Writing with LLM is not a shame • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing with LLM is not a shame

#151

Post by viccis » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

caconym_ wrote: post #150

viccis wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm widely read. Enough that I'm not a pseud trying to imply that I read a lot of super duper hard books as evidence that my midwit opinion on emdashes is better than the guy here who made me mad by criticizing them. Let me know if you're so stoked at reading Infinite Jest that you think that's proof I'm wrong.

You made this claim above: > I don't know of any prose that relies on crutch dashes If that's true then you are not widely read, and if it's false then you are a disingenuous troll and your comments here are exactly as worthless as they look. Either way your opinion is still bad. Sorry you're mad about it, but I'm done here.

Good—see ya!

Re: Writing with LLM is not a shame

#152

Post by AlecSchueler » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

viccis wrote: post #148

AlecSchueler wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is really below the standards one might expect here, a total and hominem. Why don't you open one of your own big boy books and tell us which one it was that used no em dashes?

Oh no I did a and hominem My whole point was that opening "big boy books" doesn't actually make a point about the validity of a thing. That's just argumentum ad populum.

And what's your argument? YOU have never read any literature that made use of em dashes? But you're showing no evidence of these dashless works at all?

N=0

And yes, you made an ad hominem, check the site guidelines. You can make your point without being a dick.

Re: Writing with LLM is not a shame

#153

Post by rstuart4133 » Mon, Sep 01, 2025, 11:15 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #145

rstuart4133 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always used AI as an editor, which is to say I give it the my efforts and ask it to highlight mistakes. They invariably find a few. They occasionally miss a few too, so they aren't particularly reliable editors. They aren't reliable at anything I guess, but for English I have nothing else, and they are better than nothing. I do wish they would use a more effective way of highlighting their suggested changes, suc…

You can prompt AI to focus on writing prose that is optimized for impact and clarity, and its output is MUCH better.

Yes, it is much better. But now rather than my words, it's an AI's words. Despite being much better than the usual slop, they aren't in my style, the thoughts have become muddied, and the mistakes (there will be some) are no longer mine.

As I said that doesn't matter if you are being paid by the word. If the goal is to be paid, who cares where the words come from if the reader laps it up. But if you enjoy writing for it's own sake, and if you are doing because you've found the discipline involved writing something down in a way others will understand is an excellent way to sharpen you're own understanding, then the less a AI is involved the better. Sadly I need a proof reader, an AI does an acceptable job, and they are free, for now.

Re: Writing with LLM is not a shame

#154

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

akkad33 wrote: post #71

catapart wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"el" begins with a vowel sound, so "an" is the appropriate article. Is not about the letter, it's about practical pronunciation. "An r before a u, and an m or an f".

It depends on how you read it. You could say "a large language model".. I think both are right

Then the "an" tells us that the author pronounces "LLM" as "Ell-ell-em".

Re: Writing with LLM is not a shame

#155

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 4:26 PM UTC

phoenixhaber wrote: post #101

[dead]

> First, there is the question of the mythology of the author. Would Shakespeare be himself if he had an AI ghost write his books? Would we care as much?

Idunno... Would Homer? Shakespeare is one thing; we have at least some biographical detail on him. (And even then, quite a few people seem to believe he didn't write the works attributed to him.) But "Homer - the author of the Iliad and the Odyssée" is so unknown to us that experts argue about whether he even existed, whether he was one person or several, and so on. We know him only through his (or, eh, "his") works. Now there you can talk about "the mythology of the author"; that's "mythological", indeed! :-)

For all we know, Homer — or "Homer" — could be an AI! Yeah, sure, very far-fetched and unlikely. But let's say our descendants in the 26th (or 387th) century invent time travel (or their AIs do...), and an AI goes to bronze-age (or was it early iron-age?) Greece and plants these stories, perhaps posing as a person called "Homer"[1], and they survive to this day attributed to this possibly-existing-or-possibly-fictitious person, and are the stories we know as "the Iliad" and "the Odyssée".

Would that change anything about how we percieve, or should percieve, the stories? If so, what and how? Does "an AI" differ from "person or persons unknown" in this scenario?

___

[1]: Or it's a flesh-and-blood person using the moniker that does the actual posing-as-"Homer", but he only peddles the stories an AI wrote for him in his home period; whatever.