Stop Telling Me to Ask an LLM

So I went back to The Business and asked "why would you even want to do that?" and the answer is that it centers on business processes that I can't reveal due to NDA. Other technical people dismissing the problem with "why would you even ..." is not productive. Many, many times, I have indeed communicated the why to those I am seeking help from and they go silent. Telling them didn't help me solve the problem. Many times, the explanation is pretty involved and people-heavy and ... not important to solving the problem. And more often than you'd think, I'm just not allowed to tell you.

Now, if you think at the next level, perhaps you might suggest looking at the problem from an angle you've seen before; or that just occurred to you and hasn't yet become apparent to me. Or you happen to know an alternate product that provides something close to what I'm asking. Great, that's helpful!

Attempting to diagnose my client's or employer's asinine process - I have indeed already done that and it is indeed asinine, and not up for changing - is shortsighted, just like many of the neophytes I've worked with throughout my career.

I'm a pretty late adopter and nost of my LLM use has been

1) vibe red teaming (having Codex RE the data flow of various extensions, comparing the attestation with the ToS, seeing if I think it's a potential FTC violation) which is just for fun and I do nothing with,

2) feeding tons of documentation into NotebookLM and asking if everything in a short document is attributable (often when it says it's not, it is, but you have to kind of read between the lines). I think this is a good use of AI if rigorously fact-checked.

3) feeding 20-30 job descriptions + cover letters, asking for outlines for new cover letters. For this one I think it may be faster to go back to creating templates because I have to entirely rewrite things anyway. (It does add lies! And conflates things! V bad for a cover letter!) But I think use of machines to write letters being read by machines is pretty justifiable.

4) I've been experimenting with Claude editing. I think what bugs me about people assuming everything is LLM-written is that it's rather dismissive and difficult to tell the difference between "a human spent X hours on this and made some stylistic tweets" vs "a machine wrote this in response to a prompt."

I do find myself immediately scrolling away too, though. A friend had a LI post for a course he's teaching and I could tell it was AI because it's not how he writes. That said, the post performed phenomenally well, which is probably more important for selling a course than my opinion is.

I'm also not confident in my ability to distinguish between 1) something an AI write from scratch, 2) something he may have iterated with an AI, feeding it many different versions of a post, going back and forth, etc. I think both would show up as AI in the extensions I've seen, but I also think they're very different.

My thought process on it is complicated. I think I'm more disappointed than anything. It made me sad because his human writing is so unique, and I'd hate to see it all outsourced. But I also don't have the same "you didn't even bother to write this so why should I read it" reaction so many do, given that I don't know how much time he spent on it or the reasoning.

Mostly I worry that if the whole of human knowledge becomes AI slop, and AI is then being fed that slop, that the writing would get even worse.

Re: fact-checking, I am far too paranoid/obsessive/whatever about accuracy to not review changes! Even NotebookLM is weirdly drawn to the first document you feed it, so if you have a second contradictory document, it seems to want to tell you why it's wrong. To be fair, I know people like this, too. The first version of a story they hear is what they will forever believe, even if every other version contradicts it.