3 ms·

I sort of agree, but I also think the advice here is circular. To look at the style suggestions produced by an LLM and decide that you agree with some of them i

I sort of agree, but I also think the advice here is circular. To look at the style suggestions produced by an LLM and decide that you agree with some of them in spirit, but want to put it in your own words, you already need how to know how to write well. In other words, you need to read a style manual or two, and you need to read and have opinions about other people's work. You must have taste. Otherwise, you can't really distinguish between good and bad advice. You'll anchor to the suggestions made by the LLM and it will turn your writing into LLMese. I guess that works - it sure gets clicks on HN - but it won't be your voice anymore. There's still value in getting a second pair of eyes on what you write. But here's another cool trick that gives you a similar benefit: just let it stew. Go for a walk, grab a lunch. Re-read what you wrote. You'll be surprised.

tptacek 14d ago
I wrote the article. I am not interested in "style suggestions" from the LLM; I'm interested in things I can verify for myself. Is this word or construction overused in the piece? Is there a pointless throat-clearing like "it's important to note that" crudding up this paragraph? Am I overusing vacuous nouns like "issue" ("the big issue is that") or "factor" ("the next factor to consider is")? Do I have my verbs buried in nouns, like "distortion" where I should just use "distort"? I don't care whether the LLM likes these constructions or not. I don't like them. I usually don't want to keep them in my work. It's my call what to change; I just want issues flagged. Your prompts would be different. Or, they would if you decided that having an LLM merely point things out about your own writing wasn't itself a form of contamination. You do you! I wrote this article in about 45 minutes and didn't workshop it with anybody else, so I'm not surprised it's gone over people's heads; it was just something I was talking about on Twitter that I wanted to get down on a page. But it's pretty obvious that a lot of people here have missed the point.
- politician 14d ago
  I think your take has more application than writing. I also suspect that Jev-like use cases for LLMs will begin to overtake the generate-all-the-things paradigm in programming, contracts/legal, music. People are beginning to wisen to how to more skillfully deploy generative models.
- buu700 12d ago
  Exactly. LLMs are excellent tools for compressing the time needed to produce a given body of text. Sure they can also be used for outsourcing the writing process and producing text that doesn't resemble your own voice, just as any tool can be used for multiple purposes. Tools aren't responsible for how particular humans choose to use them. Your process is similar in spirit to mine, although mine is a bit more fluid. I don't think it's necessary to disqualify words and phrases based on provenance per se, but rather on whether they're genuinely the correct words for what I intend to say and how I intend to say it. That's basically the test I use; if I know that I've intentionally chosen every detail of the text, that I've maintained consistency with my own manner of writing and speaking, and that I've faithfully encoded my own bona fide thoughts, then as far as I'm concerned it's my writing and I see no need to qualify that based on whatever tools may or may not have been used.
andrewflnr 14d ago
That's not "circular" so much as an acceptance that there's no free lunch w.r.t. good writing. And, as a fan of the "let it stew" technique, it's not a full substitute for an actual other perspective.
- in_absentia 13d ago
  Right, but neither is an LLM because most of the time, it conflates "helpful" with "sycophantic" by default (i.e., it loves the thesis of your essay even if it's dumb). If you prompt it to be critical, it often defaults to over-the-top nonsense, so it's hard to strike the right balance. A good approach may be to present an LLM with an article without saying its yours, and then have it write a thoughtful polemic. But it's not a very efficient way of doing things.
  - andrewflnr 13d ago
    Right, I'm broadly not a fan of LLMs either. But I understand the use case here. If you can't get an actual human to look at your writing, an LLM used carefully could be better than nothing.

tptacek 14d ago

I wrote the article. I am not interested in "style suggestions" from the LLM; I'm interested in things I can verify for myself. Is this word or construction overused in the piece? Is there a pointless throat-clearing like "it's important to note that" crudding up this paragraph? Am I overusing vacuous nouns like "issue" ("the big issue is that") or "factor" ("the next factor to consider is")? Do I have my verbs buried in nouns, like "distortion" where I should just use "distort"? I don't care whether the LLM likes these constructions or not. I don't like them. I usually don't want to keep them in my work. It's my call what to change; I just want issues flagged. Your prompts would be different. Or, they would if you decided that having an LLM merely point things out about your own writing wasn't itself a form of contamination. You do you! I wrote this article in about 45 minutes and didn't workshop it with anybody else, so I'm not surprised it's gone over people's heads; it was just something I was talking about on Twitter that I wanted to get down on a page. But it's pretty obvious that a lot of people here have missed the point.

politician 14d ago
I think your take has more application than writing. I also suspect that Jev-like use cases for LLMs will begin to overtake the generate-all-the-things paradigm in programming, contracts/legal, music. People are beginning to wisen to how to more skillfully deploy generative models.
buu700 12d ago
Exactly. LLMs are excellent tools for compressing the time needed to produce a given body of text. Sure they can also be used for outsourcing the writing process and producing text that doesn't resemble your own voice, just as any tool can be used for multiple purposes. Tools aren't responsible for how particular humans choose to use them. Your process is similar in spirit to mine, although mine is a bit more fluid. I don't think it's necessary to disqualify words and phrases based on provenance per se, but rather on whether they're genuinely the correct words for what I intend to say and how I intend to say it. That's basically the test I use; if I know that I've intentionally chosen every detail of the text, that I've maintained consistency with my own manner of writing and speaking, and that I've faithfully encoded my own bona fide thoughts, then as far as I'm concerned it's my writing and I see no need to qualify that based on whatever tools may or may not have been used.

andrewflnr 14d ago

That's not "circular" so much as an acceptance that there's no free lunch w.r.t. good writing. And, as a fan of the "let it stew" technique, it's not a full substitute for an actual other perspective.

in_absentia 13d ago
Right, but neither is an LLM because most of the time, it conflates "helpful" with "sycophantic" by default (i.e., it loves the thesis of your essay even if it's dumb). If you prompt it to be critical, it often defaults to over-the-top nonsense, so it's hard to strike the right balance. A good approach may be to present an LLM with an article without saying its yours, and then have it write a thoughtful polemic. But it's not a very efficient way of doing things.
- andrewflnr 13d ago
  Right, I'm broadly not a fan of LLMs either. But I understand the use case here. If you can't get an actual human to look at your writing, an LLM used carefully could be better than nothing.