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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)

#81

Post by fn-mote »

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.

Learning to write clearly = very valuable.

Reading what someone wrote while they were learning = less valuable.

I just want the clear communication.

ALTERNATIVE Thought: I’m willing to post/comment to help them if I think they will listen. An LLM behind the writing destroys this part of the community, because there’s nobody to teach/argue with. It’s just wasting our time and energy.

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

#82

Post by agile-gift0262 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #62

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 tho…

I completely agree. And I'd say that at least in my case, it applies to both writing prose and code

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

#84

Post by pxmpxm »

aviperl wrote: post #17

When I log into LinkedIn, it seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand. Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting. There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.

So much this. My average linkedin in exprience is a sprinkling of updates from people i personally know, in an oceon of inane "content" by ~$0 net worth people with 40 word self professed titles.

I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.

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

#85

Post by iterateoften »

jampekka wrote: post #74
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

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 tho…

> 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. I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there…

> You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents.

Hard disagree. Constraint is the driver of creativity. Also rewording sentences to sound better or make sense can make you reconceptualize the whole concept you are expressing

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

#86

Post by 27183 »

jampekka wrote: post #74
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

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 tho…

> 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. I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there…

The number of times the friction of writing has saved me from prematurely communicating a poorly understood idea must be in the hundreds or maybe thousands. For me when something is difficult to write about, it's a very good signal that I don't understand it well enough. So I think all the things you label as aspects of writing that aren't necessarily "thinking" are nonetheless good for thinking because they provide some necessary friction.

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

#87

Post by throwaway_fange »

Even worse in the corporate world. Most emails about some launch announcements are now entirely written by AI. TTFED (Time to first em dash) is usually like 30 words or less.

What once has been a thoughtful email trying to describe in few words why something is launched and how it might help you etc. is now almost a novel with more paragraphs than substance within the tool being launched.

This makes it almost impossible to stand out as well. Where in the past someone could create a grea looking announcement (eye-candy) and think deeply about what to write there, and then hopefully stand out in the sea of mediocre ones, now every little email seems like it's a multi-million $ SaaS being launched. Just last week we launched an internal tool which was in development for months, and literally a handful of people even bothered clicking the links within the announcement.

This is being one-upped still by leaders writing big project plans for 4-5 months ahead, using AI. Everything from the inception of the project(s) is AI. It has bizzare timelines, more codenames than actual people working on it, the vaguest descriptions of what the things will do etc. Then this is trickled down into the teams, and they... to no ones surprise, throw more LLM at it. Now they start working on the LLM project plan using claude etc. The end-effect is baffling in all sorts of ways (quality, ui/ux, all pages looking different), AI generated images and more. And then, finally, they colaborate on big announcement emails using AI. And if you don't share the optimism and try to explain why this is silly, you're an AI sceptic...

True story from within one of the biggest companies in the world.

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

#88

Post by fwlr »

jampekka wrote: post #74
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

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 tho…

> 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. I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there…

Strange! I would quite specifically highlight “having to do the reader’s thinking for them”, as well as more generally developing the skill to “communicate non-interactively with an unknown audience”, as extremely valuable upgrades to my thinking.

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

#89

Post by Dumblydorr »

jampekka wrote: post #74
jeremyjh wrote: post #62

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 tho…

> 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. I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there…

All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought.

And not all thinking is writing is a clear truism, there’s no point to even stating that.

Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.

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