through the winters".

by xtajv

3/30/2026 at 8:25:25 AM

The slop decade will be a slop "rest of humanity." There's no going back from this.

by nusl

3/30/2026 at 10:39:57 AM

I think some spaces will try to retain their value by actively combating LLMs, in the same way they combat hackers and trolls, and if they don't, they'll naturally die.

Several subreddits became AI slop submission repositories and their human engagement dwindled. Some subreddits that were inundated with AI slop implemented policies that ban it, and it seems to work well.

Strict no slop policies work, and surprisingly, so do rules that require AI submissions to be tagged as AI. Forcing slop slingers to tag their slop does a good job at discouraging said slop, it turns out that admitting your slop is slop is embarrassing or something.

by heavyset_go

3/30/2026 at 9:18:39 AM

No technology ever became obsolete?

by missingdays

3/30/2026 at 9:49:14 AM

Oh well, when the most powerful people on the planet manage to enshittify it enough, we'll be freed from AI...

Or maybe there'll be the elite enjoying the world, while the rest of us have to work manual labor. But at least it'll be AI systems ensuring our compliance!

by netsharc

3/31/2026 at 2:10:00 PM

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by noritaka88

3/30/2026 at 10:59:50 AM

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by ghywertelling

3/30/2026 at 7:07:51 PM

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by i18nagentai

3/30/2026 at 8:38:19 PM

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by Copperline-Labs

3/30/2026 at 5:06:18 PM

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by jeremie_strand

3/30/2026 at 8:20:22 AM

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by shyam47

3/30/2026 at 7:15:30 AM

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by nareyko

3/30/2026 at 4:30:30 PM

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by sjdv1982

3/31/2026 at 12:16:19 AM

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by syntheticmind