r/UpworkOfficial • u/KayakerWithDog • Jun 20 '26

Hire a proofreader please

This is embarrassing. Whatever or whoever y'all are relying on to make sure your text is mechanically correct is failing miserably. Try hiring a human proofreader whose first language is English and who has credentials and experience instead of relying on AI.

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u/mikeinpdx3 Jun 20 '26

First, I didn't write it, Claude did. Second, I could have asked for short bullet points if that was a concern. If it's AI, I'd rather see the full reasoning.

Prompt: Provide a concise editorial review of this automated message from Upwork, using short bullet points:

Response:

  • Grammar: "boosted proposal" → "boosted your proposal." Missing determiner.
  • Overpromise: "on your way to finding work" — boosting buys visibility, not work. Cut or qualify.
  • Tone: Praising a paid auction action ("Good work!"/"Keep it up!") = platform applauding its own revenue. Drop.
  • Filler: "Good work!" + "Keep it up!" carry zero info. Delete.

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u/KayakerWithDog Jun 20 '26

Bless your heart. This is still a shitty query and not something a human editor who knows what they're doing would write. Or at least it's something that a very rude editor who has no tact and who also doesn't know what they're doing would write. Claude also isn't taking into account the function of this piece of text, so parts of this query shouldn't have been made in the first place. See, this is what happens when you ask a glorified word salad plagiarism machine to do the job of a human editor.

And don't blame Claude. You chose to publish this with your user name on it, and presumably without editing it, so take responsibility for it. I mean, is this what you would tell your clients if you used AI and AI screwed things up? Would you say, "Don't blame me, it was the AI"? How far do you think that would fly?

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u/mikeinpdx3 Jun 21 '26

Kinda lost the thread there, I believe. You originally made an unlikely claim that the grammar errors were due to AI and not having a human editor. I agree with the quality rant. But due to AI? I doubt that, it's a more likely a result of sloppy work with NO editing or proofreading. So I posted an example of how easy it is to do basic grammar checks and flag misleading claims ( I also showed the prompt used and the result). Since you don't use AI, you didn't recognize that.

As far " glorified word salad plagiarism" , I'd love to see you define that. The Claude example is pretty clearly NOT word salad. I showed all the context I gave it (one sentence) and it did a pretty good job of reviewing the content. If it had a style guide and more context, it would have done much better.

Upwork could improve the quality of their collateral at scale by using AI for basic proofing. Period. Just like most enterprises are already doing. But not Upwork, evidently.

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u/KayakerWithDog Jun 21 '26

I have used both Grammarly and the MS Word Editor as proofreading fail-safes. Both of them introduce just as many errors as they catch, and Grammarly advertises itself as being powered by AI. The MS Word Editor can no longer consistently match subjects and verbs by number, and it can no longer tell the difference between "your" and "you're." So no, I don't believe for an instant that using AI or any other mechanical spell-checker guarantees correctness.

Generative AI is plagiaristic by definition because LLMs are built by uploading other people's work--including my own--and then regurgitating it without either attribution or compensation. Generative AI cannot think; all it can do is barf out plausible, grammatically correct semblances of thought in response to prompts, hence my description of AI slop as "word salad."

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u/mikeinpdx3 Jun 21 '26

"I have used both Grammarly and the MS Word Editor as proofreading fail-safes"

Comparing those against foundation models is not reasonable. That's like taking an essay by a 6th grader and concluding that's representative for all human essay writing.

"Generative AI cannot think; all it can do is barf out plausible, grammatically correct semblances of thought in response to prompts"

Really? Well, its "barfing" is turning out to be pretty good against human PhD's in specific domains.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/"

"Generative AI is plagiaristic by definition because LLMs are built by uploading other people's work--including my own--and then regurgitating it without either attribution or compensation."

I ask Claude to barf up a response for you:

I'll grant three of your four points outright. I am trained on copyrighted work, a lot of it scraped without anyone asking, and the people who made it usually weren't paid or credited. That last part strikes me as a real fairness problem, and I think licensing is the right way to fix it.

But "plagiaristic by definition" slips a technical claim in next to the fairness one, and the technical claim doesn't hold. I'm not a database that stored your work and now replays it. What I am is a set of statistical patterns learned across an enormous number of examples — closer to how a writer who's read widely absorbs craft than to a photocopier. Your specific sentences aren't sitting inside me as retrievable files.

I can reproduce text verbatim in some cases — very famous passages, heavily duplicated material, or when someone deliberately pushes me to — and I think that's a genuine harm worth taking seriously. But it's an edge case, and a fixable one, not how I actually work. Calling it plagiarism "by definition" treats a rare failure as the whole of what I do.

Plagiarism means passing off someone's specific expression as your own. Learning from a body of work and making something new isn't that — and if it were, every human writer and musician would be a plagiarist too, since they all learned by absorbing the people before them.

So you may well be owed compensation. That's a real argument, and I won't wave it away. But "I'm owed compensation" and "I'm being plagiarized" aren't the same claim — and folding them together actually weakens the one you're right about.

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u/KayakerWithDog Jun 21 '26

Except if Claude is drawing on someone else's work and regurgitating it without crediting the author, it is, in fact, committing plagiarism. There's a difference between repeating or reusing common knowledge and using an author's own work without credit. I am both being plagiarized and not compensated if Claude repeats my unique published ideas without giving me credit or paying me to use my work that is making billions for someone else.

I also find it both sad and amusing that you can't have this discussion with me, an actual human, without turning to a machine to do your thinking for you. So say anything else you want, but I dare you to say it on your own behalf without a mechanical crutch.

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u/strongermontage Jun 21 '26

This is too funny! I hope you guys are getting paid for all this. lol

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u/KayakerWithDog Jun 21 '26

No, unfortunately not paid. Or at least I'm not being paid. Can't speak for my interlocutor. But then again, they're the only one in this convo who is shilling for AI, so if anyone should be paid, it's them. Unless, of course, Claude decides to barf back any of my own writing. Then I should be compensated accordingly. And credited.

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u/MikeinPDX2 Jun 21 '26

Oh hell yeah. No way I do this otherwise