Is “natural sounding” actually a useful goal when editing AI writing?
I've started questioning the phrase “make it sound natural” because I'm not sure it's specific enough to be useful.
Natural writing can mean completely different things depending on the person. A professor, a teenager, a journalist, a business owner, and a casual Reddit user are all going to have very different ideas of what natural writing sounds like.
Even within the same type of writing, people have completely different voices. Some people are direct, some are detailed, some use humor, and others keep everything very simple.
So maybe the real goal shouldn't be to make AI writing sound “human.” Maybe it should be to make it sound like a particular person with a particular way of communicating.
What do you think?
If you were trying to improve an AI-generated paragraph, would you focus on making it generally natural, or would you focus specifically on making it sound like your own writing?
I'm curious whether people have found that distinction useful when editing.