I have found LLM’s to be a really good thinking partner for writing. I start with a rough idea then proceed to argue for hours challenging ourselves and throwing away a lot of drafts until something materially useful emerges. It is a very different approach to writing… much morel like attaching a debugger to my thought process.
Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
271–280 of 449 posts
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#272I’d rather be embarrassed by my writing than embarrassed by an LLM speaking for me.
Same here.
I remember the first time my email client made an unsolicited suggestion about how to compose a thank you note to my grandmother. After seeing what it had autocompleted I thought, "oh, wow that's a lot better than I could do" for a split second before realizing, "wait, what the hell is wrong with me getting a computer to write a thank you note to my grandmother!"
I've never even tried to use AI to write since. I'd be so embarrassed.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#273We seem to be very sensitive to style. It can be rather distracting. This writing contained 7 exclamation marks and 9 colons.
As for em-dashes, there were 7.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified. LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already…
> Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use. All that "X is…
I think you're missing the context, which isn't musing on what it is to be human and can machines think, but the purpose of Joe Smith's LinkedIn account expressing that he has ideas about X is to convey the message that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to venture an opinion on it, and Joe Smith has actually just set up an automated process to generate content without thinking about X, that perverts the purpose of communicating that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to propose the following ideas he been thinking about...
Similarly if Joe's contribution to his long form "idea" is a couple of bullet points, a program trained on flowery phrasing and a weighted average of everyone else's ideas isn't communicating Joe's thoughts on the topic, it's just adding words.
The debate on whether Claude actually thinks or not is orthogonal to the fact that outsourcing your "thought leadership" to it is avoiding thinking or leading. If I want to know how Wikipedia or Claude summarise wider human thought about the topic, I can find their websites thanks
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer
It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppress their intuitive heuristics formed from the bait and switch of being subjected to endless LLM spam every day and blame them for not giving you a fair chance.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Not all writing is thinking Would love an example where you’re able to write without transferring your thoughts. Besides the obvious: fjcjfjrnjfjfifjfnrnakosifnrbwkofgjrj
I can think of the following:
(1) Translation from one language into another
(2) Transcription from one medium (audio) into another (text)
(3) Deception to obfuscate your thoughts
(4) Posting things like "First!", "This.", "Just google it.", etc.
(5) Textbook answers with no original thought.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#277These 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 work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think. It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a la…
> I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think.
Later
> I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document.
So in the future, it won't be necessary for you to think?
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#278I'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,…
> You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing.
That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful.
If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"?
Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#279Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would almost never transmit LLM output without a decent amount of editing. But I also don't understand people who paint it as this horrible offensive unreadable slop. Calling it better than most journalists is extreme (and probably the reason for down votes), but it must certainly be better than the average person. We're hearing this criticism from the highly educated professional class people who bother to have th…
> But I also don't understand people who paint it as this horrible offensive unreadable slop. When a piece of writing is full of LLM tells, I find it as offensive as any formulaic writing, except that the LLM style has quickly become pervasive, much more so than any other type of formulaic writing. I’m not reacting out of some general dislike of LLMs - I use them daily. I’m reacting because I don’t like terrible writ…
Well said. When I realize I've been reading LLM filler and leave the page it's the same reaction I would have pre-2021 thinking I found a good source for something and realizing I'm actually reading blogspam.
The difference being this variant of blogspam is produced with basically zero cost and thus the infection has spread far beyond SEO into every UI surface with textbox. Plus there are now passionate defenders who insist finding their blogspam unpleasant to read is disrespectful or anti-progress somehow.