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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)

#121

Post by altmanaltman »

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.

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 different from thinking logically about a concept and writing it down which I think is where you are getting at.

The definition of writing and thinking is too broad in that sentence even though it does apply in several obvious cateogires within that at different levels.

And also "writing helps us think about the world" is too broad again. Why? Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world? I just wrote it because i felt like writing it. Why wouldn't you consider that writing?

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

#122

Post by jeremyjh »

bbor wrote: post #100
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…

They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target. Ofc the rest is all right on, but I'd quibble with this specific idea. LLMs are absolutely targeted at modeling human understanding, which is the same faculty that contains what we call perception (!= sensibility) and intuition (!= rationality). It would be nice to train them to be completely alien from the gr…

We don't have a reward function for "human understanding". We reward the appearance of understanding. We define goals that we cannot conceive of reaching without something like understanding happening. There is something happening, but it is alien and counter-intuitive - it makes bizarre mistakes that betray it - and we don't know what it is. I'm pretty sure it is not human understanding.

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

#123

Post by LtWorf »

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.

They are worse than most people at communicating ideas.

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

#124

Post by anon84873628 »

masswerk wrote: post #34
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,…

I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well. There's also the problem that certain…

[dead]

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by ModernMech »

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 can be thinking. There's a huge presumption that if someone is banging away on a keyboard they're doing work because you can hear and see them doing stuff. But that's the whole plot of The Shining -- Jack despite all his writing wasn't thinking at all.

Likewise using AI can be thoughtless, but it doesn't have to be. I don't see why a valid creation process can't be like this Simpson's meme[1], where you start with a rough object and then cut away and refine until it's done. I don't see it as lacking merit or requiring less thinking compared to starting from a blank canvas and adding more until it's done.

And either way at the end of the day the writing artifact stands on its own. It's either good or bad, taste permitting, and can be evaluated for what it is.

[1] https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4D22AQFoqRgMxteTNg/fee...

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

#128

Post by kjs3 »

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.

[flagged]

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

#129

Post by anon84873628 »

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.

Wow, you must be one very unique and special person if you converse the way you write. By definition, a carefully written and edited piece will be much more refined and cogent than an extemporaneous conversation.

Just watch an interview with a famous author. Or compare a legal brief to what court actually sounds like.

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

#130

Post by riskable »

jampekka wrote: post #76
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.

> LLMs write better than most journalists. I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.

I've come to trust their grammar corrections implicitly. So much that I've setup a "Fix Grammar" command with Obsidian Copilot that I'll just let it run on a whole chapter (YOLO mode):

    Proofread the following text for grammar, punctuation, and typos while
    strictly preserving the author's voice, pacing, and intentional stylistic
    choices (such as sentence fragments or character dialogue quirks).

    Rules:
    - Correct objective spelling errors, misused words, and unintended punctuation mistakes.
    - Smooth out unintentional syntactic snags without homogenizing unique phrasing.
    - Retain all Markdown formatting.
    - Return ONLY the corrected text with no intro, summary, or explanations.

    Text to edit:
    {selection}
About a year ago, all three big AI vendors could end up with strange "corrections" that would throw you off, but not anymore. As far as I'm concerned, they've solved "the grammar checking problem."

The complexity in this command is there for phi4:14b and qwen3:14b which I run locally via ollama. If the text doesn't have any Obsidian callouts or similar, fancy stuff I just use either of those and they do a fantastic job in seconds. For Big AI (e.g. Gemini, GPT-whatevs, Claude) you can literally just tell it, "fix the grammar." No need for the lengthy command.

NOTE: I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL). Occasionally, Big AI (Gemini, specifically) have disagreements about whether a comma is necessary in a particular spot but it's always of no real consequence.

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