141–150 of 454 posts
I did writing courses as elective in college, the biggest lost truth is that there is no one correct writing style, (you build) being a writer at any capacity means cultivating your own writing voice, (yours) which is an expression of who you are. (voice)
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I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effo…
It's because they view the LLM's output as "their thoughts." They told the LLM (via the prompt) what to do—often with loads of run-on sentences and long trains-of-thought. From their perspective, the LLM is just acting as a translation tool, saving them the trouble of having to think (about grammar, ideal wording, or even the order in which their thoughts should be presented). They treat it as "just another tool" to…
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> 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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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.
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.
Or not. I mean, if you had no voice and nothing to say before, you can amplify that signal 10x now. Basically, you’re boosting your brand as a tasteless brainless schlub.
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> 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
Sure, but doing an interpretative dance or an abstract painting can make you reconceptualize the whole concept too. But we're not really pushing those tools as much as writing. Take for example a non-native writer of the language. I'm sure having to check up words from a dictionary may help to reconceptualize things, but I'm sure also that it's not often very efficient. And I think similar is going on for natives too…
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> Not all writing is thinking Would love an example where you’re able to write without transferring your thoughts. Besides the obvious: fjcjfjrnjfjfifjfnrnakosifnrbwkofgjrj
I did think about this while writing, and I made the compromise to accept that someone will nitpick about it to hopefully drive the point better for those willing to read it charitably. QED?