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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)

#462
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because I didn’t need to type it. If you are a fast typer and love type emails then sure you don’t benefit from it. I don’t love it and I don’t type that fast.

It didnt get it from the docs. There is no public docs. I know it because I wrote the code.

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

#463

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 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…

"You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document."

I am a subject matter expert in certain fields of real estate in Canada. This is how I draft my teaching materials, articles and educational content. I use it as a human amplifier of my brain as it increases my output which other people will pay money for. People who complain that LLM writing is slop have not encountered good AI-human hybrid outputs. Like visual effects in movies, the best examples are imperceptible and do not get in the way of storytelling.

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