I don't often use AI to cleanup my texts, but when I do, I fully own the output. I make a conscious decision whether to leave in every AI suggestion or not. The final text _is_ what I want to say.
I find that AI is very useful for getting me past the 'blank page' writing block, but inevitably it writes in ways I would never, and so I end up editing it heavily. But, for me, a boy with ADHD, editing something is infinitely easier than writing it from scratch.
I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writing well, or clearly expressing what I mean... it has been the inertia of putting words on a page at all.
(and an LLM had nothing to do with this comment :P)
I totally agreed with you. I'm French (nobody is perfect ^^), I'm not so fluent in english and I'm dyslexic, that why I often write my message, then I ask to Claude to translate it in english because i'm feeling I will lose the credibility of my message if there is too much mistake...
But you're right, so this message is not translated by LLM :D
I really don't mind text filtered through an LLM per se. But I prefer high signal-to-token so to speak. The way humans talk and write means that the seemingly extraneous text they add often provides an interesting insight into the thought patterns of the person, and therefore mistakes or even pointless monologues can be interesting.
This is not always true. Once there was an online reaction to short content that made people treat "long-form" content as desirable entirely due to its length. I rather like reading books and the New Yorker's fiction section when I still subscribed, but much of this "long-form" content was token-expansion of a formulaic nature which I did not enjoy. LLMs have mastered this kind of long-form token-expansion.
This is assuming people are using an LLM in good faith, obviously. One day, perhaps LLMs will learn to express what someone is saying in an elegant way that is enjoyable for people like me to read. But even then, I will have the difficulty of distinguishing whether this is a human speaking through an LLM in good faith or a human who has set up a machine that is set up to mimic a human.
The latter is undesirable to me because I have access to the best such machines at a remarkably low cost. Were I to desire a conversation with an LLM, it is trivial for me to find one. I'm not coming here for that[0].
A sufficiently insightful LLM which prompts my thinking in certain ways wouldn't be unwelcome to me, I suppose. I have a couple of my friends for whom I still go on Twitter to read what they say even after I have stopped using the site routinely. If I found out the posts were entirely an LLM I think I would still read them simply because I find the posts useful and with sufficiently high signal-to-token.
0: Certainly, if every place only spoke about things I was interested in and never in things I was not interested in, I wouldn't need separation of interest spaces at all. But the variation of interest vectors for different humans has made this impossible.
> The way humans talk and write means that the seemingly extraneous text they add often provides an interesting insight into the thought patterns of the person, and therefore mistakes or even pointless monologues can be interesting.
Yeah, some colleagues started using ChatGPT for internal communication as well. While we don’t like to mandate or prohibit anyone from using any tools, we did need to make it really clear to everyone that this is not productive. Grammarly to make small corrections to external recipients is fine. Using ChatGPT to “polish” your message is not. If you’re not sure about your English abilities, we offer you free English lessons and encourage giving each other feedback during chats.
LLMs shouldn’t be used for communication at all if you want any form of authenticity.
You can take one step ahead and let user write in their own language then you figure out how to make sense of it.
[deleted]
Tbe hard truth is at work there is no authenticity.
Definitely not getting any better if everyone starts using ChatGPT for private communications.
Bad thing X has been happening for a while. Let's all work towards making it worse.
Why play this word game that has nothing to do with their point? I can write an email about TPS reports in my own voice without caring about the subject matter. That's authentic. I care about performing my job well and with individuality and (no pun intended) agency.
This is starting to become my latest pet peeve, people using Claude to write their messages in Slack. I'm going to just stop communicating via text with these people.
It's one thing to have Claude polish a message and another thing for it to write out an entire message.
That’s exactly why I’ve refused to use autocomplete on smartphone keyboards from the very beginning. I want to express myself in my own words.
In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?
And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.
It feels so disrespectful sometimes too, having to read a long paragraph that conveys so little meaning knowing full well the original prompt was probably very short and I'm now wasting extra time parsing the hollow LLM text expansion.
Easy fix: use an LLM to summarize it.
(only half-joking, a part of me fears that this is the reality we’re moving towards)
That's absolutely what's happening already: write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader. At some point it will become clear how absurdly wasteful we're being (right now, we're being paid to ignore that waste).
> write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader.
It's funny though. For computer to computer conversation, we have invented (deflate+inflate) algorithms to save bandwidth, time and money.
On the other hand for human to human communication, we are in the process of inventing a (inflate+deflate) method and at the same time we are spending insane amounts of time, money & bandwidth to make it possible!
We need to come up with a catchy buzzword salad to market to executives. Something like "increased communication efficiency between workers by direct brain-email-brain interface"
Imagine going to work or a social meeting where everyone looks and sounds the same(or just a limited set) all with the same perfect tone, body language and communication style. Sounds like a nightmare and I would find it hard to relate and get that "perspective", when there is nothing to differentiate a person.
I guess everyone using LLMs for text is similar to that. If everyone uses the same LLM style, its hard to understand where the other person is coming from. This is not a problem for technical and precise communication though(the choice of LLMs in that context has other risks).
It is also strictly not an LLM capability problem because they can mimic or retain the original style and just "polish" with enough hints but that takes time, investment and people go through path of least resistance. So, we all end up with similar text with typical AI-isms.
There are other reasons to dislike LLM text like padding and effort asymmetry that have been discussed here enough.
When I wrote a snarky mail to the MD and I couldn’t suppress my anger, Claude did a great job smoothing it out while keeping it pointy.
Once asked Claude to guess what the prompt was that generated a mail.
Didn’t work unfortunately.
I think there was an SMBC comic about this topic, but I don't think I can find it, and the site doesn't exactly make it easy. I don't even remember if it was pre-2020 or not.
It was about how people would get a thing (a robot?) that would repeat whatever they said but in a more fancy way (or something along those lines), to make them sound smarter. Then the people would start depending on these robots to communicate at all, to the point their speech degrades and they start making unintelligible noises that the robots still translate into actual speech.
There are two ways to write an email. One is to keep it short and to the point that so there are obviously no errors, the other is to waffle on and obfuscate the message with an LLM so that the reader's eyes glaze over...or something like that.
In emails...whatever. I can tell it's there but fine whatever, we're just trying to get a message across LLM or otherwise.
But this was the first year I saw it in performance review write-ups which frankly was jarring. Here is feedback supposedly 1:1 that massively affects this person's life and their perception of "worth" so to speak...and it's just AI.
Notably it was split by geography. EU countries closest to organic, india slop trainwreck, US in the middle
Sorta made me conclude "ok i guess that's the end of performance reviews that vaguely mean anything & actually get read"
I use ChatGPT for communication. It started with "please fix typos" and now it's "write me a slack message about this and that". This is mostly an effect of the communication environment we created - taking risks is rarely rewarded, and mistakes can be very costly. Remember, you're always one misunderstood message away from being fired. Of course there are people whom I trust and I'd never offend them with AI-generated slop, but the rest of the humanity - it is what it is, LLMs help me a lot.
> Remember, you're always one misunderstood message away from being fired.
If this is true, you really want to be fired. That is a horrendous work environment, and you should quit if at all possible.
Most workplaces (any certainly any good workplace) will seek to understand, not fire you immediately.
[dead]
> It robs me of getting to know you.
Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. There is a threshold between all that I share with the world and the rest of me. Hell, not every person gets the same picture, and that's deliberate and healthy--my customers don't get to know what my proctologist knows. My mother doesn't get to know what my wife knows.
You don't get to know all of me, because I don't trust you.
This post comes across as sweet, and innocent. It also comes across as absurdly self-entitled, and it's not an OK posture to take towards the world. It's not OK when the police take this posture, it's not OK when private companies take this posture, and it's not OK when strangers on the internet take this posture.
You are entitled to withdraw from relationships that don't fulfill your emotional needs. A reasonable audience for this missive is your girlfriend, your child (who relies on you), or your employer (to whom you are vulnerable).
Weaponised therapy speak is gross. This article was not asking you to spill your life story to every person you meet, it was asking you to speak with your own voice, which is a perfectly normal and in no way entitled thing to be asking.
What are you rambling about? It’s not about your doctor using ChatGPT for his newsletter, it’s about your colleagues using ChatGPT on Slack or email.
I personally think that the people who can’t be bothered to actually write authentic messages, and assume that everyone will just read their word salad full of repetitive AI patterns, are being the ones acting entitled.
It is, because of the baked-in asymmetry. "I couldn't be bothered to write it, but you have to read it". Unless your expectation is that I'm going to have my chatbot summarize the messages from your chatbot, in which case, maybe we should just both ride off into the sunset.
I'm so tired of hearing that word online.
True: Nobody is entitled to be treated nicely. Nobody is entitled to an open, friendly relationship. Nobody is entitled to get to know you. If we only did what we were entitled to do, and received what we were entitled to receive, the world would be an even shittier place than it already is. We have enough people walking around with the "You're not entitled to me being nice, so I'm not gonna be! nyaaaaa!" attitudes.
I don't often use AI to cleanup my texts, but when I do, I fully own the output. I make a conscious decision whether to leave in every AI suggestion or not. The final text _is_ what I want to say.
I find that AI is very useful for getting me past the 'blank page' writing block, but inevitably it writes in ways I would never, and so I end up editing it heavily. But, for me, a boy with ADHD, editing something is infinitely easier than writing it from scratch.
I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writing well, or clearly expressing what I mean... it has been the inertia of putting words on a page at all.
(and an LLM had nothing to do with this comment :P)
I totally agreed with you. I'm French (nobody is perfect ^^), I'm not so fluent in english and I'm dyslexic, that why I often write my message, then I ask to Claude to translate it in english because i'm feeling I will lose the credibility of my message if there is too much mistake... But you're right, so this message is not translated by LLM :D
I really don't mind text filtered through an LLM per se. But I prefer high signal-to-token so to speak. The way humans talk and write means that the seemingly extraneous text they add often provides an interesting insight into the thought patterns of the person, and therefore mistakes or even pointless monologues can be interesting.
This is not always true. Once there was an online reaction to short content that made people treat "long-form" content as desirable entirely due to its length. I rather like reading books and the New Yorker's fiction section when I still subscribed, but much of this "long-form" content was token-expansion of a formulaic nature which I did not enjoy. LLMs have mastered this kind of long-form token-expansion.
This is assuming people are using an LLM in good faith, obviously. One day, perhaps LLMs will learn to express what someone is saying in an elegant way that is enjoyable for people like me to read. But even then, I will have the difficulty of distinguishing whether this is a human speaking through an LLM in good faith or a human who has set up a machine that is set up to mimic a human.
The latter is undesirable to me because I have access to the best such machines at a remarkably low cost. Were I to desire a conversation with an LLM, it is trivial for me to find one. I'm not coming here for that[0].
A sufficiently insightful LLM which prompts my thinking in certain ways wouldn't be unwelcome to me, I suppose. I have a couple of my friends for whom I still go on Twitter to read what they say even after I have stopped using the site routinely. If I found out the posts were entirely an LLM I think I would still read them simply because I find the posts useful and with sufficiently high signal-to-token.
0: Certainly, if every place only spoke about things I was interested in and never in things I was not interested in, I wouldn't need separation of interest spaces at all. But the variation of interest vectors for different humans has made this impossible.
> The way humans talk and write means that the seemingly extraneous text they add often provides an interesting insight into the thought patterns of the person, and therefore mistakes or even pointless monologues can be interesting.
Yeah, some colleagues started using ChatGPT for internal communication as well. While we don’t like to mandate or prohibit anyone from using any tools, we did need to make it really clear to everyone that this is not productive. Grammarly to make small corrections to external recipients is fine. Using ChatGPT to “polish” your message is not. If you’re not sure about your English abilities, we offer you free English lessons and encourage giving each other feedback during chats.
LLMs shouldn’t be used for communication at all if you want any form of authenticity.
You can take one step ahead and let user write in their own language then you figure out how to make sense of it.
Tbe hard truth is at work there is no authenticity.
Definitely not getting any better if everyone starts using ChatGPT for private communications.
Bad thing X has been happening for a while. Let's all work towards making it worse.
Why play this word game that has nothing to do with their point? I can write an email about TPS reports in my own voice without caring about the subject matter. That's authentic. I care about performing my job well and with individuality and (no pun intended) agency.
This is starting to become my latest pet peeve, people using Claude to write their messages in Slack. I'm going to just stop communicating via text with these people.
It's one thing to have Claude polish a message and another thing for it to write out an entire message.
That’s exactly why I’ve refused to use autocomplete on smartphone keyboards from the very beginning. I want to express myself in my own words.
In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?
And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.
I largely reached the same conclusion recently => https://stephencagle.dev/posts-output/2025-10-14-you-should-...
It feels so disrespectful sometimes too, having to read a long paragraph that conveys so little meaning knowing full well the original prompt was probably very short and I'm now wasting extra time parsing the hollow LLM text expansion.
Easy fix: use an LLM to summarize it.
(only half-joking, a part of me fears that this is the reality we’re moving towards)
That's absolutely what's happening already: write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader. At some point it will become clear how absurdly wasteful we're being (right now, we're being paid to ignore that waste).
> write for me for the writer, summarise this for me for the reader.
It's funny though. For computer to computer conversation, we have invented (deflate+inflate) algorithms to save bandwidth, time and money.
On the other hand for human to human communication, we are in the process of inventing a (inflate+deflate) method and at the same time we are spending insane amounts of time, money & bandwidth to make it possible!
We need to come up with a catchy buzzword salad to market to executives. Something like "increased communication efficiency between workers by direct brain-email-brain interface"
Imagine going to work or a social meeting where everyone looks and sounds the same(or just a limited set) all with the same perfect tone, body language and communication style. Sounds like a nightmare and I would find it hard to relate and get that "perspective", when there is nothing to differentiate a person.
I guess everyone using LLMs for text is similar to that. If everyone uses the same LLM style, its hard to understand where the other person is coming from. This is not a problem for technical and precise communication though(the choice of LLMs in that context has other risks).
It is also strictly not an LLM capability problem because they can mimic or retain the original style and just "polish" with enough hints but that takes time, investment and people go through path of least resistance. So, we all end up with similar text with typical AI-isms.
There are other reasons to dislike LLM text like padding and effort asymmetry that have been discussed here enough.
When I wrote a snarky mail to the MD and I couldn’t suppress my anger, Claude did a great job smoothing it out while keeping it pointy.
Once asked Claude to guess what the prompt was that generated a mail. Didn’t work unfortunately.
I think there was an SMBC comic about this topic, but I don't think I can find it, and the site doesn't exactly make it easy. I don't even remember if it was pre-2020 or not.
It was about how people would get a thing (a robot?) that would repeat whatever they said but in a more fancy way (or something along those lines), to make them sound smarter. Then the people would start depending on these robots to communicate at all, to the point their speech degrades and they start making unintelligible noises that the robots still translate into actual speech.
EDIT: Found it, from 2014: https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
There are two ways to write an email. One is to keep it short and to the point that so there are obviously no errors, the other is to waffle on and obfuscate the message with an LLM so that the reader's eyes glaze over...or something like that.
In emails...whatever. I can tell it's there but fine whatever, we're just trying to get a message across LLM or otherwise.
But this was the first year I saw it in performance review write-ups which frankly was jarring. Here is feedback supposedly 1:1 that massively affects this person's life and their perception of "worth" so to speak...and it's just AI.
Notably it was split by geography. EU countries closest to organic, india slop trainwreck, US in the middle
Sorta made me conclude "ok i guess that's the end of performance reviews that vaguely mean anything & actually get read"
I use ChatGPT for communication. It started with "please fix typos" and now it's "write me a slack message about this and that". This is mostly an effect of the communication environment we created - taking risks is rarely rewarded, and mistakes can be very costly. Remember, you're always one misunderstood message away from being fired. Of course there are people whom I trust and I'd never offend them with AI-generated slop, but the rest of the humanity - it is what it is, LLMs help me a lot.
> Remember, you're always one misunderstood message away from being fired.
If this is true, you really want to be fired. That is a horrendous work environment, and you should quit if at all possible.
Most workplaces (any certainly any good workplace) will seek to understand, not fire you immediately.
[dead]
> It robs me of getting to know you.
Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. There is a threshold between all that I share with the world and the rest of me. Hell, not every person gets the same picture, and that's deliberate and healthy--my customers don't get to know what my proctologist knows. My mother doesn't get to know what my wife knows.
You don't get to know all of me, because I don't trust you.
This post comes across as sweet, and innocent. It also comes across as absurdly self-entitled, and it's not an OK posture to take towards the world. It's not OK when the police take this posture, it's not OK when private companies take this posture, and it's not OK when strangers on the internet take this posture.
You are entitled to withdraw from relationships that don't fulfill your emotional needs. A reasonable audience for this missive is your girlfriend, your child (who relies on you), or your employer (to whom you are vulnerable).
Weaponised therapy speak is gross. This article was not asking you to spill your life story to every person you meet, it was asking you to speak with your own voice, which is a perfectly normal and in no way entitled thing to be asking.
What are you rambling about? It’s not about your doctor using ChatGPT for his newsletter, it’s about your colleagues using ChatGPT on Slack or email.
I personally think that the people who can’t be bothered to actually write authentic messages, and assume that everyone will just read their word salad full of repetitive AI patterns, are being the ones acting entitled.
It is, because of the baked-in asymmetry. "I couldn't be bothered to write it, but you have to read it". Unless your expectation is that I'm going to have my chatbot summarize the messages from your chatbot, in which case, maybe we should just both ride off into the sunset.
I'm so tired of hearing that word online.
True: Nobody is entitled to be treated nicely. Nobody is entitled to an open, friendly relationship. Nobody is entitled to get to know you. If we only did what we were entitled to do, and received what we were entitled to receive, the world would be an even shittier place than it already is. We have enough people walking around with the "You're not entitled to me being nice, so I'm not gonna be! nyaaaaa!" attitudes.