4 ms·

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with w

by sonink 2mo ago

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. Strategic thought is the other thing - like if I am deciding what we, as a company should focus on long term, it is easy for LLM's to give you a wrong direction. I think this is more because Strategic directions require a ton of context - and it is almost impossible for you to feed the ai EVERYTHING. There might be some things which are easy to miss out, which might make all the difference, and the LLM would assume that the 'requirements' are complete and would go to town with it. I suspect, this is largely because the current SOTA LLM's are being optimised for code and there isnt enough data in the training set for them to learn long term thought. Coding is I think fine for me. But even there, I dont let the agent use memory at all. I create the context - and it runs from that only. The biggest unlock here is that I can now program in any language. And it frees up sometime to think in systems and come up with more robust architectures.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
> Strategic thought is the other thing I feel like LLMs can be very helpful to double-check a bunch of stuff here, and evaluate alternative-paths and so on, but the "direction" really has to come from you, then you can use the LLM to double-check and what not. But if you let the LLM set the "direction", then all bets are off, as they don't have a single care about anything in the world, so they'll just do whatever essentially.
- sonink 2mo ago
  "Direction" is what I mean by strategic thought - but even if the high level direction came from you - the tactical approach might fall prey to the same over confidence which destroys direction setting in the first place. I use it very sparingly for stuff like this - and even when I do - I discount its outputs heavily and maybe just use it let me see some blind spots and sanity testing.
kranner 2mo ago
> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously I mean human-written books, and specifically with prose that you appreciate.
- pinkmoonx 2mo ago
  [dead]
  - pringk02 2mo ago
    I kind of love the idea of everyone suddenly talking and writing in the cringey stilted style of Japanese media translated into English.
- sonink 2mo ago
  Not too sure - I never read that many books - and it wasnt an issue at all. I think writing more, without AI, is helping me get back to my pre-AI-stink self.
  - borski 2mo ago
    Sure, but if you’re influenced by how AI writes, it stands to reason that you’d be influenced by a great author too, and that may help improve your writing.
    - saltcured 2mo ago
      I may be misreading, but I think the earlier post was about the LLM being used to edit (clean up) their writing. It's quite different than just reading a lot of text from other authors and passively absorbing diction and style. Instead, it means getting detailed reinforcement signals in the context of your own active writing effort. This can start an ironic reinforcement learning pattern where the writer gets tuned to write in the LLM's "corrected" form. Imagine a traditional professional writer, in a long-term partnership with a particular copy editor who gates their output.
cj 2mo ago
Gmail's AI is particularly guilty of robbing the writer of their style.
budsniffer952 2mo ago
[flagged]
- vaylian 2mo ago
  > If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great. As a recipient of AI-enhanced texts I must say: AI is not good at making things clearer. Good communication requires that the sender makes the message as simple as possible. AI is anti-simple, because it likes to produce more words, not less.
  - borski 2mo ago
    Relevant essay: https://paulgraham.com/simply.html https://paulgraham.com/simply.html
- borski 2mo ago
  > Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great. Writing well is not easy. PG has written many essays about this very topic. LLMs do not write well. > Strategic thinking? The LLM has more context than you. Sure, you know more about your company, but AI knows more about the rest. This is a mistake, and untrue. The LLM has more general knowledge, yes. But it’s the specific knowledge (aka “context”) that makes all the difference. It’s the same reason management consultants are, by and large, useless; they aren’t dumb, but they lack context. So no, the LLM doesn’t have more context than you. In fact, its context window is literally limited. You have decades of experience and knowledge and patterns you’ve matched, and the LLM has none of that. Do not fool yourself into thinking it has more context than you. It doesn’t. It has more knowledge. Those are very different. (Incidentally, the same is true of humans; the most knowledgeable ones are not always the ones making discoveries or changing the world. Often, it is specific context that matters more, as the application of a solution to a problem requires seeing the right problem. LLMs are a solution engine, but they have no metric for what is a “right problem”)
  - budsniffer952 2mo ago
    [flagged]
dan_man 2mo ago
I've tried teaching AI to copy a writer's style and it fails miserably. And the output out of it always have the same writing style - LLMesque. I agree!
ramon156 2mo ago
If i were to compare it to relying on SO for your code, then would SO be a better fit because its multiple people. Are models inherently worse than a human community? maybe my question is too generic to answet

by sonink 2mo ago

embedding-shape 2mo ago

> Strategic thought is the other thing I feel like LLMs can be very helpful to double-check a bunch of stuff here, and evaluate alternative-paths and so on, but the "direction" really has to come from you, then you can use the LLM to double-check and what not. But if you let the LLM set the "direction", then all bets are off, as they don't have a single care about anything in the world, so they'll just do whatever essentially.

sonink 2mo ago
"Direction" is what I mean by strategic thought - but even if the high level direction came from you - the tactical approach might fall prey to the same over confidence which destroys direction setting in the first place. I use it very sparingly for stuff like this - and even when I do - I discount its outputs heavily and maybe just use it let me see some blind spots and sanity testing.

kranner 2mo ago

> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously I mean human-written books, and specifically with prose that you appreciate.

pinkmoonx 2mo ago
[dead]
- pringk02 2mo ago
  I kind of love the idea of everyone suddenly talking and writing in the cringey stilted style of Japanese media translated into English.
sonink 2mo ago
Not too sure - I never read that many books - and it wasnt an issue at all. I think writing more, without AI, is helping me get back to my pre-AI-stink self.
- borski 2mo ago
  Sure, but if you’re influenced by how AI writes, it stands to reason that you’d be influenced by a great author too, and that may help improve your writing.
  - saltcured 2mo ago
    I may be misreading, but I think the earlier post was about the LLM being used to edit (clean up) their writing. It's quite different than just reading a lot of text from other authors and passively absorbing diction and style. Instead, it means getting detailed reinforcement signals in the context of your own active writing effort. This can start an ironic reinforcement learning pattern where the writer gets tuned to write in the LLM's "corrected" form. Imagine a traditional professional writer, in a long-term partnership with a particular copy editor who gates their output.

cj 2mo ago

Gmail's AI is particularly guilty of robbing the writer of their style.

budsniffer952 2mo ago

[flagged]

vaylian 2mo ago
> If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great. As a recipient of AI-enhanced texts I must say: AI is not good at making things clearer. Good communication requires that the sender makes the message as simple as possible. AI is anti-simple, because it likes to produce more words, not less.
- borski 2mo ago
  Relevant essay: https://paulgraham.com/simply.html https://paulgraham.com/simply.html
borski 2mo ago
> Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great. Writing well is not easy. PG has written many essays about this very topic. LLMs do not write well. > Strategic thinking? The LLM has more context than you. Sure, you know more about your company, but AI knows more about the rest. This is a mistake, and untrue. The LLM has more general knowledge, yes. But it’s the specific knowledge (aka “context”) that makes all the difference. It’s the same reason management consultants are, by and large, useless; they aren’t dumb, but they lack context. So no, the LLM doesn’t have more context than you. In fact, its context window is literally limited. You have decades of experience and knowledge and patterns you’ve matched, and the LLM has none of that. Do not fool yourself into thinking it has more context than you. It doesn’t. It has more knowledge. Those are very different. (Incidentally, the same is true of humans; the most knowledgeable ones are not always the ones making discoveries or changing the world. Often, it is specific context that matters more, as the application of a solution to a problem requires seeing the right problem. LLMs are a solution engine, but they have no metric for what is a “right problem”)
- budsniffer952 2mo ago
  [flagged]

dan_man 2mo ago

I've tried teaching AI to copy a writer's style and it fails miserably. And the output out of it always have the same writing style - LLMesque. I agree!

ramon156 2mo ago

If i were to compare it to relying on SO for your code, then would SO be a better fit because its multiple people. Are models inherently worse than a human community? maybe my question is too generic to answet