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Do your own writing

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Re: Do your own writing

#31

Post by furyofantares »

nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

I'm torn.

I sometimes use them when I'm stuck on something, trying to brainstorm. The ideas are always garbage, but sometimes there is a hint of something in one of them that gets me started in a good direction.

Sometimes, though, I feel MORE stuck after seeing a wall of bad ideas. I don't know how to weigh this. I wasn't making progress to begin with, so does "more stuck" even make sense?

I guess I must feel it's slightly useful overall as I still do it.

Re: Do your own writing

#32

Post by dexwiz »

monkaiju wrote: post #25
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.

I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging. The…

Sometimes people just need something else to tell them their ideas are valid. Validation is a core principle of therapeutic care. Procrastination is tightly linked to fear of a negative outcome. LLMs can help with both of these. They can validate ideas in the now which can help overcome some of that anxiety.

Unfortunately they can also validate some really bad ideas.

Re: Do your own writing

#33

Post by lokar »

CharlesW wrote: post #5

The title and of this article is Don't Let AI Write For You , when its point seems to be closer to Don't Let AI Think For You (see "Thinking"). This distinction is important, because (1) writing is not the only way to faciliate thinking, and (2) writing is not neccessarily even the best way to facilitate thinking. It's definitely not the best way (a) for everyone, (b) in every situation. Audio can be a great way to c…

I would count direct dictation (eg someone writes down what you say, and that is the final text), as writing, in the context of producing a document (book, etc) that you intend others to read.

It's not the same thing as talking to someone (or a group) about something.

Re: Do your own writing

#35

Post by satvikpendem »

monkaiju wrote: post #25
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.

I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging. The…

Sometimes I don't want creativity though, I'm just not familiar enough with the solution space and I use the LLM as a sort of gradient descent simulator to the right solution to my problem (the LLM which itself used gradient descent when trained, meta, I know). I am not looking for wholly new solutions, just one that fits the problem the best, just as one could Google that information but LLMs save even that searching time.

Re: Do your own writing

#36

Post by criddell »

firefoxd wrote: post #23

I'm 100% an advocate for not using LLM for writing... But I'll tell you were I use them just for that. For ceremonies. A large part of our work is about writing documents that no one will read, but you'll get 10 different reminders that they need to get done. These are documents that circulate, need approval from different stake holders. Everybody stamps their name on it, without ever reading it. I used to spend so m…

If it's very mechanical you probably aren't losing out on anything by using a machine to produce it.

Re: Do your own writing

#37

Post by keithnz »

CharlesW wrote: post #5

The title and of this article is Don't Let AI Write For You , when its point seems to be closer to Don't Let AI Think For You (see "Thinking"). This distinction is important, because (1) writing is not the only way to faciliate thinking, and (2) writing is not neccessarily even the best way to facilitate thinking. It's definitely not the best way (a) for everyone, (b) in every situation. Audio can be a great way to c…

I'm finding AI great to have a conversation with to flesh out ideas, with the added benefit it can summarize everything at the end

Re: Do your own writing

#38

Post by tines »

keithnz wrote: post #37
CharlesW wrote: post #5

The title and of this article is Don't Let AI Write For You , when its point seems to be closer to Don't Let AI Think For You (see "Thinking"). This distinction is important, because (1) writing is not the only way to faciliate thinking, and (2) writing is not neccessarily even the best way to facilitate thinking. It's definitely not the best way (a) for everyone, (b) in every situation. Audio can be a great way to c…

I'm finding AI great to have a conversation with to flesh out ideas, with the added benefit it can summarize everything at the end

You're being steered without being aware of it.

Re: Do your own writing

#39

Post by bluepeter »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #27
bluepeter wrote: post #13

Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." Much like days of yore where we all approached Google searches with acrobatic language knowing how to specifically get something done. Now? I am pushing so much of my writing into prompts into AI where I know the AI will understand me even with lots of typos and run-on sentences... Is that a bad thing? A good thing? I am able to be so…

> Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) No. Don't pretend your taking shortcuts is less questionable because everyone else is doing it too. We're not. Own it yourself, don't get me involved. > I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words If you think value comes from volume of words you really need to understand writing better.

Ok, but 3 generations ago, shorthand was a core skill that any competent professional could read and extract MORE value from than laboriously typeset prose. Something similar is probably happening now with prompt-ese and human-to-human (vs just AI) writing.

Re: Do your own writing

#40

Post by sikiri_app »

paulpauper wrote: post #14

Letting an LLM write for you is like paying somebody to work out for you. The problem with writing is the feedback tends to be inconsistent. With going to the gym you can track your progress quantitatively such as how fast or far you can run or weight lifted, but it's sometimes hard to know if you're improving at writing.

real fact and it is an interesting point.
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