Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

I've thought exactly that "writing is thinking" before as a reason to not let a LLM write for me.

Then again, I've seen a counterargument [1] by someone who clearly heavily uses LLMs for writing (going by both their LLMy writing style and their own admission). The person I'm citing describes a process where they get a LLM to write something, they check over it and provide feedback to the LLM, the LLM rewrites, and the process repeats iteratively. So clearly he is putting thought into the process.

I think there is something valuable missing, even if it's hard to clearly express. I'll try. The threshold for what I'm willing to accept if I'm simply approving something is likely different from what I'll get if I write something myself, for instance. Saying "LGTM" is too tempting. It seems to me like he's outsourcing his selection of topics to cover as well. If you're not thinking yourself about what to cover then it would be very easy to miss a critical subject. There also an asymmetry between checking and generating something with constraints placed on it. Checks can't catch everything, and a constrained generating process can reduce the amount that needs to be checked, avoid issues that can't be checked so easily, and focus your attention on areas that you know historically have had issues with this generating process. I've thought about this quite a bit in terms of whether to write new code or use an existing library. Sometimes "the devil you know" (my code) is better than an existing library simply because I understand its flaws better.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-026-00236-3

I suspect people who are putting out LLM "writing" are people who weren't trying to communicate in the first place.

They were likely hunting for a better job, chasing the thrill of a million views, or similar - seeking a side effect of writing, rather than seeking to help someone else understand what was in their head.

> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post.

I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start.

They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt.

Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time?

It's not that an LLM wrote it so much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.

I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.

I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.