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AI makes you boring

marginalia.nu

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Re: AI makes you boring

#41

Post by ExtremisAndy »

skissane wrote: post #9
nemomarx wrote: post #2

I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future writing seems like a bad outcome to me.

I sometimes go in the opposite direction - generate LLM output and then rewrite it in my own words The LLM helps me gather/scaffold my thoughts, but then I express them in my own voice

This is exactly how I use them too! What I usually do is give the LLM bullet points or an outline of what I want to say, let it generate a first attempt at it, and then reshape and rewrite what I don’t like (which is often most of it). I think, more than anything, it just helps me to quickly get past that “staring at a blank page” stage.

Re: AI makes you boring

#42

Post by iambateman »

We are going to have to find new ways to correct for low-effort work.

I have a report that I made with AI on how customers leave our firm…The first pass looked great but was basically nonsense. After eight hours of iteration, the resulting report is better than I could’ve made on my own, by a lot. But it got there because I brought a lot of emotional energy to the AI party.

As workers, we need to develop instincts for “plausible but incomplete” and as managers we need to find filters that get rid of the low-effort crap.

Re: AI makes you boring

#43

Post by PaulHoule »

nemomarx wrote: post #2

I've seen a few people use ai to rewrite things, and the change from their writing style to a more "polished" generic LLM style feels very strange. A great averaging and evening out of future writing seems like a bad outcome to me.

I had to write a difficult paragraph that I talked through with copilot. I think it made one sentence I liked but found GPTZero caught it. I would up with 100% sentences I wrote but that I reviewed extensively with Copilot and two people.

Re: AI makes you boring

#44

Post by PaulHoule »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #33
embedding-shape wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if anything it might make sense to do the opposite. Use LLMs to do research, ruthlessly verify everything, validate references and help you guide you in some structure, but then actually write your own words manually with your little fingers and using your brain.

Are you joking? The facts and references are the part we know it will hallucinate.

You can check the references.

Re: AI makes you boring

#45

Post by runarberg »

taude wrote: post #11

AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely. EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't…

This claim sounds plausible, but it is also testable. Do you know whether this has actually been tested in an experimental setting?

Re: AI makes you boring

#47

Post by jcalvinowens »

Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time.

The number of people who I see having E-mail conversations where person A uses an LLM to turn two sentences into ten paragraphs, and person B uses an LLM to summarize the ten paragraphs into two sentences, is becoming genuinely alarming to me.

Re: AI makes you boring

#48

Post by Forgeties79 »

matsemann wrote: post #17

If you spent 3 hours on a show HN before, people most likely wouldn't appreciate it, as it's honestly not much to show. The fact that you now can have a more polished product in the same timeframe thanks to AI doesn't really change that. It just changes the baseline for what's expected. This goes for other things as well, like writings or art. If you normally spent 2 hours on a blog post, and you now can do it in 5 m…

AI is great for getting my first bullet points into paragraph form, rephrasing/seeing different ways of writing to keep me moving when I’m stuck, and just general copy-editing (grammar really). Like you said it generally doesn’t save me a ton of time, but I get a quality copy done maybe a little bit faster and I find it just keeps me working on something rather than constantly stopping and starting when I hit a mental wall. Sometimes I just need/wanf to get it done, and for that LLM’s can be great.

Re: AI makes you boring

#49

Post by spijdar »

mym1990 wrote: post #10

Most ideas people have are not original, I have epiphanies multiple times a day, the chance that they are something no one has come up with before are basically 0. They are original to me , and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it. There is a huge case for having good taste to drive the LLMs toward a good result, and original voice is quite valuable, but I would say most people don't hit those 2 t…

Most ideas people have aren't original, but the original ideas people do have come after struggling with a lot of unoriginal ideas.

> They are original to me, and that feels like an insightful moment, and thats about it.

The insight is that good ideas (whether wholly original or otherwise) are the result of many of these insightful moments over time, and when you bypass those insightful moments and the struggle of "recreating" old ideas, you're losing out on that process.

Re: AI makes you boring

#50

Post by latexr »

taude wrote: post #11

AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers. It'll also make people who write better than average, worse writers. Know where you stand, and have the taste to use wisely. EDIT: also, just like creating AGENT.md files to help AI write code your way for your projects, etc. If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style. Don't…

> AI writing will make people who write worse than average, better writers.

Maybe it will make them output better text, but it doesn’t make them better writers. That’d be like saying (to borrow the analogy from the post) that using an excavator makes you better at lifting weights. It doesn’t. You don’t improve, you don’t get better, it’s only the produced artefact which becomes superficially different.

> If you're going to be doing much writing, you should have your own prompt that can help with your voice and style.

The point of the article is the thinking. Style is something completely orthogonal. It’s irrelevant to the discussion.

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