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Do your own writing

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Re: Do your own writing

#21

Post by contagiousflow »

j45 wrote: post #18
nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

Asking the LLM better will return better than average and bland and mainstream results.

Why would they return "better" results?

Re: Do your own writing

#22

Post by paulpauper »

nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

LLMs can come sometimes up with novel or non-obvious insights...or just regurgitate google-like results.

Re: Do your own writing

#23

Post by firefoxd »

I'm 100% an advocate for not using LLM for writing... But I'll tell you were I use them just for that. For ceremonies.

A large part of our work is about writing documents that no one will read, but you'll get 10 different reminders that they need to get done. These are documents that circulate, need approval from different stake holders. Everybody stamps their name on it, without ever reading it. I used to spend so much time crafting these documents. Now I use an LLM, the stakeholders are probably using an LLM to summarize it, someone is happy, they are filed for the records.

I call these "ceremonies" because they are a requirement we have, it helps no one, we don't know why we have to do it, but no one wants to question it.

Re: Do your own writing

#25

Post by monkaiju »

dummydummy1234 wrote: post #16
nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.

I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging.

The moment I bring in a conversational element, I want a being that actually has problem comprehension and creativity which an LLM by definition does not.

Re: Do your own writing

#26

Post by NewsaHackO »

nerevarthelame wrote: post #12

I agree with most of this, but my one qualm is the notion that LLMs "are particularly good at generating ideas." It's fair enough that you can discard any bad ideas they generate. But by design, the recommendations will be average, bland, mainstream, and mostly devoid of nuance. I wouldn't encourage anyone to use LLMs to generate ideas if you're trying to create interesting or novel ideas.

Yes, I didn't get this portion at all. I feel as though letting an LLM brainstorm ideas for you would be worse in externally framing your thoughts than letting it write/proofread for you. If you pick one idea out of the 10 presented by the LLM, you are still confining yourself to the intersection of what the LLM thinks is important and what you think is important, because then you can never "generate" a thought that the LLM hasn't presented.

Re: Do your own writing

#27

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

bluepeter wrote: post #13

Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." Much like days of yore where we all approached Google searches with acrobatic language knowing how to specifically get something done. Now? I am pushing so much of my writing into prompts into AI where I know the AI will understand me even with lots of typos and run-on sentences... Is that a bad thing? A good thing? I am able to be so…

> Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours)

No. Don't pretend your taking shortcuts is less questionable because everyone else is doing it too. We're not. Own it yourself, don't get me involved.

> I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words

If you think value comes from volume of words you really need to understand writing better.

Re: Do your own writing

#28

Post by drnick1 »

> They are particularly good at generating ideas.

I think it's the opposite. People have ideas and know what they want to do. If I need to write something, I provide some bullet points and instructions, and Claude does the rest. I then review, and iterate.

Re: Do your own writing

#29

Post by jonathaneunice »

Agree with the underlying point: "don't let an LLM do your thinking, or interfere with processes essential to you thinking things clearly through."

My own experience, however, is that the best models are quite good and helping you with those writing and thinking processes. Finding gaps, exposing contradictions or weaknesses in your hypotheses or specifications, and suggesting related or supporting content that you might have included if you'd thought of it, but you didn't.

While I'm a developer and engineer now, I was a professional author, editor, and publisher in a former life. Would have _killed_ for the fast, often excellent feedback and acceleration that LLMs now provide. And while sure, I often have to "no, no, no!" or delete-delete, "redraft this and do it this way," the overall process is faster and the outcomes better with AI assistance.

The most important thing is to keep overall control of the tone, flow, and arguments. Every word need not be your own, at least in most forms of commercial and practical writing. True whether your collaborators are human, mecha, or some mix.

Re: Do your own writing

#30

Post by [deleted] »

monkaiju wrote: post #25
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found the one of the better use cases of llms to be a rubber duck. Explaining a design, problem, etc and trying to find solutions is extremely useful. I can bring novelty, what I often want from the LLM is a better understanding of the edge cases that I may run into, and possible solutions.

I always find folks bringing up rubber ducking as a thing LLMs are good at to be misguided. IMO, what defines rubber ducking as a concept is that it is just the developer explaining what their doing to themselves. Not to another person, and not to a thing pretending to be a person. If you have a "two way" or "conversational" debugging/designing experience it isnt rubber ducking, its just normal design/debugging. The…

[deleted]
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