I wonder what the breakdown is between AI-generated comments and AI-assisted comments. If I write anything substantial, I run it through the following prompt: "Please rewrite the following message for clarity, spelling, and grammar, but only return the revised text without any additional commentary."
Articulateness is a decent (not perfect) signal for intelligence, which is a decent (not perfect) signal for sound ideas. In a sea of online garbage, it was a quick and easy way to discard that not worth reading. Nowadays, a whiff of AI's brand of articulateness tells me the author couldn't manage on their own, either due to skill or discipline. In either case, the result is the same: close tab / scroll past.
Use a local model such as Gemma3 with a prompt such as "strictly limit changes only to spelling issues, syntactical errors, and punctuation."
That way, it's basically functioning like Grammarly on steroids. Asking an LLM for a "rewrite" is basically dissolving your writing style into the homogenized gloop.
To be fair, comments here are graded on kindness, civility, curiosity, intellectual gravity, technical merit, novelty, thoughtfulness, substantiveness, objective fact, not fulminating, not cross examining, steelmanning vs strawmanning, not containing memes, not containing humor, not expressing positive emotion, not expressing negative emotion, not being snarky, sneering, overly cynical, not cynical enough, being "curmudgeonly", class bias, political bias, religious bias, cultural bias, not using "flamewar style" and many other heuristics.
If you followed all of the guidelines for comments to the letter, you would wind up sounding wooden, if not entirely like an AI.
I'm kind of curious how you.... I guess, interpret the responses to when you send someone AI-assisted content. I previously thought "I don't care if it's AI or not; quality is quality", but I'm increasingly taking the position that I do care, and intentionally have started ignoring comments and especially product reviews where you get the formatted 2-4 sentence paragraphs with formal tone and rule-following. It's come to the point where as long as you don't write as poorly as Epstein, I want the errors. Actually, I'm getting so weird and romantic about it, that I think I'd argue having errors and unusual style shows an openness and vulnerability that's now a necessary gate price; like journalists have so many tools available to them, but they still make typos, factual errors in articles they have no business writing about, and fail to quote people properly -- that's great, I think.
