Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bcantrill.dtrace.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 436 posts

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

#311

Post by DenisM »

fwlr wrote: post #88
jampekka wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

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.

Most valuable thinking is done at the margins, where you don’t have much capacity to emphasize with a diverse and unknown audience.

That said, abdicating to an LLM is the worst of all worlds - you’re not thinking and the product is not tailored.

The solution is obvious - write as much detail as you need and allow readers to interrogate the virtual you with an LLM, maybe not even reading what you write.

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

#312

Post by WCSTombs »

SecretDreams wrote: post #67
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.

I agree with the sentiment with a small caveat, since IMO good writers don't write the way that they talk. The very simple reason is that you can revise your writing but not your talking. But yeah, I completely agree that using an LLM to write your words is intellectual catfishing, and that's a great way to phrase it.

I'm in the process of writing a pretty long essay that has taken a few months. I've written the first draft, and I'm almost done with the second draft, which incurred substantial revisions. At the end of the process, maybe no sentence will be something I would actually utter in person, but the writing is still something I created, and as such, it is a representation of who I am as a person. Had I used an LLM to do any of the writing, that would no longer be the case, and the writing would at best represent me as a person when the LLM is at my side, and at worst (and most likely) not really represent me at all.

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

#313

Post by thaumasiotes »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #302
habinero wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Translation from one language into another Bad example, because translation is deeply creative. You can't blindly mill one language into another, because words and phrases and concepts and cultural references in one language frequently don't map 1:1. You have to find a way to convey meaning as closely as you can and not necessarily the words.

Amusingly I absolutely abhor translations done by people who think the way you do. I want a translation that's as literal as possible and which provides the necessary commentary for me to understand any alien concepts, idioms, customs, etc. I absolutely never want "translated" cultural references. At that point the "translator" is nothing more than a shitty fan fiction author as far as I'm concerned. Of course the ab…

But you aren't disagreeing with your parent comment. You seem to have a strong opinion that you are; that opinion is incorrect.

Words refer to a broad semantic region, a phenomenon technically known as "polysemy".

The range of a word in one language is always different from the range of analogous words in another language. This is a classification problem. And a translator must think about how to solve it. Imagine a Venn diagram with 20 circles that each overlap the other 19 to differing degrees. What does it mean to designate one of those circles as "the literal translation" of a foreign word?

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

#315

Post by paulpauper »

People, such as the author, who are smart and competent--be it writing, math ,coding etc.--I think systematically underestimate the difficulty of said task for a general population. Things they take for granted, such as writing well, are surprisingly difficult for large proportion of the general population

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

#316

Post by CrimsonRain »

zahlman wrote: post #228
CrimsonRain wrote: post #68

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.

> But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap. The problem is precisely that LLM writing is that exact thing (at least by default), but even more so . Longer-form, more "perfect" in some technical sense, and yet crappier.

not all of them.

and you can always just ask to be concise.

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

#318

Post by IanCal »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #89
jampekka wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

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.

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

Much like money decoupled selling and buying to move away from bartering, writing decoupled saying and hearing so they didn't have to happen at the same time. The incredible step that happened was not that people had to think a whole lot, it was that thinking that was already happening had to happen once.

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

Of course you can. You can write down exactly what you hear, for dictation.

You can write down a stream of consciousness and put barely any thought into it at all.

I can't help but feel most here are massively over estimating human writing. Human writing is, almost universally, terrible. We have entire jobs that are hard to fill just to make things sort of ok. Good writing is a small subset of human output.

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

#319

Post by IanCal »

max__dev wrote: post #186
altmanaltman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thinking over this comment for a while now. I think yes, you are correct that thought is involved in writing but I don't think it is possible to claim "all writing is thinking when done by a human". Like what type of thinking are you claiming here? Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is…

You wrote "apt apt apt apt apt apt" to prove a very specific point no? Absolutely requires reasoning and understanding the problem to go there. And good luck getting an LLM to do that.

> And good luck getting an LLM to do that.

Have you never asked a decent model to explain something to you? You should try it.

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

#320

Post by ptx »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #115
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…

On the other hand there is so much things that don’t require hard thinking. An example is I got an email the other day from a supplier asking if they can turn off their old email. It didn’t require ”thinking”. All I had to communicate was ”turn off graphql but don’t touch restapi”. Instead of sending off such a short and maybe unclear reply I had AI type up a concise and clear reply with exactly what can be turned of…

I don't see how the AI reply could be more concise, clear or exact than what you wrote. If it didn't get the details from you, where did it get them? How do you know it got them right? If it got them from the docs, why not just point to the docs?
Post reply on HN