4 ms·

"LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output" The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs. If you're

"LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output" The best advice for writing for other humans is: don't use LLMs. If you're writing for machines, liking coding, then fine go for it. If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, then also ok to use LLMS. But if you're writing for a human mind to ingest and extract meaning from, then LLMs are poison.

jackyinger 10d ago
Agreed. If I’m spending my precious time reading something thing, I want the author to have invested their personal effort to write it.
- thesuitonym 10d ago
  Or to put it another way: Why should I be interested in reading something you weren't interested in writing?
  - partyficial 10d ago
    the author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ? This is an unnecessary argument both ways. Whether you use a LLM or write it yourself or read it yourself (and then comment on it), you're putting your signature beneath it. I don't care whether you use your natural brain or an artifical brain (LLM)
    - andrew_lettuce 10d ago
      Because it's an asymmetric relationship? If you write something it can be consumed with value at many different levels, and an llm summary is valid. If we could trust llms to get the details right, creation of technical content would also be valid, but for now IME the editing and proof reading required outweighs any gains.
    - 0c3ca83 10d ago
      > the author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ? I wouldn't. LLMs don't summarize things very well. If you don't care if someone wrote it, and you don't plan to read it, why are you even here?
      - partyficial 10d ago
        > you don't plan to read it Not in full. I plan to read the LLM's summary. Most people could benefit from brevity. author : writes the summary (prompt). LLM expands it to article. reader : LLM summarizes the article. reader reads it. both author and reader are free to use, or not use LLM. I don't see the big deal here.
        0c3ca83 9d ago
        Seems stupid.
    - aprilthird2021 10d ago
      I don't care what you use. But if it reads or sounds like slop, I'm tuning out
anonymous_user9 10d ago
Those of us using our human minds to extract meaning from specifications and manuals don't want to look at LLM slop either.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 10d ago
  Slop is slop of course, but I don't 'read' manuals so much as I look stuff up in them. So I only need the information to be clear and style doesn't matter so much. Provided the LLM knows its writing a manual it can do a fair job of presenting the info in a good enough manner. Granted, if someone had used the tool incorrectly and its spouting out flowery prose in a manual, then that is indeed bad.
utopiah 10d ago
Interesting way to put it because it means in most professional software development contexts, it is also NOT appropriate for coding since other human will work on the same codebase, at least review the submitted code. So... according to this (IMHO pragmatic) heuristics it's only acceptable for coding alone, e.g. weekend project that won't be pushed online. Unless code has no meaning beside the output it produces, which does exist but I would wager is rare.
- hannasanarion 10d ago
  But reviewing isn't the same as reading. When you review code, you're not taking it all in end to end like an email or memo or blog, you're looking for important symbols, recognizing structures and patterns, jumping between different files at different levels of reference and abstraction, and building a model in your head of the principles that make it work and their consequences for the overall procedure. Code is "meant to be read" in the same way as a law, blueprint, policy document, or manual is, ie: jumping between relevant sections to get small pieces of information relevant to some task. The act of "reading" never starts at the beginning, it starts with a ctrl-f or flipping through an index or table of contents for a specific relevant symbol that is the only reason you are looking at the document. Code is invention, not art (and should be covered by patent law, not copyright law, I will die on this hill)
  - utopiah 10d ago
    It is not the same yet it requires reading which in turns requires interpretability, trying to make sense of what was read within a very specific, maybe explicit context, e.g. specifications, and that can be optimized for an audience, or not. For example the code I would write for somebody who just started to learn programming will not be the same as the code who is an expert even though both will pass the specifications. Consequently taking into account who (if anyone) will actually review, and thus read, the code changes the code itself.
    - hannasanarion 10d ago
      Who said interpretability wasn't necessary? Manuals, laws, and dictionaries are not designed to be read, but they are designed to be interpreted. In fact interpretability is what they maximize for. And interpretability isn't an absolute value, it is relative to an audience, this is why household equipment often comes with separate owners, installers, and service manuals, and why Webster publishes Elementary, Collegiate, International, and Mass-Market versions of its Dictionary. Documents that are "meant for human consumption" in the way the top comment intended generally don't optimize for interpretability like code, manuals, and dictionaries do. Novels, letters, emails, internet comments, blogs, articles, nonfiction books, etc often forgo interpretaiblity for practical, expressive, or rhetorical effect. The best moments of these is even when they are confusing on purpose, because imprecise language is a gateway to deeper levels of meaning through fourth-wall breaks, metaphor, analogy, and humor. (all things that LLMs are notoriously bad at and don't seem to be improving on over the years) Those other types of writing are intended to be read in full, every word, end-to-end, in order to educate, entertain, inform, or influence the reader who, and i think this is the critical part, does not drive the experience. When I'm reading a news article, and you realize that you're reading the voice of chatgpt, I'm annoyed because it means that i've been strung along by a stupid machine that somebody else handed me off to to keep me occupied. When I'm reading code, and I notice that it seems AI written for whatever reason, I might then choose to apply more scrutiny, maybe I try to suss out what the prompter intended to happen, so that I can validate whether that actually happened and if it was accomplished in an optimal way. But it's not insulting in the same way, because I'm still in the driver's seat of the experience, deciding on my own which parts to read and which parts to ignore as irrelevant to my investigation, because the only thing I want to get out of it an understanding of a part of the mechanical system that the code creates.
SamInTheShell 10d ago
> If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, Yeah... no. The people doing this lack the communications training, see the output has the necessary information, and regurgitate it with no effort or care. This needs to stop. We spent decades format building to make it easy quick and easy to get through something like a runbook. If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong. If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop. This is a hill I will die on or absolutely start slaughtering people on. I just refuse to deal with this crap.
- antonvs 10d ago
  I used an LLM a year or more ago to generate a description of our SDLC for a compliance certification. Perfect application of LLMs IMO. Do you want to die on that hill as well? A lot of documentation generated in corporations has marginal real value. > If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong. That’s easy to instruct an agent to do. Put it in a skill. > If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop. Using an AI doesn’t absolve the user of their responsibilities. This is an easy problem to solve, just make sure teams know what’s expected of them and encourage everyone to push back (professionally) against offenders.
  - SamInTheShell 10d ago
    If someone sends me AI slop, they're getting chewed out and told I'm not doing it and I'll even tell my boss "no" and why. If I got fired over something like that, then it tells me everything I need to know about company and the leadership's priorities. I'll die on that hill. To be completely fair though, I'm against the behaviors in information transfer I've been seeing. I've pass along AI generated runbooks, but they look nothing like the default outputs of these models. It's because I took time to apply all the writing knowledge I like to see in my curation. If people are doing this, I can't even tell it's AI writing. My work is done in minutes instead of deciphering so BS pseudo language they developed in their AI workspace (people really need to turn off those memory features). --- Edit: Also if I'm the guy receiving a security report and it's AI generated and poorly formatted, I'm failing you short of producing something for a human to parse. Simple as that.
marcelo-earth 10d ago
In fact, post-LLM quality monitoring is a huge time trap. I can't write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.
- keeganpoppen 10d ago
  completely agree. i will admit to taking llm phrases when i am really trying to refine every last detail and it just makes a suggestion that is too good to unsee. but in general it doesn’t feel like it helps directly with the “word choosing” part of the writing task at all (if you are someone who cares about word choice), which is… definitely a pretty big part of the job, lol. it is great at analyzing the argument, finding inconsistencies, helping you think through what parts should be cut, helping you refine examples or fix the occasional “how do i get this phrase to work correctly in this transition?” kinds of stuff. but anything where LLMs are the prima materia… that stuff literally only makes sense _to me_. which makes sense, because it is written _for_ me, no matter what instructions i actually give it, bc of memories and a million other things. and i say this as a complete maximalist wrt. trying to use llms for absolutely every last thing they possibly can be used for, just to see what it’s like. i guess i would say that it does very, very little to make the writing process meaningfully faster; it _can_ do _plenty_ to help make your output better though, which is definitely something— just isn’t the thing most people are looking for.
- jerf 10d ago
  I've had some success writing certain explicitly technical documents, with a style guide provided to the LLM that it can match, and then going over it by basically iterating on every sentence in the document and asking "can this sentence be removed?". Style guides are a big tools people are missing out on. It isn't enough to say "write concisely and technically". Give them a sample. Yea verily these many 5 or 6 years ago, "style transfer" was a big thing that early LLM tech was doing. It's still very good at it. That said I still tend to cut out at least 25% of the resulting verbiage and adding back another 10% or so more of my own original content even under those circumstances. Where it has been really helpful is that I tend to want to write in a conversational style that doesn't seem to match most people's expectations of a technical document. The LLMs let me write my way and style-shift it into something closer to what people expect. And LLMs, since let's be honest they're the primary audience nowadays. Which I am not even upset about; I'd rather 5 LLMs read the architecture document than the amortized .2 or so humans I could expect in the same circumstance 5 years ago. Which also implies, in many cases, I am feeding the AI as much text as I expect to come out, or in some cases, even more, as I am describing context, reasoning, and other things that may impact the writing but are not necessarily repeated in the final text. I factored out a lot of the context into my user-level CLAUDE.md which has helped cut that down a bit.
tptacek 10d ago
The literal first rule of the post is not to have LLMs write for you.
robwwilliams 10d ago
Too simple, too dogmatic at the start and at the end (“don’t use LLMs” and “then they are poison”). The middle section is all good. Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do. You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end. I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve. I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.
- taco_emoji 10d ago
  Maybe don't write about something you don't know?
  - aprilthird2021 10d ago
    But I want everything and want to do no effort for it
- bradishungry 10d ago
  No, you need to learn the new field you’re entering enough to write about it. Having incomplete knowledge and writing for others utilizing an llm that you do not know enough to fact check is about the worst way I can think of to use an llm for writing.
- al_borland 10d ago
  A person isn’t becoming a master in the new field if the LLM is doing all that for them. New areas are where it is most dangerous to use an LLM, as a person can’t tell when it doesn’t align with their views (because they don’t have any yet), is misleading, or flat out wrong. If I want to know what an LLM thinks, I’ll ask an LLM. If I’m reading a paper from a human, it’s, because I want to know what that human thinks. If they need the LLM to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, then they don’t know enough to write about the topic yet. Doing that work to write something themselves could help move them learn enough to write something that is hopefully worth reading.
aprilthird2021 10d ago
Absolutely correct. No matter what the detractors say, your writing will get glazed over and you will lose the focus of readers if your AI output sounds like all the AI output your readers have read before.
- combobyte 10d ago
  Every time I'm presented with AI-generated text I feel like I'm staring into the Uncanny Valley
  - tptacek 10d ago
    Which is exactly what the post says, and why I say "do not accept a single word suggested by an LLM".
delis-thumbs-7e 10d ago
You just should not do things that human beings are good at with automated processes. Things such as: creative writing, painting, dancing that is not pre-programmed, going with the flow, living the moment, having sex, wrestling, cooking, acting, connecting with your loved ones... and so on. Word chains these programs produce are inherently meaningless. They do not feel so, because WE people are amazing at bringing meaning to any old string of symbols: https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html They are very useful machines indeed, but they do not help you write well. They mathematically cannot. They just try to guess what is the next tokern you might want to read.
int0x29 10d ago
I would stay away from it for manuals and documentation as well. AI tends to like inserting meaningless and confusing clarification that is at best a waste of time. Also if you don't understand what you are documenting enough to write the docs that is a problem.
- maxerickson 10d ago
  It's more or less incoherent to pair the statement about those topics with the sentence that follows. Charitably, they can be thinking that it's fine to have LLMs organize information intended for LLMs.
qarl 10d ago
> don't use LLMs Don't you think they're useful as fact checkers?
- tenuousemphasis 10d ago
  Sure, if you don't mind your fact checker to be confidently wrong often.
  - qarl 10d ago
    You mean hallucinations? Hallucinations don't really work that way. They happen when you ask an LLM to generate new material. Not so much reviewing existing material. But there's always the "ask a second LLM to get two opinions" technique which gets you pretty close to error free. And... now that I think of it... even if it was terrible and missed 50% of the errors... wouldn't that still be better than using no LLM which catches 0% of the errors?
- cheesecakegood 10d ago
  Personally I think every single medium to long form piece of writing should go through an LLM grammar check at the minimum (they are great at catching stuff like correcting “reign in” to “rein in”, not to mention their/they’re and so on) although I don’t think they generally have the self control to make the corrections themselves without screwing stuff up. I can see being lazy and skipping it, but refusing to use them even for more minimal advice purposes seems crazy to me.
deleted 10d ago
[deleted]

jackyinger 10d ago

Agreed. If I’m spending my precious time reading something thing, I want the author to have invested their personal effort to write it.

thesuitonym 10d ago
Or to put it another way: Why should I be interested in reading something you weren't interested in writing?
- partyficial 10d ago
  the author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ? This is an unnecessary argument both ways. Whether you use a LLM or write it yourself or read it yourself (and then comment on it), you're putting your signature beneath it. I don't care whether you use your natural brain or an artifical brain (LLM)
  - andrew_lettuce 10d ago
    Because it's an asymmetric relationship? If you write something it can be consumed with value at many different levels, and an llm summary is valid. If we could trust llms to get the details right, creation of technical content would also be valid, but for now IME the editing and proof reading required outweighs any gains.
  - 0c3ca83 10d ago
    > the author can ask the same question - why should I write something if you're just going to use a LLM to summarize it ? I wouldn't. LLMs don't summarize things very well. If you don't care if someone wrote it, and you don't plan to read it, why are you even here?
    - partyficial 10d ago
      > you don't plan to read it Not in full. I plan to read the LLM's summary. Most people could benefit from brevity. author : writes the summary (prompt). LLM expands it to article. reader : LLM summarizes the article. reader reads it. both author and reader are free to use, or not use LLM. I don't see the big deal here.
      - 0c3ca83 9d ago
        Seems stupid.
  - aprilthird2021 10d ago
    I don't care what you use. But if it reads or sounds like slop, I'm tuning out

anonymous_user9 10d ago

Those of us using our human minds to extract meaning from specifications and manuals don't want to look at LLM slop either.

Eddy_Viscosity2 10d ago
Slop is slop of course, but I don't 'read' manuals so much as I look stuff up in them. So I only need the information to be clear and style doesn't matter so much. Provided the LLM knows its writing a manual it can do a fair job of presenting the info in a good enough manner. Granted, if someone had used the tool incorrectly and its spouting out flowery prose in a manual, then that is indeed bad.

utopiah 10d ago

Interesting way to put it because it means in most professional software development contexts, it is also NOT appropriate for coding since other human will work on the same codebase, at least review the submitted code. So... according to this (IMHO pragmatic) heuristics it's only acceptable for coding alone, e.g. weekend project that won't be pushed online. Unless code has no meaning beside the output it produces, which does exist but I would wager is rare.

hannasanarion 10d ago
But reviewing isn't the same as reading. When you review code, you're not taking it all in end to end like an email or memo or blog, you're looking for important symbols, recognizing structures and patterns, jumping between different files at different levels of reference and abstraction, and building a model in your head of the principles that make it work and their consequences for the overall procedure. Code is "meant to be read" in the same way as a law, blueprint, policy document, or manual is, ie: jumping between relevant sections to get small pieces of information relevant to some task. The act of "reading" never starts at the beginning, it starts with a ctrl-f or flipping through an index or table of contents for a specific relevant symbol that is the only reason you are looking at the document. Code is invention, not art (and should be covered by patent law, not copyright law, I will die on this hill)
- utopiah 10d ago
  It is not the same yet it requires reading which in turns requires interpretability, trying to make sense of what was read within a very specific, maybe explicit context, e.g. specifications, and that can be optimized for an audience, or not. For example the code I would write for somebody who just started to learn programming will not be the same as the code who is an expert even though both will pass the specifications. Consequently taking into account who (if anyone) will actually review, and thus read, the code changes the code itself.
  - hannasanarion 10d ago
    Who said interpretability wasn't necessary? Manuals, laws, and dictionaries are not designed to be read, but they are designed to be interpreted. In fact interpretability is what they maximize for. And interpretability isn't an absolute value, it is relative to an audience, this is why household equipment often comes with separate owners, installers, and service manuals, and why Webster publishes Elementary, Collegiate, International, and Mass-Market versions of its Dictionary. Documents that are "meant for human consumption" in the way the top comment intended generally don't optimize for interpretability like code, manuals, and dictionaries do. Novels, letters, emails, internet comments, blogs, articles, nonfiction books, etc often forgo interpretaiblity for practical, expressive, or rhetorical effect. The best moments of these is even when they are confusing on purpose, because imprecise language is a gateway to deeper levels of meaning through fourth-wall breaks, metaphor, analogy, and humor. (all things that LLMs are notoriously bad at and don't seem to be improving on over the years) Those other types of writing are intended to be read in full, every word, end-to-end, in order to educate, entertain, inform, or influence the reader who, and i think this is the critical part, does not drive the experience. When I'm reading a news article, and you realize that you're reading the voice of chatgpt, I'm annoyed because it means that i've been strung along by a stupid machine that somebody else handed me off to to keep me occupied. When I'm reading code, and I notice that it seems AI written for whatever reason, I might then choose to apply more scrutiny, maybe I try to suss out what the prompter intended to happen, so that I can validate whether that actually happened and if it was accomplished in an optimal way. But it's not insulting in the same way, because I'm still in the driver's seat of the experience, deciding on my own which parts to read and which parts to ignore as irrelevant to my investigation, because the only thing I want to get out of it an understanding of a part of the mechanical system that the code creates.

SamInTheShell 10d ago

> If you're writing for processes with formal highly structured content like manuals, specifications, form content, procedures, information, that sort of thing, Yeah... no. The people doing this lack the communications training, see the output has the necessary information, and regurgitate it with no effort or care. This needs to stop. We spent decades format building to make it easy quick and easy to get through something like a runbook. If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong. If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop. This is a hill I will die on or absolutely start slaughtering people on. I just refuse to deal with this crap.

antonvs 10d ago
I used an LLM a year or more ago to generate a description of our SDLC for a compliance certification. Perfect application of LLMs IMO. Do you want to die on that hill as well? A lot of documentation generated in corporations has marginal real value. > If your commands are bulleted instead of numbered and code blocked, it's wrong. That’s easy to instruct an agent to do. Put it in a skill. > If you didn't crawl through the playbook, it's immoral to hand that to me, you're wasting my time with untested slop. Using an AI doesn’t absolve the user of their responsibilities. This is an easy problem to solve, just make sure teams know what’s expected of them and encourage everyone to push back (professionally) against offenders.
- SamInTheShell 10d ago
  If someone sends me AI slop, they're getting chewed out and told I'm not doing it and I'll even tell my boss "no" and why. If I got fired over something like that, then it tells me everything I need to know about company and the leadership's priorities. I'll die on that hill. To be completely fair though, I'm against the behaviors in information transfer I've been seeing. I've pass along AI generated runbooks, but they look nothing like the default outputs of these models. It's because I took time to apply all the writing knowledge I like to see in my curation. If people are doing this, I can't even tell it's AI writing. My work is done in minutes instead of deciphering so BS pseudo language they developed in their AI workspace (people really need to turn off those memory features). --- Edit: Also if I'm the guy receiving a security report and it's AI generated and poorly formatted, I'm failing you short of producing something for a human to parse. Simple as that.

marcelo-earth 10d ago

In fact, post-LLM quality monitoring is a huge time trap. I can't write anything for humans using LLMs, because there is so much to change that it ends up like the Ship of Theseus, I would have been faster writing it myself than delegating the task.

keeganpoppen 10d ago
completely agree. i will admit to taking llm phrases when i am really trying to refine every last detail and it just makes a suggestion that is too good to unsee. but in general it doesn’t feel like it helps directly with the “word choosing” part of the writing task at all (if you are someone who cares about word choice), which is… definitely a pretty big part of the job, lol. it is great at analyzing the argument, finding inconsistencies, helping you think through what parts should be cut, helping you refine examples or fix the occasional “how do i get this phrase to work correctly in this transition?” kinds of stuff. but anything where LLMs are the prima materia… that stuff literally only makes sense _to me_. which makes sense, because it is written _for_ me, no matter what instructions i actually give it, bc of memories and a million other things. and i say this as a complete maximalist wrt. trying to use llms for absolutely every last thing they possibly can be used for, just to see what it’s like. i guess i would say that it does very, very little to make the writing process meaningfully faster; it _can_ do _plenty_ to help make your output better though, which is definitely something— just isn’t the thing most people are looking for.
jerf 10d ago
I've had some success writing certain explicitly technical documents, with a style guide provided to the LLM that it can match, and then going over it by basically iterating on every sentence in the document and asking "can this sentence be removed?". Style guides are a big tools people are missing out on. It isn't enough to say "write concisely and technically". Give them a sample. Yea verily these many 5 or 6 years ago, "style transfer" was a big thing that early LLM tech was doing. It's still very good at it. That said I still tend to cut out at least 25% of the resulting verbiage and adding back another 10% or so more of my own original content even under those circumstances. Where it has been really helpful is that I tend to want to write in a conversational style that doesn't seem to match most people's expectations of a technical document. The LLMs let me write my way and style-shift it into something closer to what people expect. And LLMs, since let's be honest they're the primary audience nowadays. Which I am not even upset about; I'd rather 5 LLMs read the architecture document than the amortized .2 or so humans I could expect in the same circumstance 5 years ago. Which also implies, in many cases, I am feeding the AI as much text as I expect to come out, or in some cases, even more, as I am describing context, reasoning, and other things that may impact the writing but are not necessarily repeated in the final text. I factored out a lot of the context into my user-level CLAUDE.md which has helped cut that down a bit.

tptacek 10d ago

The literal first rule of the post is not to have LLMs write for you.

robwwilliams 10d ago

Too simple, too dogmatic at the start and at the end (“don’t use LLMs” and “then they are poison”). The middle section is all good. Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do. You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end. I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve. I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.

taco_emoji 10d ago
Maybe don't write about something you don't know?
- aprilthird2021 10d ago
  But I want everything and want to do no effort for it
bradishungry 10d ago
No, you need to learn the new field you’re entering enough to write about it. Having incomplete knowledge and writing for others utilizing an llm that you do not know enough to fact check is about the worst way I can think of to use an llm for writing.
al_borland 10d ago
A person isn’t becoming a master in the new field if the LLM is doing all that for them. New areas are where it is most dangerous to use an LLM, as a person can’t tell when it doesn’t align with their views (because they don’t have any yet), is misleading, or flat out wrong. If I want to know what an LLM thinks, I’ll ask an LLM. If I’m reading a paper from a human, it’s, because I want to know what that human thinks. If they need the LLM to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, then they don’t know enough to write about the topic yet. Doing that work to write something themselves could help move them learn enough to write something that is hopefully worth reading.

aprilthird2021 10d ago

Absolutely correct. No matter what the detractors say, your writing will get glazed over and you will lose the focus of readers if your AI output sounds like all the AI output your readers have read before.

combobyte 10d ago
Every time I'm presented with AI-generated text I feel like I'm staring into the Uncanny Valley
- tptacek 10d ago
  Which is exactly what the post says, and why I say "do not accept a single word suggested by an LLM".

delis-thumbs-7e 10d ago

You just should not do things that human beings are good at with automated processes. Things such as: creative writing, painting, dancing that is not pre-programmed, going with the flow, living the moment, having sex, wrestling, cooking, acting, connecting with your loved ones... and so on. Word chains these programs produce are inherently meaningless. They do not feel so, because WE people are amazing at bringing meaning to any old string of symbols: https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html https://www.ubu.com/sound/lin.html They are very useful machines indeed, but they do not help you write well. They mathematically cannot. They just try to guess what is the next tokern you might want to read.

int0x29 10d ago

I would stay away from it for manuals and documentation as well. AI tends to like inserting meaningless and confusing clarification that is at best a waste of time. Also if you don't understand what you are documenting enough to write the docs that is a problem.

maxerickson 10d ago
It's more or less incoherent to pair the statement about those topics with the sentence that follows. Charitably, they can be thinking that it's fine to have LLMs organize information intended for LLMs.

qarl 10d ago

> don't use LLMs Don't you think they're useful as fact checkers?

tenuousemphasis 10d ago
Sure, if you don't mind your fact checker to be confidently wrong often.
- qarl 10d ago
  You mean hallucinations? Hallucinations don't really work that way. They happen when you ask an LLM to generate new material. Not so much reviewing existing material. But there's always the "ask a second LLM to get two opinions" technique which gets you pretty close to error free. And... now that I think of it... even if it was terrible and missed 50% of the errors... wouldn't that still be better than using no LLM which catches 0% of the errors?
cheesecakegood 10d ago
Personally I think every single medium to long form piece of writing should go through an LLM grammar check at the minimum (they are great at catching stuff like correcting “reign in” to “rein in”, not to mention their/they’re and so on) although I don’t think they generally have the self control to make the corrections themselves without screwing stuff up. I can see being lazy and skipping it, but refusing to use them even for more minimal advice purposes seems crazy to me.

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