I think we're beyond this already for most Claude/ChatGPT users they just assume that everything is written by AI because that's what they'd do. Credibility has been lost, but certainly there are many cases where human thinking will improve the final artifact, I think it's enough to focus on improving quality vs some moral high ground.
Do your own writing
91–100 of 265 posts
Re: Do your own writing
#92I feel like LLMs are just forcing me to realize what writing actually is. For me, writing is basically a mental cache clear. I write things down so I can process them fully and then safely forget them.
If I let an LLM generate the text, that cognitive resolution never happens. I can't offload a thought i haven't actually formed - hence am troubld to safely forget about it.
Using AI for that is like hiring someone to lift weights for you and expecting to get stronger (I remember Slavoj Žižek equating it to a mechanical lovemaking in his recent talk somewhere).
The real trap isn't that we/writers willbe replaced; it's that we'll read the eloquent output of a model and quietly trick ourselves into believing we possess the deep comprehension it just spit out.
It reminds me of the shift from painting to photography. We thought the point of painting was to perfectly replicate reality, right up until the camera automated it. That stripped away the illusion and revealed what the art was actually for.
If the goal is just to pump out boilerplate, sure, let AIdo it. But if the goal is to figure out what I actually think, I still have to do the tedious, frustrating work of writing it out myself .
Re: Do your own writing
#93This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new.
Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea.
I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think.
Re: Do your own writing
#94This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those i…
I'm not sure - being able to take something like a casual response to a post, and then changing it to iambic pentameter with the easy button could be a great way of learning how to do that off the cuff.
Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind:
to take a casual reply to a post
and turn it, with an easy button’s press,
to flawless iambic pentameter
might be the finest way to learn the art
of speaking thus extempore, off the cuff.
It's not perfect, but I envy the wealth of tools this generation has. They'll find uses for AI that leave us in awe.
Re: Do your own writing
#95This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those i…
You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions.
"So if that is true then this next statement is also true..." and the LLM will either agree or disagree.
There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of creation of marketable products, writing as a shared summary of specialist niche knowledge, and writing as an aid to personal comprehension.
Those are fundamentally different activities, They happen to use the same medium and there are some overlapping areas. But they're essentially different activities with different requirements and different processes.
There's also the point that LLMs can give you explicit control over features like reading age, social register, metaphor frames/ themes/imagery, sentence structure, grammatical uniqueness, rhythmic variation, and other linguistic markers.
The generic templated slop styles - rule of three, it's not this it's that, bullet points, "that's rare", strained weird or cringey similes, and the other tics - that appear all over social media are the low-skill default for AI writing. It doesn't have to be that crude or obvious, and learning how to push it beyond that is a skill in itself.
As is creating knowledge engineering systems that use agents to manage knowledge in useful ways, with writing as one possible output.
Re: Do your own writing
#96This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those i…
You can do that interactively with LLMs. Instead of aiming for a finished product you ask a question, then refine your understanding with more questions. "So if that is true then this next statement is also true..." and the LLM will either agree or disagree. There are lines between writing as a persuasive medium, writing as a didactic medium for teaching, writing as a creative/poetic medium, writing as the process of…
> There's also the point that LLMs can give you explicit control over features like reading age, social register, metaphor frames/ themes/imagery, sentence structure, grammatical uniqueness, rhythmic variation, and other linguistic markers.
You already have this. Control over your writing is the default position.
Re: Do your own writing
#97This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those i…
I'm not sure - being able to take something like a casual response to a post, and then changing it to iambic pentameter with the easy button could be a great way of learning how to do that off the cuff. Though I’m unsure, this notion comes to mind: to take a casual reply to a post and turn it, with an easy button’s press, to flawless iambic pentameter might be the finest way to learn the art of speaking thus extempor…
It's worth emphasizing here that you haven't changed it to iambic pentameter with an easy button. Your A lines are, but the Bs butcher it.
Re: Do your own writing
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> agent write release notes for your agent in the future... I have been going back to verbose, expansive inline comments. If you put the "history" inline it is context, if you stuff it off in some other system it's an artifact. I cant tell you how many times I have worked in an old codebase, that references a "bug number" in a long dead tracking system.
But how do you deal with communicating that some library you maintain has a behavior change? People already need to know to look at your code in order to read your comments.
> communicating ... People
End users? Other Devs? These two groups are not the same.
As an end user of something, I dont care about the details of your internal refactor, only the performance, features and solutions. As a dev looking at the notes there is a lot more I want to see.
The artifact exists to inform about what is in this version when updating. And it can come easily from the commit messages, and be split for each audience (user/dev).
It doesn't change the fact that once your in the code, that history, inline is much much more useful. The commit message says "We fixed a performance issue around XXX". The inline comment is where you can put in a reason FOR the choice made.
One comes across this pattern a lot in dealing with data (flow) or end user inputs. It's that ugly change of if/elseif/elesif... that you look at and wonder "why isnt this a simple switch" because thats what the last two options really are. Having clues as inline text is a boon to us, and to any agent out there, because it's simply context at that point. Neither of us have to make a (tool) call to look at a diff, or a ticket or any number of other systems that we keep artifacts in.
Re: Do your own writing
#99I've long considered writing to be the "last step in thinking". I can't tell you how many times an idea, that was crystal clear in my mind, fell apart the moment I started writing and I realize there were major contradictions I needed to resolve. Likewise I also have numerous times where writing about something loosely and casually revealed to me something that fundamentally changed how I viewed a topic and really co…
> 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 con…
I never learned a subject faster than when I was suddenly forced to teach it!
Re: Do your own writing
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