Can You Make It Sound Like You? Post-Editing LLM-Generated Text for Personal Style

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Baumler, Connor, Bao, Calvin, Nghiem, Huy, Yang, Xinchen, Carpuat, Marine, Daumé III, Hal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Baumler, Connor
Bao, Calvin
Nghiem, Huy
Yang, Xinchen
Carpuat, Marine
Daumé III, Hal
author_facet Baumler, Connor
Bao, Calvin
Nghiem, Huy
Yang, Xinchen
Carpuat, Marine
Daumé III, Hal
contents Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) for writing tasks, users may hesitate to rely on LLMs when personal style is important. Post-editing LLM-generated drafts or translations is a common collaborative writing strategy, but it remains unclear whether users can effectively reshape LLM-generated text to reflect their personal style. We conduct a pre-registered online study ($n=81$) in which participants post-edit LLM-generated drafts for writing tasks where personal style matters to them. Using embedding-based style similarity metrics, we find that post-editing increases stylistic similarity to participants' unassisted writing and reduces similarity to fully LLM-generated output. However, post-edited text still remains stylistically closer in style to LLM text than to participants' unassisted control text, and it exhibits reduced stylistic diversity compared to unassisted human text. We find a gap between perceived stylistic authenticity and model-measured stylistic similarity, with post-edited text often perceived as representative of participants' personal style despite remaining detectable LLM stylistic traces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can You Make It Sound Like You? Post-Editing LLM-Generated Text for Personal Style
Baumler, Connor
Bao, Calvin
Nghiem, Huy
Yang, Xinchen
Carpuat, Marine
Daumé III, Hal
Computation and Language
Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) for writing tasks, users may hesitate to rely on LLMs when personal style is important. Post-editing LLM-generated drafts or translations is a common collaborative writing strategy, but it remains unclear whether users can effectively reshape LLM-generated text to reflect their personal style. We conduct a pre-registered online study ($n=81$) in which participants post-edit LLM-generated drafts for writing tasks where personal style matters to them. Using embedding-based style similarity metrics, we find that post-editing increases stylistic similarity to participants' unassisted writing and reduces similarity to fully LLM-generated output. However, post-edited text still remains stylistically closer in style to LLM text than to participants' unassisted control text, and it exhibits reduced stylistic diversity compared to unassisted human text. We find a gap between perceived stylistic authenticity and model-measured stylistic similarity, with post-edited text often perceived as representative of participants' personal style despite remaining detectable LLM stylistic traces.
title Can You Make It Sound Like You? Post-Editing LLM-Generated Text for Personal Style
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24444