alt Hacker NewsThe piece hit differently, reading it as someone who is autistic. The anxiety the author describes, having your natural way of communicating flagged as wrong and being pressured to sand down the parts of yourself that are most distinctly you, that's not a new problem for a lot of us.
Neurodiverse people have been running this gauntlet forever. Your pacing is too flat or too intense. Your vocabulary is too formal or too casual. You don't make eye contact correctly. You're either masking so hard you're invisible, or you're visibly yourself, and people assume something is broken.
The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM. That maps onto something a lot of us already live. The only way to seem normal is to perform a version of yourself that isn't quite you.
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As this post has been (to my sensibilities) obviously composed by an LLM, I can tell you: this does not read "human."
But changing the way we communicate and present ourselves to prove we are not malicious (or disreputable) actors has always been a thing
> The bitter irony the author lands on: the only way to seem human is to pass your writing through an LLM.
(FWIW, some people consider this style of colon use an LLM-ism.)
I appreciate where you're coming from, though. As bland as LLM output can be, it seems to read more human to people because it's more average. (Although I can't really fathom seeing the neurodivergent as not human; neurodiversity is about the most human trait I can imagine. cf. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/11/05/think-alike/ .)
Long before the rise of ChatGPT, it seems a lot of people were immersed in a culture where "improving" your writing with tools like Grammarly was considered more or less mandatory. And it seems like people read less nowadays, certainly when it comes to attempts at good writing for writing's sake. Overall I fear the art of natural language communication is in decline.