**To be extra clear, when I say 'tidy up', I mean self-editing to make it more concise. Not using AI! This is an LLM-free zone: I'm perfectly able to write lengthy over-explained tracts myself, thanks 😁

*I'm not having a go at AmEng speakers either! I would guess that AI also flattens out regional variety and neologisms there too... And the flipside is that if LLMs are overusing writing devices, it may be because good writers did it first 🙃 (See: em dashes, rules of three)

I also don't have a proper conclusion for this thread. Just that I love Hiberno English 😅 and I kinda hope LLMs mean our own dialects and idiolects come to be seen as more valuable/real

I don't know if that makes me more authentic-sounding or more annoying to read stuff from (if we work together, don't answer that 😅)

The more I see obviously-AI posts (*cough* looking at you, LinkedIn), the more I've wanted to leave things more like how I speak, in meandering sentences, with asides in brackets and more flippant descriptions, because I want people to know I wrote it myself

In the same way we started doubting our own use of em dashes - look what they stole from us! - I've found myself less inclined to 'tidy up' my own writing lately, because I don't want to 'sound like AI.'

It sounds false to me/us. We're generally a bit more roundabout in how we say things... and maybe more colourful in our descriptions

And I think maybe that's why so much AI-written copy and customer service chatbots sounds are so uncanny valley to me - even leaving aside dialectal words and phrases, Hiberno speakers (or speakers of English in Irish contexts) are not that obsequious(?) or direct or eager.

If LLMs work by predicting the most common next word/next token, and American English is the biggest corpus in the training data, then presumeably they'll always skew to some sort of boringly flattened AmEng variant. And smaller dialects globally will be missing or misunderstood.

Currently languishing in that strange early-mid 30s abyss, i.e. where I am simultaneously too old and haggard to enter the Rose of Tralee, and too young and sprightly to run for President 👋

(I actually don't entirely disagree with the premise of the article tbf. Just enjoyed the headline 😅)

(From this CN Traveler piece. I have questions 😅 www.cntraveler.com/galleries/20...)