Comment by xyzsparetimexyz
5 days ago
No, I am capable of assessing whether a text is written well. I do want to know if someone cared enough to write it themselves though. That's an important piece of metadata.
5 days ago
No, I am capable of assessing whether a text is written well. I do want to know if someone cared enough to write it themselves though. That's an important piece of metadata.
It depends on the goal of the text. I don't care if technical documentation is written by human or machine. I care if it's correct and helpful. I don't care if a letter providing emotional support for a lost loved one is a perfectly accurate, beautifully structured piece of text. I care that it's heartfelt, coming from a person that meant what they wrote. Such metadata is important for the latter, but irrelevant for the former.
This is something that gets glossed over a lot in the debate. "Writing to convey functional information" has a different set of success criteria than "Writing to convey emotion and shared human experience". One might still legitimately argue that knowing that a text is LLM-generated undermines confidence in the former (there's no guarantee that a coherent mind exists that can clarify ambiguities); but much _less_ so than for the latter.
People have been buying and sending Get Well and Happy Birthday cards for centuries, written by other people who don't give a shit about sharing their human experience with the receiver, and are just doing their jobs as professional greeting card writers.
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About three times as many people speak English as a second/foreign language compared to native speakers, not to mention people with no English fluency at all. That's a lot of people who might use an AI writing assistant for legitimate reasons that go beyond poor character. Same as we might do if we needed to communicate in Farsi or whatever.
It seems better for people to simply write in their native tongue. By translating what you write before sharing it, you are robbing readers from the opportunity of using future, better translation technology. It freezes text at the current capabilities of translation software. It also drives us towards a monolonguistic world, and I think a lot would be lost in that (said as a monolonguistic English speaker).
In the abstract, sure. But in terms of practical communication, especially something like a lightweight group discussion, you want to be seen by everyone, not just by those who happen to use live translating software on the receiving end. Because English is dominant in US-centric social media, perhaps you are rarely in the situation where you will be completely left out of a conversation you want to participate in if you only use English, but there's a real friction to leaving text untranslated. Think Reddit or even HN. Would most people even bother to translate the Farsi comment to see if it's insightful, or would they just skip it? Or even scold the author that this is an English dominant space and they should try to conform to that?