I've been thinking about something that is becoming pretty common among developers.π€
A lot of us use AI to polish our English before publishing ...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Hey, this article appears to have been generated with the assistance of ChatGPT or possibly some other AI tool.
We allow our community members to use AI assistance when writing articles as long as they abide by our guidelines. Please review the guidelines and edit your post to add a disclaimer.
Failure to follow these guidelines could result in DEV admin lowering the score of your post, making it less visible to the rest of the community. Or, if upon review we find this post to be particularly harmful, we may decide to unpublish it completely.
We hope you understand and take care to follow our guidelines going forward!
π€£π€£π€£
Beautifully written, and I could not agree more.
One thing I would add, since you focused on the prompt. The prompt is the weakest place to carry your voice, because you have to describe your own style, and almost nobody can do that accurately. Showing beats telling. If your tool allows it, feed it a folder of things you have already written and let it work out the pattern itself. Some of them let you save that as a reusable style profile.
Then the correction loop matters more than the first output. When it hands you something that does not sound like you, do not just fix it and move on. Fix it, tell it why, and save that. Otherwise you correct the same thing every week.
The change that helped me most, though, is not asking for a polished version at all. Ask for three options and pick one. Choosing is where your voice actually lives, and it puts you back in the author's seat instead of the editor's.
And keep a running note. Jot the raw thought on the day you have it, in your own words, and develop it later. What you scribble at the time is the most sentence that sounds like you that you will ever have.
To be straight about it, I use AI too, as an assistant, and I am still learning to use it well. Some days are busy enough that automating the whole thing is tempting.
I was actually thinking of writing something on this myself. You got there first, and better.π
Actually, Iβve always thought it would be great if dev.to had a realβtime onβdemand AI translation feature similar to what you see on X or LinkedIn. People could post in their native language, with an option to toggle autoβtranslation on or off. That way writers could preserve as much of their original style as possible. Maybe it could work out.π
Hello sir, I hope youβre doing well. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
I just wanted to clarify one thing. Iβm Divyaβs friend, and Iβm currently managing her account. She asked me to do this because whenever she comes on DEV.to, she gets distracted from her studies. So for now, Iβm handling the account so that I can also learn something from here while she gets enough time to focus on her studies without distractions.
She only asked me to wish you good luck for your series. Sheβll be back on DEV.to after around two months, and once she returns, sheβll read your series herself.
So, I just wanted to pass along what she told me. The rest, youβll hear directly from her when sheβs back.
Thanks for passing her message along. Wish Divya all the best with her studies. Looking forward to hearing from her again in two monthsπ
As a matter of fact there's a post still lingering i need to complete which my Assistant even council app has not been able to deliver. The soul of that topic i'd rather get or not make the post π
The AI assistance here ain't working as other stuff or projects on this particular topic.
anyway i don't know english π
I also don't know about English!!π€
Honestly, translating my original Chinese text into English loses so much of its charm. Whether itβs Chinese poems, idioms or common sayings β what can be conveyed in just a few Chinese characters often requires dozens of English words, which is really cumbersome.
Besides, while writing the ThirtyβSix Stratagems series recently, Iβve come to realize that every character in a longβform story should have their own unique linguistic fingerprint. Due to different identities and personalities, each character needs a distinct voice. Without that, readers cannot easily tell who is speaking, and dialogue lacks recognizability. It can be quite a headache to pull off.π€£
The irony here is almost too perfect. π
An article about AI polishing our writing until it starts sounding like AI⦠gets flagged for sounding like AI.
But I think that accidentally proves the point better than the article itself.
Maybe the goal shouldnβt be βhuman-sounding AI writingβ at all. It should be preserving a personβs linguistic fingerprint β including their simple words, odd sentence structures, favorite expressions, humor, and even some imperfections.
Perfect grammar is easy to generate now.
A recognizable voice is much harder.
And apparently, even the moderator bot just joined the experiment. π
Very interesting topic. The desire to remain authentic and share your own views remains a desire and must be supported. This is a trait one should support and encourage others. However over time we do make small adjustments as we want to be heard and understood, we want engagement and this can mean a lot of things as to why one desires that. This is often the case when someone is not proficient in English or the dominant language in the location they are in. There can be cultural aspects too. IMHO, AI does help here and AI does help tune the message to the right persona, right demographic while still remaining true to your own self and remaining authentic.