I’ve used ChatGPT as an editor and had very good results. I’ll write the whole thing myself and then feed it into ChatGPT for editing. And then review its output to manually decide which pieces I want to incorporate. The thoughts are my own, but sometimes ChatGPT is capable of finding more succinct ways of making the points.
I'd rather read the prompt
171–180 of 880 posts
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#172LLM cheating detection is an interesting case of the toupee fallacy. The most obvious ChatGPT cheating, like that mentioned in this article, is pretty easy to detect. However, a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect. I think if I was in the teaching profession I'd just leave, to be honest. The joy of reviewing student work will inevitably b…
On reviewing students' work: people exchange copies, get their hands on past similar assignments, get friends to do their homework , potentially each of them shadow the other in fields they're good at etc.
There always was a bunch of realistic options to not actually do your submitted work, and AI is merely makes it easier, more detectable and more scalable.
I think it moves the needle from 40 to 75, which is not great, but you'd already be holding your nose at student work half of the time before AI, so teaching had to be about more than that (and TBH it was, when I was in school teachers gave no fuck about submitted work if they didn't validate it by some additional face to face or test time)
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#173I’ve used ChatGPT as an editor and had very good results. I’ll write the whole thing myself and then feed it into ChatGPT for editing. And then review its output to manually decide which pieces I want to incorporate. The thoughts are my own, but sometimes ChatGPT is capable of finding more succinct ways of making the points.
I have found that it is no where near a human editor. I use LanguageTool to check the basics.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#174I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards. In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I…
In my experience Gemini can be really good at creative writing, but yes you have to prompt and edit it very carefully (feeding ideas, deleting ideas, setting tone, conciseness, multiple drafts, etc). https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1andqk8/gemini...
I use Gemini pretty much exclusively for creative writing largely because the long context lets you fit an entire manuscript plus ancillary materials, so it can serve as a solid beta reader, and when you ask it to outline a chapter it is very good at taking the events preceding and following into account. It's hard to overstate the value of having a decent beta reader that can iteratively review your entire work in seconds.
As a side note, I find the way that you interact with a LLM when doing creative writing is generally more important than the model. I have been having great results with LLMs for creative writing since ChatGPT 3.5, in part because I approach the model with a nucleus of a chapter and a concise summary of relevant details, then have it ask me a long list of questions to flesh out details, then when the questions stop being relevant I have have it create a narrative outline or rough draft which I can finish.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#175I’ve used ChatGPT as an editor and had very good results. I’ll write the whole thing myself and then feed it into ChatGPT for editing. And then review its output to manually decide which pieces I want to incorporate. The thoughts are my own, but sometimes ChatGPT is capable of finding more succinct ways of making the points.
I generally make sure I use diff tools for that type of task, because LLMs are really good at making subtle changes you don't easily notice that are wrong.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
this immediately comes to mind https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/04/29/supplied_can_ai_change_you... A study on whether LLMs can influence people on r/changemymind
This only came to light after the study had already been running for a few months. That proves that we can no longer tell for certain unless it's literal GPT-speak the author was too lazy to edit themselves. Teachers will lament the rise of AI-generated answers, but they will only ever complain about the blatantly obvious responses that are 100% copy-pasted. This is only an emerging phenomenon, and the next wave of p…
Maybe it will get us to rethink the grading system. Do we need to grade them, or do we need students to learn things? After all, if they grow up to be incompetent, they will be the ones suffering from it.
But I know it's easier said than done: if you get a student to realise that the time they spend at school is a unique opportunity for them to learn and grow, then you're job is almost done already.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you really want to read the students original thought? Why else would you become a teacher, if you didn't care about what your students think?
Because you want to pass on knowledge? I am not saying there aren't ANY situations where a teacher cares about what their students think, but the example given isn't really one of those times. The question is not one that has many opportunities for original thought; it is a basic question that everyone who knows the answer will answer similarly. The entire purpose is to ascertain if the person understands what was ta…
> Because you want to pass on knowledge?
Arguably, that's not what teachers mainly do (to an ever increasing proportion).
Most knowledge is easily available. A teacher is teaching students to think in productive ways, communicate their thoughts and understand what others are trying to tell them. For this task, it's essential that the teacher has some idea what the students are thinking, especially when it's something original.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#178ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email. I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I’ll ask ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me to email. You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points provided. Somewhere off…
Is the lake evaporation line/idea from literature/film, or is it from you personally? I haven’t heard it before is why I’m asking.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#179I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercis…
Depends on what you are looking for. I’ve turned half baked ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I’ve used them to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and complete. I’ve used them to get praised for writing comprehensive documentation. Part of my performance review is indirectly using bloat to seem sophisticated and thorough.
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Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#180> They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. No, this is just the de-facto "house style" of ChatGPT / GPT models, in much the same way that that that particular Thomas Kinkade-like style is the de-facto "house style" of Stable Diffusion models. You can very easily tell an LLM in your prompt to respond using a different style. (Or you can set it up to…
I tried changing the house style. https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c9f4-ed48-8010-bc3e-58299140c8... In the real world I would at least remove the em dashes. It’s a dead give away for LLM generated text.
That was not a good attempt at changing the style.
You can't just say "don't sound like an LLM." The LLM does not in fact know that it is "speaking like an LLM"; it just thinks that it's speaking the way the "average person" speaks, according to everything it's ever been shown. If you told it "just speak like a human being"... that's what it already thought it was doing!
You have to tell the LLM a specific way to speak. Like directing an image generator to use a specific visual style.
You can say "ape the style of [some person who has a lot of public writing in the base model's web training corpus — Paul Graham, maybe?]". But that coverage will be spotty, and it's also questionably ethical (just like style-aping in image generation.)
But an LLM will do even better if you tell it to speak the in some "common mode" of speech: e.g. "an email from HR", or "a shitpost rant on Reddit" or "an article in a pop-science magazine."