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I have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much effort into post-AI copy editing, it's just clear and useful writing. Sure, the occasional non-idiomatic phrase creeps in but those are hard to find.

That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.

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Then a better recommendation should be to use specialized AI proofreading tools, such as Kagi Translate's proofread feature. Yeah, it uses AI, but the "harness" around it forces you to use it only to improve your text, not sloppify it.

https://translate.kagi.com/proofread

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Why would you proofread in 2026?? Punctuation and grammar errors give further credence to human authorship.
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I have stolen your link, dear sir

Thank you kindly for sharing

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You do realize that when you have to find a special use case to defend something you are really giving an argument AGAINST casual widespread use of it.
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I disagree. It would be a wonderful world where every overseas contractor that I interacted with used the AI tools in this fashion.

Even among native speakers, literacy is way down. AI could help with that… if people actually do the work.

That’s the real problem, not AI: no one wants to do the work. That is purely a PEBKAC situation.

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Science says the opposite, sorry. People lose their language skills when they outsource their thinking to AI. You can believ what you want want but that doesn't change the facts.
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Pretty sure the references you are referring to are about losing coding skills, which is a very different set of skills than language skills. The kagi link (1) a sibling comment left was an example of an AI that can improve writing while also informing about better writing style. As opposed to the slop grenade, which is outsourcing thinking to AI.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48219992#48221497

The point is, you don't have to outsource your thinking to use AI, if it's a good AI tool. But most AI companies are coming from a hyper-scaling mindset where addicting the user to the product is the same as substituting hard thinking for easy dopamine hits. The most ridiculous benchmark I have seen in AI is the tendency to say the longer an agent can work and some minimal accuracy is a good thing. That just means you have 30 steps to find an error in instead of 3, and you are much more likely to just abdicate thought instead of the hard work of proofing 30 steps yourself. AI companies and evaluators are losing the point.

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I have had experiences where customers use AI to communicate and express their issues. Sometimes they produce walls of text like the website exemplifies, but overall it's a better alternative to not be able to explain the issue because you don't know the specific terminology and you are just a layman trying to do things.

Show some love for the layman, we are all laymen in areas we don't know about.

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[flagged]
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The problem with this logic, no matter the context where it’s deployed, is that you can always default to “you’re doing it wrong” no matter what case or situation is brought up. It’s an argument that is unfalsifiable no matter what because you can simply gesture to the person as the problem in literally any scenario.

If I build a car and it consistently gets into wrecks at a rate 500x that of other cars, you can’t just keep saying “operator error.” At some point you have to ask, ”why do operators keep having errors?”

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The problem seems to be with the sarcasm detectors.
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The common denominator seems to be your phrasing, not everybody else’s “sarcasm detectors.” And unfortunately a lot of people write comments like your joke but actually mean it.
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