By the time I return the text, a reader should have no idea it started with a machine.
AI can write — that is clear. What it cannot do reliably is write well — and the difference matters more than most people realise until a reader notices, or worse, until they stop reading.
Post-editing is the process of reviewing, correcting and improving AI-generated content before it goes out to readers. AI tools assisting translation and language — ChatGPT, DeepL, Grammarly and others — have improved quickly, but still have consistent blind spots that a trained human eye catches without difficulty. This is a known problem, making machine translation post-editing (MTPE) ever more important.
AI text inflates. The result is text that feels assembled rather than written. Readers sense it even when they cannot name it.
AI text reaches for words like "crucial", "pivotal", "vibrant" and "underscores" far more often than any human writer would. It pads sentences with participle phrases that sound analytical but add nothing — "reflecting the broader landscape", "showcasing its commitment to excellence." It avoids plain constructions, preferring "serves as a testament to" over the simpler "shows."
AI translation has its own problems. It handles standard sentences well and struggles with anything idiomatic, technical or context-dependent. Legal terms are rendered colloquially. Formal register slips into casual English. A phrase that works naturally in Polish becomes a Polonism in English — grammatically defensible but immediately recognisable as foreign. For business and legal documents, that recognition has consequences.
Whether you have used ChatGPT or another tool to draft a report, produce website content or prepare a communication, I review the text with the same attention I bring to any document — checking not just for errors, but for the places where the writing passes a grammar check and still sounds wrong.
For contracts, legal documents or business materials translated via DeepL or similar tools, I check for Polonisms, register slips, colloquial legal terms and any place where the output is technically correct but would strike an English reader as foreign.
At FLC Poland, my post-editing service covers both. By the time I return the text, a reader should have no idea it started with a machine.
