Do your own writing

I use LLMs for compilation of information sometimes. I’m a teacher and I sometimes use it to hack together a quick worksheet for my students. I see they need some practice with a certain concept and I get the LLM to generate a LaTeX doc which I compile to pdf. I find it can be particularly useful at document creation but it is horrible at writing anything that’s in sentence form. It stinks and is not great at conveying my voice.

I will sometimes write a lesson and have an LLM generate a quiz and give me feedback on my content search for mistakes or unclear content.

I have also used it to help me structure a document. I give it requirements it makes a general outline that I then just fill in with my own words.

I’m still not sure how to approach my students’ uses of an LLM. I am loath to make a hard and fast rule of no LLMs because that’s ridiculous. I want to encourage appropriate use. I don’t know what is appropriate use in the context of a student.

An LLM can be a great learning tool but it also can be a crutch.

I agree. As the amount of cheap content grows, I think we will come to like condensed to the point articles like this one.

But can they produce Tom Clancy or James Patterson?

> Nowadays my writing [] has totally devolved into "prompt-ese."

I've noticed this myself. Even in my Obsidian vault, which only I read and write in. I think it's a development into writing more imperatively, instinctually. Thinking more in instructions and commands than the speaking and writing habits I've developed organically over my life. Or just "talking to the computer" in plain English, after having to convert my thoughts to code anytime I want to make it do something.

I've been thinking about the role of "director" in media as an analogy to writing with LLMs. I'm working right now on an "essay," that I'm not sure I'll share with anyone, even family (who is my first audience). Right now, under the Authorship section, I wrote "Conceived, directed, and edited by Qaadika. Drafted by Claude", with a few sentences noting that I take responsibility for the content, and that the arguments, structure, audience, and editorial judgments are mine.

I had a unique idea and started with a single sentence prompt, and kept going from there until I realized it should be an essay. So the ideas in it are mine. The thesis is mine. I'm going back and forth with the LLM section by section. Some prompts are a sentence. Some are eight paragraphs. I can read the output and see exactly what was mine and what the LLM added. But my readers won't. They'll just see "Author: Qaadika" and presume every single word was mine. Or they'll sniff out the LLM-ness and stop reading.

I can make a film and call myself director without ever being seen in it. Is is the same if I direct the composition of words without ever writing any of the prose myself? Presuming I've written enough in prompts that it's identifiably unique from cheaper prompts and "LLM, fill in the blank".

We credit Steven Spielberg with E.T. But he didn't write the screenplay. He probably had comments on it, though. He didn't operate the camera. But he probably told the operators where to put it. He didn't act in it. But he probably told the actors where to stand and where to move and how to be. He didn't write the music. But he probably had a sense of when and where to place it in the audio. And he didn't spend every moment in the cutting room, placing every frame just so.

But his name is at the top. He must have done something, even if I can't point to anything specific. The "Vibe" of the film is Spielberg, but it's also the result of hundreds of minds, most of whole aren't named until the end of the film, and probably never read by most viewers.

His contribution to the film was instructions. Do this, don't do that. Let's move this scene to here. This shot would be better from this angle. The musical swell should be on this shot; cut it longer to fit.

So where, exactly, is "Spielberg" in E.T.? What can we objective credit him with, aside from the finished product: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Coming June 1982?

> writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really consolidated my thinking

You see the same thing in teaching, perhaps even more because of the interactive element. But the dynamic in any case is the same. Ideas exist as a kind of continuous structure in our minds. When you try to distill that into something discrete you're forced to confront lingering incoherence or gaps.