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Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

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Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#61

Post by Hasz »

LLMs are not defacto bad at writing and are not defacto distinguishable from human writers. Lots of people are just lazy, never customize anything, and tell chatgpt to make them a post about x to be a "thought leader". Most are even lazier and blatantly rip off some else for their own means.

However, it is perfectly possible to have an LLM imitate an existing corpus of writing (yours or someone else) and with a good prompt, idea, and editing, to produce high quality writing (in every sense of the word) with an LLM.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#62

Post by jeremyjh »

These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you:

Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.

Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing.

None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#63

Post by CuriouslyC »

IshKebab wrote: post #36
dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now: 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself. 2. The prose style is horrible to read. If we eliminate the second reason th…

> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.

You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#64

Post by cjauvin »

I think this is due to the fact that the language game that we have collectively decided to play, with AI, is not yet mature enough. In the language game of “giving a gift”, for instance, there is a distinction between giving a gift that you made yourself, and one that you bought at the store, but it is not that great, nobody cares a lot anymore. Right now, the language game of publishing words on the internet is strongly associated with the notion that these are “my words”, and the fact that they might have been written by a machine instead, introduces some discomfort. But it’s possible to imagine a future where this language game will have evolved enough that the notion of authorship by a particular machine entity, will not in itself be such an important issue, anymore.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#65

Post by manlymuppet »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs.

The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.

I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#66

Post by Kiro »

I remember when I saw it the "list with things prefixed with emojis" the first time, and started doing it myself thinking it was a great way to break down things visually. Looking back at the things I wrote then people would definitely assume it's LLM.

I sometimes see posts on LinkedIn that look LLM generated but also makes me think it's someone who has seen a post, thinking it's a great way to convey a point and tries to adapt the style, without realizing it's a smell.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#67

Post by SecretDreams »

dynm wrote: post #14

I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…

Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#68

Post by CrimsonRain »

LLMs write better than most journalists. It also writes better than majority people in the world when it comes to English as majority are really bad in writing.

And of course, LLMs write as you prompt.

Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.

Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

#69

Post by mtabini »

jgrahamc wrote: post #56
mtabini wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house sty…

I take a different stance on your final point. I think people should absolutely not use AI tools for functional communication as a crutch because they struggle with writing clearly. They need to learn to write clearly. I believe there's a direct connection between clear thought and clear words.

I think it's good to be pragmatic about these things. To me, it's similar to wondering whether we insist that doctors learn to write well, or we just give them a computer so that the pharmacist doesn't have to play philologist with their scripts. The vast majority of communication is routine, and can probably be improved with automated tools.

Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.

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