by ordu | 2026-03-11 23:31:52+00:00
> An AI may be able to teach you basic grammar but it’s not going to teach you to develop your voice.

Well, no one can help you to develop your voice. If it is your voice, then it have to be your own creation. I think we are at agreement here.

> Developing your voice by doing your own proofreading pressures you away from the mean, by helping you double down on what you value most and by choosing which grammatical rules to disregard and when disregarding them is more in-tone for yourself than adherence.

Oh... If I wanted to become a professional writer, then I'd agree with you. Maybe...

You see, I don't use LLM to fix my writing in Russian, because with Russian I'm totally in control of my grammar, I know when I deviate from it and if I do, I do it consciously. But with English I don't know. Sometimes I can see that I don't know how to follow English grammar in some particular case, and sometimes I don't even notice that I don't know.

So, returning to your argument, if I wanted to become a famous English writer, I think I'd choose to write a lot and discuss my writing with LLM, and I'd do it for hundreds of hours. LLM are unbelievably useful for digging into language nuances. Before LLMs I had urbandictionary, but it could help with specific phrases, not with choosing between "I took the effort to ask an LLM" and "I took the effort of asking an LLM". I wouldn't have a clue that there is any semantic difference. But LLM can point to it, and it can explain the difference, and give me more examples of it. Or it can point that "you recommend to choose" is not good, because of "something-something" I don't remember what, but it boils down to "you just have to remember, that the right way to use the verb 'recommend' is 'recommend choosing'". I don't see the difference, I can't choose to disregard it, because I have no opinion on if it is good or bad.

If I wanted to become an English writer, I'd spend hundreds of hours with LLM, just to get an ability to see as many differences as it is possible, to get an idea of what I value most, and which grammatical rules I like to disregard. But even after that, I think I'd continue to use LLM. It can provide unexpected takes on what you feed into it. ... Hmm... I should try it with Russian. In Russian I can pick a style for my writing and to follow it (in English I can't control the style consciously), I can (and do sometimes) turn grammar inside-out, make it alien, readable for a native speaker, but in weird ways readable (a bit like letters written by Terry Pratchett heroes like Granny Weatherwax or Carrot)... I wonder, if I can employ LLM to make it even more weird.

> I still won’t equate regressing to the AI mean with personal growth away from the average masses.

I can't obviously judge in which direction LLMs are changing my English, so I can't even give you an anecdotal counter-evidence to your statements about regression to AI mean, but I'm still sure that I'm not regressing to the mean. You see, I pick when to follow LLM advice and when not to. I'm choosing what to change. The regression to the mean you are talking to is going on in a high dimensional space, you can regress on some dimensions and continue to deviate from the mean on others as much as you like. I don't like to deviate on grammar dimensions (at least without knowing about my deviations), I was born in a family of a teacher and an engineer, which were all into to be educated and the familiarity with the grammar was one of the important part of it, and I was born in USSR, where the proper grammar was enforced in all media to the extent that make me laugh and rebel against grammar (after all the decades passed, lol). But I can't allow myself to just ignore grammar, I was taught in a way to use it properly. So I decide to use LLM. I'm too lazy to do it each time, or even every second time, but still I use it and learn from it.

The prospect to regress to the mean by using LLM seems very unlikely to me. I don't regress with all the propaganda around me when regressing is the most safe thing to do really, so mere LLM stand no chance to achieve it.