I do not want AI to "polish" me

Authenticity vs AI “Polish”

• Many commenters resonate with the author’s desire to keep their own voice, even if it’s messy, blunt, or “unprofessional.”
• Tools like Grammarly and LLM rewriters are criticized for turning distinctive prose into PR-style sludge that sounds fake, forced, and colorless.
• Others argue that a style doesn’t have to be unique to be meaningful; what matters is that it’s yours, not machine-flattened.
• Some feel genuinely uneasy or even “immoral” passing AI text off as their own, especially in personal or serious communication.

Corporate-speak and Banality Machines

• There’s strong pushback against AI that defaults to maximal politeness, apologies, and empty warm-ups; people note it often changes the meaning (adding blame-shifting, fake empathy, or promises that weren’t there).
• Several see this as an extension of corporate email norms: convergence toward one safe, inoffensive voice that erases individuality.
• Commenters describe LLMs and their tuning as a kind of “banality machine” or anti-art, extracting the interesting bits from everything that passes through.

Who Benefits and How People Actually Use It

• Many use AI selectively:
  • For bureaucratic/legal/compliance emails or meeting summaries they don’t care about.
  • Not for writing that carries emotional weight or personal stake.
• Some welcome AI-polish as a “supercharged model letter” to avoid sounding rude when they lack time or social fluency.
• A few even unpolish AI or dictation output to better match chatty, informal styles.

Language, Access, and Miscommunication

• Strong divide over ESL use:
  • Supporters say polish features are a godsend for non-native speakers and first‑generation immigrants, allowing them to avoid discrimination and be taken seriously.
  • Critics counter that if you can’t reliably judge the target language, you can’t know whether AI preserved your meaning; it may produce long, wrong, and confusing text.
  • Several argue real language skill only comes from actually writing and being edited by humans.

Privacy, Control, and Ubiquity of AI Features

• Concern about feeding proprietary or internal documents into cloud AIs; some employers officially ban it, though people likely ignore rules.
• Frustration at “AI creep”: Copilot in OneNote, “Rewrite” in Notepad, Adobe “insights,” Gmail/Outlook suggestions, often hard to disable.
• Many see these features as driven by stock-price and OKR incentives, not user need.

Broader Cultural and Future Concerns

• Fears of a world where:
  • AI pads every message and other AI summarizes it back down, wasting energy and destroying signal.
  • Most communication is AI-to-AI, making it harder to know who you’re really dealing with.
• Some still prefer receiving bland, polished text over contrived “I’m so quirky” voices—but want an option for polished and terse, not verbose corporate mush.