Dr Zoyander StreetFeb 21

Instead of defending the use of LLMs for polishing up your writing, we could be advocating for unpolished writing. Blog posts with spelling errors and awkwardly repeated words. Emails that sound a bit less warm and professional because you forgot the preamble of "Apologies for the late reply, hope you're well! Thanks for the thing last week".

If there's no budget for a human editor, why should the text meet a "professional" (middle class, formally educated) standard? Dyslexic people can just write how they write and people can deal with it. Autistic people can just say what they mean to say and not waste energy on the double empathy gap.

We can learn to read for a more inclusive world, instead of wasting the planet's diminishing resources masking our differences.

Show threadDaniel ReedersFeb 21

@zoy 'instead of accommodations we should just eliminate the role of grammar in class distinction.' this is my least favourite leftism (and I'm a socialist). no reform, only radical change allowed! people asking for incremental accommodations are traitors to the revolution!

making writing accessible to all is one of the very few good things about LLMs. let the unconfident writers polish their prose and let's target the financial and environmental and industrial injustice and unsustainability of 'AI' directly.

Show threadMarianneFeb 21
@onekind @zoy it's not polishing, it's homogenising.
Show threadDaniel ReedersFeb 21
@noodlemaz @zoy I have some news for you about copy editing.
Show threadMarianne
@onekind @zoy uh if that's what you think the point of that job is, well, I hope that's not what you do.
Feb 21 at 12:24pmWeb
Show threadDaniel ReedersFeb 21
@noodlemaz @zoy Unless they are Ezra 'make it new' Pound, copy editors conventionalise writing according to implicit house styles and explicit style guides. They make writing more accessible by doing it. If someone isn't writing in a context where they have access to a copy editor, an LLM can assist. But apparently we'd be better off shaming those writers while simultaneously telling them to be proud of their flaws.