The new lazy comment’s “AI-generated”.

On Hacker News, every thread about a programming language that isn’t Rust eventually gets a Rust comment. It doesn’t matter if the topic’s C, Zig, Go, PHP, Elixir, or a database. Somebody will find a way to turn the discussion into Rust.

We now have the same reflex for writing.

Someone publishes a blog post. Maybe something a shower thought. Maybe just a weird thing they spent the weekend trying to understand.

Instead of pointing to a wrong number, a missing test, a wrong claim, or saying thank you, somebody just writes “sounds AI-generated”.

That isn’t criticism. It gives the author nothing to fix. No sentence. No claim. No result. Just a little accusation dropped in the middle of the room. Just sending bad vibes for no reason.

And it lands on real people.

A lot of personal blogs aren’t content businesses. They’re notes written after work, or on a weekend, or at 4am, while the author’s still excited or annoyed enough to explain what they just found. The research may’ve taken days. The writing may’ve taken hours. The reward’s usually nothing. Maybe one useful comment. Maybe one email years later. Maybe just knowing that the next person won’t lose the same afternoon.

Calling that “AI-generated” isn’t harmless.

The garbage sites that actually publish AI slop don’t care. There’s nobody behind them feeling insulted. The pipeline doesn’t read Hacker News. It doesn’t get discouraged. It doesn’t wonder whether publishing was a mistake. It scrapes, generates, publishes, and repeats.

The person writing a blog does read it.

I’m French. English isn’t my native language.

When I write, I don’t first think “how would a native speaker phrase this?” I think about the thing I just did or the idea I want to get out before the excitement’s gone.

And I use a computer, so yes, I use tools.

I utterly hate AI-generated content. I don’t want machines to replace personal writing with synthetic filler.

But AI as an assistant is different.

Checking. Verifying. Proofreading. Helping me say in English what I already know I want to say. That is useful.

I use Apple Intelligence proofreading on my Mac all the time. I ask ChatGPT to fix my English. It fixes grammar. It removes very French sentence structures. It rewrites everything into something that looks a bit too clean. Do you really think I can’t see it too?

AI-assisted prose has patterns. Any idiot can recognizing its stinky smell.

But a spell checker doesn’t make a post fake. Grammarly didn’t make old posts fake. A machine helping a non-native speaker write more readable English doesn’t make the work fake.

The work’s the part before the sentence.

Did I write from actual experience? Did I put my name on the result and accept being wrong in public? This is what should matter.

That’s also why the drive-by accusation is so annoying.

Real AI slop exists. It’s everywhere and it’s awful. But as a filter, “this sounds like AI” is just fkcing annoying.

Mostly, it detects fluency. That’s exactly what non-native writers use tools for. It punishes people for making their English easier to read. It pushes them toward a stupid choice: write worse and sound human, or write better and become suspicious.

That sucks.

If a post’s wrong, say what’s wrong. If a chart’s bogus, show the bug. If a claim’s too strong, argue with the claim. If a paragraph’s clearly hallucinated, quote it.

But a drive-by “AI-generated” comment’s just a status signal. It says “I noticed the current thing.” It doesn’t improve the discussion. It doesn’t protect anyone. It doesn’t help the author. It only makes publishing feel worse.

And publishing personal writing already has a cost.

You expose how you think. You expose what you don’t know. If you write in a second language, you also expose every awkward sentence. There’s always the small fear that the post’s too rough, too direct, too French, too wrong.

Proofreading tools reduce that friction. They let me share the technical part instead of spending all my energy fighting articles and prepositions.

If that makes some sentences look assisted, so be it.

I care more about whether the content’s useful than whether every comma proves I typed it manually.

The annoying part’s that people keep saying they want the human web back. They want personal blogs, independent notes, small discoveries, weird experiments, people writing outside platforms.

Then the same people make it unpleasant to publish any of that.

Haters are gonna hate. Fine.

But this particular kind of hate costs something. The AI farms survive the comments. Humans may not.

So no, I won’t apologize for using proofreading tools.

If you want to fight AI slop, fight empty work. Fight fake expertise. Fight articles with no author, no experience, no accountability, and no point.

Don’t make humans prove they’re human every time they write a decent sentence.

That’s how you get fewer humans writing.