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I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as
by dhosek 7mo ago
I’ve completely avoided using AI for writing (although it looks like my coding avoidance is coming to an end). As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating”¹, using AI to do the writing is way beyond the pale. A lot of what writing is about for me is about discovering and distilling and figuring out what I think. Take that away and I might as well just the spend the day watching television and playing video games and getting dumber by the minute.
I would go a step further, in fact, and when I’m writing something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a reminder to not do that,³ although I’m far from immune myself (looking at my comment history, it’s upsetting to see the same verbal tics repeated when I have something to say).
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1. If you don’t know a word well enough for it to come to mind when you’re looking for a word for something, you may not know it well enough to use it in your writing.²
2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that’s just out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but even that I try to avoid.
3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had published a creative writing book which was largely based on his former students’ transcriptions of his lectures. During the lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.
- Liftyee 7mo agoWhy is it upsetting to see the same patterns repeated when you have something to say?
- dhosek 7mo agoBecause I’d like to think that I am a more creative writer than that.
- cortesoft 7mo ago> As someone who kind of views using a thesaurus as “cheating” I don't think cheating is the right word here (ironically), which I think you are kind of acknowledging by putting it in quotes. Based on your footnote, it sounds like you are more concerned that using a thesaurus is more likely to end with a worse result, since you are likely to use the incorrect word, or to use the word incorrectly. This sounds more like the opposite of cheating; cheating is about unfairly getting a better result, but this concern is more about accidentally getting a worse result.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- foxglacier 7mo agoIf you make it worse, it's cheating and getting caught. Sometimes you might luck into a correct usage of a word, but like using a LLM, the nuance of that word choice is not part of your thinking, so it's a loss of information that you did to try to appear to be a better writer.
- 0_gravitas 7mo agoDoes learning/using new words make you a worse writer? The handful of times I've used a thesaurus is usually 'for aesthetics', in that the word/phrase I have in mind clashes with the flow of the text. I know what I want to say, and I know how I can say it, but I _also_ know that I can jostle the wording around so that the rhythm doesn't deteriorate.
- dhosek 7mo agoThe question is how you acquire the new words. If you learn words from reading, you’ll have a better sense of their nuance than if you learn them from a thesaurus. Thesaurus writing is often easily identifiable thanks to the writer not catching the full meaning of the word. Some authors are better than others for challenging one’s vocabulary, notably Anthony Burgess and Cormac McCarthy. While I enjoy David Foster Wallace, I feel like he had a tendency to abuse medical terminology in an attempt to challenge the reader with unfamiliar vocabulary. If I were to contemplate using a word I found in a thesaurus in my writing (and it was something that I didn’t already know), I would make sure to (a) read the definition in a dictionary and probably do a search on Google books to see the word in action.