10 ms·

I think you should almost never use AI to write

358 points by erwald 7d ago

atdt 7d ago
This advice is too coarse. I believe LLMs have made me a better writer of technical reports. I have a keen ear for language, and I can usually tell when a sentence or a paragraph is orbiting around a point rather than landing on it firmly. Some writers insist that unclear prose is dispositive proof of unclear ideas -- a sign the writer has not thought things through. My experience is different: I often have a clear idea in mind that I cannot quite find the right idiom to express. Sometimes I can find it if I keep revising, but staring at a sentence too long can entangle you in a particular linguistic frame that can be hard to escape. LLMs are helpful because their idiom-list is vast and they are indefatigable and infinitely patient. You can keep iterating on a sentence and it will keep giving you fresh takes. Eventually, whether through careful steering or brute-force iteration, it will come up with something that has the right resonance. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you recognize it when you hear it. For me, the end result of this writing-process is often a document where much of the language first came from the agent, but the voice is recognizably mine, and I feel a clear sense of authorship. It is still my work because of the microscopic attention I paid to every word. The marble is the agent's, but the chisel and mallet are in my hands.
- breezybottom 7d ago
  You say the voice is clearly yours, but that's an illusion. I can recognize your comment as AI written.
  - atdt 7d ago
    I understand this is a confusing time, and we all feel vulnerable to being duped. But please be a bit more circumspect with these confident accusations, because they can be genuinely hurtful. You are factually wrong here: I don't use LLMs to write or revise personal content.
    - mh- 7d ago
      I thought it was an interesting comment and I suffer from the same issue when trying to get a clear idea from my head into writing. I sacrificed some Pangram credits to reply to the parent comment, fwiw.
    - breezybottom 7d ago
      [flagged]
  - mh- 7d ago
    I can see why you might think that, but Pangram says otherwise. https://www.pangram.com/history/3d55b442-d151-4490-9c71-28d0d6ec8f5c?ucc=v0WYMhMlUiN https://www.pangram.com/history/3d55b442-d151-4490-9c71-28d0...
    - breezybottom 7d ago
      [flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 7d ago
  > Sometimes I can find it if I keep revising, but staring at a sentence too long can entangle you in a particular linguistic frame that can be hard to escape. This expresses quite well an experience that I have sometimes had. Your first words can trap you in a box that you know isn't right, but you can't figure out how to escape.
- semanticc 7d ago
  I don't want to sound offending, but if that is your own writing style, it makes sense why AI writing resonates with you.
alas44 7d ago
"AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways" This one felt to me, at work I lost a lot of time re-reading and correcting AI prose that was launched to "summarize" a collective white paper, and where subtlety and nuance disappeared in ways that harmed the initial ideas/arguments I was writing about, but in sneaky ways.
- D-Machine 7d ago
  AI is very bad at properly handling statements that make heavy use of vague quantifiers (e.g. "some", "most") and also commits a lot of pretty serious logical fallacies. It is also bad at handling subtle logical negation, generally. One of the most egregious negation issues I run into a lot is when I (or someone) makes a statement of the form: "not X" or "X is thus not true", and the AI then proceeds to interpret or summarize this as 'whatever is the opposite of X is the case'". This will cause it to go down a useless path investigating or disputing the opposite of X, which generally has no relevance or bearing on anything. It also often very harmfully will replace your carefully chosen words with weirdly specific academic operationalizations or formalisms, then again waste huge amounts of text refuting / showing "problems" that result from that formalism, all of which again have no bearing or relevance on the original statement. An example would be you saying something like "intelligence, generally, must surely explain some of the differences in X", and then it will go "actually IQ does not correlate with X", unless you specifically tell it not to conflate psychometric IQ with intelligence generally. Sometimes this is helpful, but the more specific / technical the domain, the more often you specifically have to prevent it from going down stupid paths that should be obvious given the expert context and wording, because it can seem almost hungry to try to catch you in some kind of insipid 'gotcha'. Much of these issues often clearly arise immediately from the first-pass "reword what the user said" part, given the reasoning traces.
- michaelchisari 7d ago
  Most of us have worked our whole lives to be writers in some domain: Code, documentation, specifications, product requirements, corporate communication, etc. If we don't want to be writers, then we have to be editors. And editing is an entirely different job and it's not an easy one. In many ways it's harder. Especially when LLMs love writing novels when all we need is a short story or less.
polotics 7d ago
If I may propose a broader rule, that I think this post presents a special case of; Only ever use AI to make yourself think harder, and more.
- D-Machine 7d ago
  And also to think in different directions than you would have gone in isolation. Regardless, this is a great heuristic / rule that I will be sharing and keeping in mind.
- hxelk1 7d ago
  This is brilliant, I'll be using that. Thanks.
sklargh 7d ago
I don't find AI helpful for truly constructive or creative prose, it devolves to the median output very quickly and it's almost painful to hear in my inner voice when I read out an AI-ified idea. The "not this but that" formulation is especially bad or cloying attempt at pretending to refine an idea or lightly correct something to start from a position of authority, very annoying. That said, I have a lot of situations at work where I am asked to simplify something I am an expert in or convey something for a different audience, particularly as I prepare for presentations and I do find it helpful in helping me step down my writing or work. YMMV. I also skip words a lot and can miss that even after 2-3 editorial passes and it's very helpful at that vs. say normal spellcheck.
patrickmay 7d ago
From TFA: "Eric Schwitzgebel writes that . . . There’s a huge cognitive difference between nodding along while reading something and actually productively generating a text. Two reasons: First, once the text is on the page, it’s easy to passively let the approximate word suffice, rather than thinking about word choice in the same effortful, active way we do when generating prose de novo. Second, as I suggested above, I doubt that human beings, even experts, have a good sense of all the factors that shape word choice -- everything they’re being sensitive to. You would have phrased it slightly differently, and even if you don’t know that, or why, a different signal is sent and received." This is the best articulation I've seen of why simply reviewing and copy-editing does not provide remotely the same value as writing from scratch. I spent a considerable amount of time over the past two weeks reviewing and improving a work document that was the output of an LLM. Given the number of people involved and the final level of effort, I'm firmly convinced that writing it manually would have been faster and resulted in a higher quality product. Getting the wording right matters.
- onraglanroad 7d ago
  While I mostly agree with you, what is the real difference between an editor saying, 'when generating prose de novo' sounds pretentious to an American audience so let's use 'when writing from scratch' instead, versus an LLM giving the same advice? Not that it's necessarily better but it's the kind of thing an editor might pick up and so why would you reject the advice if it's a machine giving it rather than a human?
  - layer8 7d ago
    TFA is about having AI do the writing, not about having AI suggest editorial improvements. The parent comment argues against having the AI write the text and having the human merely review it, not against having the AI review human-written text (and the human deciding which of the AI’s suggestions they might apply). See also this existing comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768564, which I completely agree with and which is complementary to the above root comment.
rectang 7d ago
Instead of asking AI to write something substansive for you, ask it to critique your writing. Then use your own judgement as to which bits of advice to follow and which to ignore. The LLM will always give you a full rewrite — don't use it. It always does too much, and persuading it to tone it down is a constant battle.
- devindotcom 7d ago
  AI can't critique because it has no critical faculty. It can only offer critique-shaped language. That may be useful for some, though.
  - manmal 7d ago
    That’s not entirely true. High end models will point out things that are misrepresented or plain wrong, and this will often be accurate.
  - dwaltrip 7d ago
    Potayto, potahto
AlienRobot 7d ago
I find it so weird that people use AI to write things. Writing is one of the easiest things you can do. Just put one word after the other.
- D-Machine 7d ago
  Writing is pretty hard for a lot of people, maybe especially so if they are more non-verbal thinkers, and then doubly so again if one must write not in one's native language.
  - bigstrat2003 7d ago
    Depends on the writing. Writing a blog post or something is challenging because you want to have an engaging style. But I see people at work using LLMs to fill out tickets, which is the easiest thing in the world. It's just a plain description of things, it requires no skill at writing at all. It baffles me that people are using LLMs for something like that, which should take less than a minute of your time to fill out and will be more pleasant for the recipient than the slop the model produces.
    - D-Machine 7d ago
      Here I would maybe argue that the simplicity makes these kinds of tasks tedious (like doing taxes), so it also makes a lot of sense for people to want to just throw AI at it. Tedious, easy rote tasks can be much more unpleasant than engaging ones. I think people massively over-rely on AI and I really worry about the consequences of this. But there is nothing baffling at all about the basic appeal, IMO.
- nephihaha 7d ago
  It depends on what you are trying to convey and how.
- sublinear 7d ago
  I don't think I have to speculate why comments like yours get downvoted so much. Anyway, I completely agree. Writing isn't something to be delegated. The problem is not new with LLMs. Businesses have been delegating writing to idiots who don't really care for the entire history of business. Authors and musicians have traded their souls for inauthentic crowd-pleasing results for about as long. No, the problem with LLMs is that people are all using the same generic models. This only further shows that the future of LLMs is locally trained and locally run. Personal LLMs on a personal computer. Business LLMs on-prem. We will continue see them flourish in ways that generate absolutely no money whatsoever on their own, but do add marginal value when combined with a heavy dose of human creativity. All the clueless old farts that are still alive by this point will continue to lecture the rest of us with more condescending gee whiz "whaddyaknow" and "whodathunkit" nonsense. As if they've even had their finger on the pulse since the early 2000s.
jameshart 7d ago
Use AI to write things for you to read that you wish someone else had written. ‘Give me a summary of the research on this topic’; ‘Write a report on this data to help me make a decision’. ‘Take this transcript of a meeting and write me the email it could have been’. Don’t use AI to write things that you are producing for someone else to consume.
- bdangubic 7d ago
  I am someone else, if AI can write something that I want to and can consume then it can do the same for other’s consumption. Perhaps a disclaimer would be nice, “co-written with ____” but I see no difference between the two though of course I understand what you are trying to convey conceptually
  - boredatoms 7d ago
    There is a higher tolerance for LLM-isms if you asked an LLM to write something for you Elsewhere it’s painful and irksome when you didn’t ask for it
    - bdangubic 7d ago
      this is where I perhaps differ from other commenters, I do not have higher tolerance, regardless of whether I asked it or am reading something someone else posted, fully or partially written by LLM.
      - lelanthran 7d ago
        > this is where I perhaps differ from other commenters, I do not have higher tolerance, regardless of whether I asked it or am reading something someone else posted, fully or partially written by LLM. Perhaps English is not your first language? To people who are well-read, LLM-ism grate on their nerves like the high-pressure sales pitch you hear on 3am shopping channels.
        7d ago
calebkaiser 7d ago
I think about this a lot. I started my teenage-to-young-adult life in the literary world as a poet who loved programming, and made a living as a ghostwriter. At some point, I fell in love with mathematics and wound up in ML in research/engineering for the last 8 years or so. So, I've thought a lot about writing and ML and their intersection. I think one of the underappreciated things about writing "substantive" work is that the work you see at the end isn't the first attempt. And I don't mean the first draft of the piece. I mean that almost always, writers iterate on the same topic many times, either with complete published pieces or abandoned drafts or even just conversations and sessions of unproductive daydreaming. It's a cliche that your best work typically also comes out fastest, but it's not because of divine inspiration, it's because you've whittled the big idea you actually care about down so much in your mind that you instinctively know exactly how to write it. My experience has been that for people who don't work this way or don't write a lot, LLMs can give them this incredible feeling of leaping straight from inkling to "substantive" writing. And because they haven't built up those muscles or "taste", they don't immediately recognize that it's imprecise and hard to follow. That's not to say they're not brilliant in their own right, just that they haven't spent a lot of time on this particular thing. Sort of like a very gifted programmer who doesn't have a ton of experience yet (speaking as someone who is gifted at nothing and frequently has to do things they're inexperienced at). So I don't think the problem is that LLMs just write bad. It's that LLMs are so wonderfully powerful that they allow you to confidently leap forward to create something that is a little beyond your experience. And that's why I have different reactions to heavily AI generated writing. When it feels like marketing at scale, it grosses me out. But when I feel like it's just someone who is excited to write an idea and maybe doesn't have a lot of experience doing it, I'm not judgemental. My hope is that it makes them more excited about writing, and that trying to make their next piece better will lead them inevitably to start thinking about where the last piece fell short. And if there's some slop along the way, eh, I'm not compelled to read it.
alicia_research 7d ago
[flagged]
bko 7d ago
> I think so because (1) the writing process is an essential part of the thinking process, (2) AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and (3) writing with AI (and not labeling it as such) is rude and misleading. I’ll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings. 1. Agree writing process is essential, but just getting your thoughts down is the start. 2. Human writing is very often vague and wrong in hard to notice ways, but I would say it's more likely to be wrong in easy to notice ways, which is ... better? 3. I think it's rude to not use the best tools to convey the message most clearly and most respectfully of my time. I often use AI to help me write emails and nearly every time it provides more concise well structured versions of what I have to say. 99% of the time I'm just trying to convey a message clearly, that's all. When I write my draft there is often words I can delete or phrases that I can shorten. It's hard to spot but when you have AI point them out it's obvious. This is the role of an editor (check out Stephen King book On Writing which makes this point). Unfortunately I don't have an editor, but I have AI that helps trim the fat, get to the point and save my readers time. If these tools are available to you and you don't use them, then I think that would be disrespectful. I don't take any solace thinking how much time and effort went into what someone wrote me. If I could save them time and have AI write or edit, and save me time reading it since it would be more concise and better structured, it's a win-win.
- mathgeek 7d ago
  I think your point on “cutting down on words”, so to speak, is relative to personal writing style. I find that AI tends to write far more words than I personally do, which is sometimes useful, but in the opposite direction that it works for you.
  - bko 7d ago
    PROMPT: make this more concise while conveying the same message I think “cutting down on words” depends on personal writing style. AI tends to write more than I would, so I usually have the opposite problem.
- elmomle 7d ago
  Just a couple of days ago, a customer rep at a company we partner with dropped a long doc that had basic reasoning errors once you got into the individual sections. I would have much preferred if the rep had written a shorter document and reached out about things they were uncertain about. Instead thet wasted my and my team's time as we first tried to make sense of the document on good faith before realizing the problem. I don't care if people use LLMs per se, but if this is functionally the result, then in this aspect of my work things would go much better if people did not use them. They are a great interface for talking to a machine, but due to the laziness they breed, they are a terrible interface for talking to other humans unless approached with a great deal of discipline.
Sharlin 7d ago
Communication between two people is hard enough. Involving another actor as an intermediary rarely helps. It quickly becomes a game of telephone. Doubly so if the intermediary is an LLM.
deleted 7d ago
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oleksii_kpi 7d ago
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vanschelven 7d ago
I can't help but think that some of the arguments here apply equally well to writing _code_ as they to to other substantive writings. Writing code is thinking, AI code is often vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and the (human) reader of code is the one that pays the cost for this later. The cost/benefit analysis may still work out differently for code though...
- perrygeo 7d ago
  I never use AI for writing but do so regularly for code. They are quite different to me. My reason: code can be checked objectively. I can run it and confirm it works. I don't get attached to it. I don't feel pride in it (even when I write it by hand). Code just is. It's lifeless, inert, and entirely replaceable. How do I do the equivalent for prose? How can I tell if my words "work"? Do they clearly convey my ideas to the intended audience? There's an element of subjectivity here forces me to identify personally with the prose. Code has no such personality. I don't tie my identity or ego to code the same way I would an essay.
  - vanschelven 7d ago
    Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Hal Abelson
  - layer8 7d ago
    > My reason: code can be checked objectively. I can run it and confirm it works. Running the code only confirms that it works with the precise input, in the precise environment, under the precise circumstances you run it under. It doesn’t ensure that the code is correct. Thinking through the code, on the other hand, lets you consider all possible cases. It’s the difference between experiment and (mathematical) proof. For an objective correctness proof, using a formal language is indispensable.
    - preg_match 7d ago
      Even thinking through the code is not complete because our brains make mistakes. They also make assumptions, thousands of them, that you don’t know about. It’s tricky, because every thought you have has an entire sea of preconceived notions and knowledge behind it, which you can’t identify. In that way, it’s similar to an LLM. In practice, for code, testing code is the way to go. Formal proofs work, too, but the barrier to entry is high and it’s overkill for most business applications. LLMs can be very good at writing tests, if you read the test thoroughly and analyze them.
deleted 7d ago
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pigpop 7d ago
I don't know what everyone else is doing but I've certainly been writing a lot more often because of my interactions with AI. Maybe some people used to write more but have been leaning on AI so they can write less but I don't think that's universally the case. I agree that being lazy about writing and simply using a short prompt or list is detrimental if you are replacing your own output but you don't have to do that and you don't have to accept any of the output either. The best chats I've had usually start with a large amount of my own writing up front, thinking through the idea, listing several alternative ideas, asking a lot of questions, jotting down related topics, etc. and then reading the resulting output and critiquing it, asking for clarification, doing my own research on it, even just discussing it with the AI and doing this for a number of turns until I feel like I've exhausted the topic in the chat. I then often take what I've shaped in my own mind from that process and write something myself, either that or take the best parts of the output and edit, rearrange, reinterpret, and add to it in order to produce something. I guess it all comes down to whether you are actively engaging with the material, regardless if that material is the result of a Google search, pulled from a book or generated by AI. If you just read it or copy paste it and don't engage with it and think about it then it doesn't do much good.
tptacek 7d ago
So, I think I agree with all of this, but want to use this post to host my take on AI writing, a take I don't think I can get across on the big thread here on my post about AI writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070 I think people are stuck in the idea that the way you "use AI to write" is to let it generate alternative words for your thoughts. That's a terrible way to write. I advocate for a rule: "any word an LLM suggests to you is disqualified, even if it's better than the word you've chosen". Nobody is vigilant enough to keep LLM word selection from bleaching out their personal style. But LLMs can do things for language (natch) that deterministic programs can't. Those things are helpful and you should consider taking advantage of them. Here's a short list of ways an LLM can potentially improve your writing: * It can instantly spot overused words and turns of phrase, or, better still, worthless filler and throat-clearing like "just" and "very" and "it's important to note". * It can rescue active verbs trapped inside nouns, where sentences are wrapped in zombie verbs like "make" or "reach" or "start" or "have", carbonite-frozen verbs like "decision" or "agreement" or "distortion". * It can match the subjects of your sentences with actual characters in the action of your story or argument, flagging all the times you accidentally nail the subject of a sentence down to some random part of the scenery. It can check to see whether the new detail each sentence adds (if it adds any at all --- something else it can check) is in the stress position of the sentence. * It can check your transitions and flag places where the openings of sentences and paragraphs are abrupt. For that matter: it can check the topic sentences of paragraphs and the flow from graf to graf. * It can check for passive voice, but also note the (many) instances where passive is the right call for what you're trying to say. The model never gets tired. It generally never forgets the rules. It can instantaneously diagram out a sentence and work out an accurate model of the semantics of your writing. It's doing things you cannot do with a grammar checker. You're not going to want to act on everything an LLM flags. LLMs have an idiosyncratic sense of style (I keep saying they write every sentence like it's the headline of a magazine article). Some of these quirks of writing will be part of your voice, and you'll need to keep them. You're not going to want the LLM to give you alternate words and sentences. That way lies Velveeta. And many times, the LLM will flag a usage issue and your response won't be to act on the suggestion, but just to rewrite the sentence or paragraph entirely --- or, better yet: just delete it, which is an awesome feeling. This is using an LLM as a copyeditor. I've worked with professional copyeditors, and the feeling of working with an LLM copyeditor is comparable, except that the LLM is much more thorough, and I don't feel bad about ignoring it when we disagree. This style of working doesn't allow the model to infect your writing; it's just making you better informed about the words you're choosing. I think more people should try it.
Ampersander 7d ago
Who cares? AI gives me lots of text and it's not like it's ever going to go away. Any time in my life in the future when I need text, I can just have AI generate it. Thinking is solved.
59percentmore 7d ago
People were self-conscious about their writing (quality, speed) before LLMs. AI seems like a way out of that weakness. That's just the nature of a tool: it seems to extend our ability. People are going to use it if they don't have a better option. The only cure: be the person people can turn to instead of the machine, whether that's helping them write or helping them become better writers. And, yeah, you'll have to do that cheaper than the AI (netted against the social cost of being the guy/gal who got caught slopping).
vikrantrathore 7d ago
Irony an article written by AI, wants to say do not use AI for writing. Following sentence looks like written by an AI, human do not use double dash, it seems AI instead of emdash wrote double dash; “I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo,”
- in_absentia 7d ago
  This absolutely doesn't look like AI writing and this is a pretty weird signal to use. I have a much better theory: as it happens, Substack automatically converts "--" to em-dash as you type. I'm guessing the author knew that and wanted to use this feature, but composed the article in another editor and then copied-and-pasted the whole thing. Because of how Substack implements the feature, the substitution doesn't actually kick in on Ctrl-V, so all these "--" remained in place.
- erwald 7d ago
  Haha, I do actually use double dash, as I write in org-mode. I then convert that org-mode text to Markdown and copy and paste the Markdown into the Substack editor, which preserves the double dash. In case it needs to be said, the article is 100% human-written.
  - vikrantrathore 7d ago
    In some of your other writing can see use of emdash probably thats also intentional, emacs might have very special key combo for it to use unicode emdash instead of ASCII “-“. I commented about double dash (“--“) because because thats what LLM does when asked not to use emdash for writing. “Another promising approach is to conduct on-site inspections regularly—say, every six months— to make sure chips are not just installed to fool inspectors and then removed and smuggled, as has happened before. However, conducting on-site inspections at this scale would likely require additional budget for export enforcement, or for US authorities to implement a third-party export auditor program.”
    - 7d ago
deleted 7d ago
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a-dub 7d ago
i like to write and then workshop with the ai. i find that i have to push back on tendencies it (has less of these days) has to rewrite my work in massive ways. it also can help with writers block sometimes, or parts of a paragraph i'm not that interested in.
tzumaoli 7d ago
Every time there are some articles like this, some people replied with: "Yeah I agree, but I use LLMs 'this way' and my way doesn't suffer from the problem mentioned." I'm not saying these people are wrong but it's interesting that people always think their way of using LLMs is the best (and other people are using LLMs in the wrong way).
- dwaltrip 7d ago
  Welcome to the internet :)
theropost 7d ago
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queenkjuul 7d ago
I know I'm an outlier but i truly just can't imagine using an LLM for absolutely anything outside programming itself. I'm something of an expert in programming so i can spot the hallucinations and nonsense. I'm not an expert in lots of other things where i wouldn't be able to spot the problems. That and the writing is so grating and awful, the docs are so verbose yet vague. Reading the responses i explicitly asked it to generate is bad enough, i could never ask someone else to do it with something they could just generate themselves.
gong_hits 7d ago
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AndrewKemendo 7d ago
This has to be the most toxic topic ever
stavros 7d ago
I disagree, but think that there's a specific way to use AI to write. I use AI to get critiques on my writing, but never want it to actually produce text for me. I experimented with this by making https://www.writelucid.cc https://www.writelucid.cc, and I really like it, I use it for all my writing nowadays. Getting comments on specific sentences/passages and being able to debate them has been great for my thinking, and I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work while writing with it.
ruokaelen 7d ago
[flagged]
foobarbecue 7d ago
It blows my mind that anyone would ever use an LLM to write, if communication is their goal. LLM writing takes your prompt and adds stuff you didn't write, burying your meaning and making it harder for the reader to get your message. Way more effective to just publish the prompt. Of course, it's great if you're just trying to fill space or satisfy demands of a bullshit job.
- AustinDev 7d ago
  Here's how I use it to write. I dump an unedited stream of consciousness into the prompt. Sometimes it's just me having a conversation with myself thinking through what I actually want to say. Then, I have it ask me to clarify anything that's unclear. Then I have it write me a rough draft. I read that and then just rewrite most if not all of it while I edit the output. I use this workflow for work stuff or dealing with businesses in personal life. I'd never use this to generate a letter or email to a friend or colleague.
  - foobarbecue 7d ago
    Interesting. Does your output end up being shorter than your input?
    - AustinDev 7d ago
      Hmmm, I've never actually checked that. Just had codex run the numbers excluding the boilerplate in some of the documents output is on average ~13% shorter than input, I only checked the ones that were all of the same type (proposals) since it was easier to have codex run the numbers on that. I compared at final edited output less boilerplate vs sum(prompts). If I had to guess I'd say far more people are better at editing than they are at writing de novo. My approach probably limits the creativity of the output but I'm not writing a novel.
  - grey-area 7d ago
    Definite ‘work stuff’ because most work stuff is read by colleagues, otherwise why was it written?
dalemhurley 7d ago
When I was a graduate 20 years ago, the partner would sit with a print out of every word I wrote and a red pen marking every change required, as the partner knew anything that was written in his name had to be exactly what he would have said. Same needs to go for LLMs, leverage them for productivity both make sure you are owning their output.
malacola 7d ago
This resonated with me - I’ve been avoiding things that affect my word choice since mobile messaging apps started introducing “next logical word choice” features for the exact reasons outlined here. If writing approximates thought, I don’t want some third party process constantly butting in and derailing that train, even if I’m just texting someone. But as a thought experiment, replace “writing” in this article with “coding”, and ask yourself why the same points wouldn’t hold? Maybe it’s because I enjoyed writing essays in college, before I wrote software as a job, but I’ve never seen much difference between writing code and writing natural language. They’re both a means to an end, some lossy way of encoding thought. One is machine executable and one isn’t (arguable maybe, at this point) but I think they both suffer from the same pathologies outlined here when AI takes over, eg, “writing is thought”, “AI writing can be subtly wrong” etc. Yet the preponderance of hot takes I see these days are along the lines of “code review is dead”, “writing code by hand is dead”. Perhaps people largely don’t see code as communication? It bothers me to imagine a world where the vast majority of textual communication produced becomes machine generated, whether that’s natural language or code.
- thenthenthen 7d ago
  LLM’s can be soooo derailing. Better ask a few friends to give feedback on your writing. Yes, it will take two weeks before you get any, but it is waaay more valuable than any LLM and absolutely worth the time (also gives you some fresh eyes ;) ). Dont forget to give them a gift, copy, credit.
grogers 7d ago
Is editing really any less 'thinking' than writing the original copy? I don't use LLMs to generate prose but I can compare to writing code. Let's say I use an LLM to write code to some specification. After it meets the spec I go over everything with a fine-toothed comb - tweaking things to a style I like better, rewriting pieces or interfaces that I think would be better a different way, etc. Is the final work product any different than if I wrote it from scratch without absolutely any LLM use? Personally I would say no, if I do enough editing to be perfectly satisfied with it then it's the exact same output in the end.
- in_absentia 7d ago
  I think it's hard to generalize because people have different approaches to writing, but to me, there's a marked difference between iteratively polishing my own text and editing for someone else (and that includes LLM output produced by my own prompts). In the second case, these sentences were never a "voice in your head", and you never invested any effort into shaping them, so it feels more like janitorial work / drive-by nitpicking than craftsmanship.
zamalek 7d ago
I recently heard the best noun for someone who let's AI write for them: a meat proxy. Apart from the extremely good points made in the article; there's also whether you care that someone reads what you (or rather, the AI) has written. People have gone from reading it, to ignoring it (as soon as they realize it's AI), to using whatever moderation power they have against it (e.g. downvoting). My 75 y/o mother wrote a kids' book about the animals on my brother's farm, and she was singing praises about how much AI was helping her. I reminded her that I would rather have her grandchildren reading _her_ words and not some clanker's words. I don't think I am alone in valuing the human soul.
wdutch 7d ago
One way I use AI to help me write that I've not seen anyone else talk about is this: I'll say "give me multiple versions of saying xyz". I'll almost never use any of what it outputs verbatim, but seeing it said in different ways helps me clarify how I'd prefer to approach writing it.
diego_moita 7d ago
Define "use AI to write". If you're talking about the general plan, structuring paragraphs, organizing your thoughts then I totally agree. Claude, in particular, is very hard to read. But if English is a second language for you and you still get confused about what is the proper preposition or phrasal verb then you need AI. I suggest Grammarly.
- erwald 6d ago
  It's defined in the linked article?
numitus 7d ago
This is just some sort of Luddism all over again. Sorry to be blunt, but nobody cares about your proofreading, because your text will most likely be read by another AI anyway. Your boss doesn't care about what's more convenient for you either. If you generate X amount of value for the company and your colleague generates 3X, you'll soon find yourself out on the street. It's like saying you don't like Googling things and instead prefer spending the whole day at the library reading through articles and books. LLMs are incredibly powerful tools, and everyone's task right now is to learn how to maximize their productivity by leveraging their advantages and mitigating their flaws, rather than urging people not to use AI. The genie is out of the bottle, and the world will never be the same.
- Kodiack 7d ago
  LLMs are incredibly powerful and useful tools, but offloading your writing to them oftentimes means you’re placing an undue burden on whoever you’re sending the generated output to. To take it to the extreme, a “3x worker” is by definition relative, and someone malicious could achieve that by overloading a colleague with generated text that they themselves hadn’t bothered to read in full. You can stay at your baseline but be “3x” if you’re sufficiently able to sabotage your coworkers. I’ve been on the receiving end of needing to review “documentation” that was generated almost entirely by LLM. It wasn’t anything that was done with malicious intent, but it’s still exhausting, and you need to exercise an even greater degree of caution because of the potential subtle mistakes or inaccuracies that a real human would never make.
  - numitus 7d ago
    I agree that sending someone a text you haven't read and understood is a sign of poor skills, much like forwarding someone else's message that has nothing to do with the issue being discussed. But we have to acknowledge that the market for speechwriters and corporate copywriters has existed for centuries. Surely you don't think a president is being dishonest when delivering a speech that someone else wrote for them?
    - jplusequalt 7d ago
afian 7d ago
Unfortunately the sad truth is that any good writing on the internet these days is going to be drowned by a tidal wave of SEO optimized slop. The other unfortunate thing is that LLMs write better than most people I know, so the number of people using LLMs to write, even when the purpose is to inform or persuade, will only grow.
illusive4080 7d ago
I offended a coworker by asking him to not send me AI written things because they’re wrong in subtle ways and overly verbose. I’m glad someone else shares my opinion.
Zaraif13 7d ago
Any form of thoughtful writing is usually meaningful when it's deeply human. Having said that, I've found it helpful to use AI as a sounding board and planner before actually getting into the writing. For me, the hardest part of writing a piece is always in getting the actual writing started, and AI has helped me unblock that a few times.
rajay99 7d ago
I use AI to write all the time. It can write better than I can. This article is wayyy to pretentious.
rootedbox 7d ago
[flagged]
833dong 7d ago
[flagged]
Revanche1367 7d ago
I’ve found Gemini and Codex can do pretty well by just telling them to follow my writing style, be brief, be less robotic, be professional, be semi-professional, use less technical jargon, no em-dashes, etc. depending on the task. But, I only use that for short summaries of things I am deeply familiar with to send a slack message about or similar. I also edit before sending. It takes maybe a couple of prompts to get 90% of the way there. Claude on the other hand is atrocious at sounding human, it’s like it’s deliberately following LLM -speak stereotypes no matter how you tell it to write. I finally told it to stop using “Claudeisms,” which gave better though not great results.
ScienceCaptain 7d ago
I built a place to continue the disagreement around Grunewald's article as a structured one-on-one discussion. Its an experiment in finding better ways to have deeper conversations online if anyone here wants to try it: https://hwgo.io/p/7 https://hwgo.io/p/7 Good or bad please let me know what you think of this format!
someguynamedq 7d ago
That's a lot of qualifiers for one title
dcj4 7d ago
"I think" You do not.
peterpanhead 7d ago
Sorta based? “You should never use AI for writing!!” then goes an uses AI for writing. Funny stuff mate. I agree generally but you still use and used AI and are telling people not to.
- erwald 6d ago
  Why do you think I used AI to write this? (I didn't.)
r0l1 7d ago
I dump my thoughts and a short draft of my message, mail, ... into one of the big LLMs and let it finish my work. Quite happy with the results and I can concentrate on the real tasks. I don't like writing and I am happy with the speedup... Get real work done and enjoy the rest of my time outside in nature.
chasedavenport 7d ago
[flagged]
stevetron 6d ago
I think we are confusing the line between the tool and the author. The AI is a tool, like a word processor, a typewritier, or a computer running MSWord or LibreOffice. Someone is going to say it isn't authentic if you used a spell-checker or a grammar-checker.
- nirava 6d ago
  You're wrong in comparing LLMs to a spell/grammar-checker (Syntax v Semantics) If LLM is a tool so is a ghost writer (not) You're probably extending the logic from the idea that a programmer-llm is a tool. That is at least a defensible position. A written program isn't written to be experienced by people (usually), rather to create certain outcomes. On the other hand, the written word is the entire experience of the person reading your thing, and that can all be created by an AI without your input. It has it's own biases and motivations and "alignments" (so to speak). Thus it is not a tool and actually a writer itself. And when it writes, you miss out on the experience of having written it, thus actually you end up becoming the tool (pun intended) that LLM is using to express itself.
throwaway81523 6d ago
Seems like poor advice. Why "almost"?
informal007 6d ago
Much like short-form video, technology that minimizes deep thinking seems bound to gain popularity
p0w3n3d 6d ago
I totally agree! I think AI could be used as a discussion partner or a proofreader. Otherwise it tends to extrapolate (unnecessarily enlarge) parts that are of low value and omit or not stress enough parts that are of most importance. It does not understand or know what's inside my brain and won't take it out from there by itself. It has problems with human thinking in terms of easiness (when trying to explain something for example) etc -- EDIT -- The thing I am mostly scared of is that people who create decisions will start writing them with AI and world will stop making sense in 3... 2... 1...
MetroWind 5d ago
Unfortunately people don't usually "write", at least not in the sense this article describes. > blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel Normal people don't write blog posts, research reports (because normal people don't do research), or novel. They also don't write "thoughtful emails"; they just write low effort normal emails.

358 points by erwald 7d ago

atdt 7d ago

This advice is too coarse. I believe LLMs have made me a better writer of technical reports. I have a keen ear for language, and I can usually tell when a sentence or a paragraph is orbiting around a point rather than landing on it firmly. Some writers insist that unclear prose is dispositive proof of unclear ideas -- a sign the writer has not thought things through. My experience is different: I often have a clear idea in mind that I cannot quite find the right idiom to express. Sometimes I can find it if I keep revising, but staring at a sentence too long can entangle you in a particular linguistic frame that can be hard to escape. LLMs are helpful because their idiom-list is vast and they are indefatigable and infinitely patient. You can keep iterating on a sentence and it will keep giving you fresh takes. Eventually, whether through careful steering or brute-force iteration, it will come up with something that has the right resonance. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you recognize it when you hear it. For me, the end result of this writing-process is often a document where much of the language first came from the agent, but the voice is recognizably mine, and I feel a clear sense of authorship. It is still my work because of the microscopic attention I paid to every word. The marble is the agent's, but the chisel and mallet are in my hands.

breezybottom 7d ago
You say the voice is clearly yours, but that's an illusion. I can recognize your comment as AI written.
- atdt 7d ago
  I understand this is a confusing time, and we all feel vulnerable to being duped. But please be a bit more circumspect with these confident accusations, because they can be genuinely hurtful. You are factually wrong here: I don't use LLMs to write or revise personal content.
  - mh- 7d ago
    I thought it was an interesting comment and I suffer from the same issue when trying to get a clear idea from my head into writing. I sacrificed some Pangram credits to reply to the parent comment, fwiw.
  - breezybottom 7d ago
    [flagged]
- mh- 7d ago
  I can see why you might think that, but Pangram says otherwise. https://www.pangram.com/history/3d55b442-d151-4490-9c71-28d0d6ec8f5c?ucc=v0WYMhMlUiN https://www.pangram.com/history/3d55b442-d151-4490-9c71-28d0...
  - breezybottom 7d ago
    [flagged]
AnimalMuppet 7d ago
> Sometimes I can find it if I keep revising, but staring at a sentence too long can entangle you in a particular linguistic frame that can be hard to escape. This expresses quite well an experience that I have sometimes had. Your first words can trap you in a box that you know isn't right, but you can't figure out how to escape.
semanticc 7d ago
I don't want to sound offending, but if that is your own writing style, it makes sense why AI writing resonates with you.

alas44 7d ago

"AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways" This one felt to me, at work I lost a lot of time re-reading and correcting AI prose that was launched to "summarize" a collective white paper, and where subtlety and nuance disappeared in ways that harmed the initial ideas/arguments I was writing about, but in sneaky ways.

D-Machine 7d ago
AI is very bad at properly handling statements that make heavy use of vague quantifiers (e.g. "some", "most") and also commits a lot of pretty serious logical fallacies. It is also bad at handling subtle logical negation, generally. One of the most egregious negation issues I run into a lot is when I (or someone) makes a statement of the form: "not X" or "X is thus not true", and the AI then proceeds to interpret or summarize this as 'whatever is the opposite of X is the case'". This will cause it to go down a useless path investigating or disputing the opposite of X, which generally has no relevance or bearing on anything. It also often very harmfully will replace your carefully chosen words with weirdly specific academic operationalizations or formalisms, then again waste huge amounts of text refuting / showing "problems" that result from that formalism, all of which again have no bearing or relevance on the original statement. An example would be you saying something like "intelligence, generally, must surely explain some of the differences in X", and then it will go "actually IQ does not correlate with X", unless you specifically tell it not to conflate psychometric IQ with intelligence generally. Sometimes this is helpful, but the more specific / technical the domain, the more often you specifically have to prevent it from going down stupid paths that should be obvious given the expert context and wording, because it can seem almost hungry to try to catch you in some kind of insipid 'gotcha'. Much of these issues often clearly arise immediately from the first-pass "reword what the user said" part, given the reasoning traces.
michaelchisari 7d ago
Most of us have worked our whole lives to be writers in some domain: Code, documentation, specifications, product requirements, corporate communication, etc. If we don't want to be writers, then we have to be editors. And editing is an entirely different job and it's not an easy one. In many ways it's harder. Especially when LLMs love writing novels when all we need is a short story or less.

polotics 7d ago

If I may propose a broader rule, that I think this post presents a special case of; Only ever use AI to make yourself think harder, and more.

D-Machine 7d ago
And also to think in different directions than you would have gone in isolation. Regardless, this is a great heuristic / rule that I will be sharing and keeping in mind.
hxelk1 7d ago
This is brilliant, I'll be using that. Thanks.

sklargh 7d ago

I don't find AI helpful for truly constructive or creative prose, it devolves to the median output very quickly and it's almost painful to hear in my inner voice when I read out an AI-ified idea. The "not this but that" formulation is especially bad or cloying attempt at pretending to refine an idea or lightly correct something to start from a position of authority, very annoying. That said, I have a lot of situations at work where I am asked to simplify something I am an expert in or convey something for a different audience, particularly as I prepare for presentations and I do find it helpful in helping me step down my writing or work. YMMV. I also skip words a lot and can miss that even after 2-3 editorial passes and it's very helpful at that vs. say normal spellcheck.

patrickmay 7d ago

From TFA: "Eric Schwitzgebel writes that . . . There’s a huge cognitive difference between nodding along while reading something and actually productively generating a text. Two reasons: First, once the text is on the page, it’s easy to passively let the approximate word suffice, rather than thinking about word choice in the same effortful, active way we do when generating prose de novo. Second, as I suggested above, I doubt that human beings, even experts, have a good sense of all the factors that shape word choice -- everything they’re being sensitive to. You would have phrased it slightly differently, and even if you don’t know that, or why, a different signal is sent and received." This is the best articulation I've seen of why simply reviewing and copy-editing does not provide remotely the same value as writing from scratch. I spent a considerable amount of time over the past two weeks reviewing and improving a work document that was the output of an LLM. Given the number of people involved and the final level of effort, I'm firmly convinced that writing it manually would have been faster and resulted in a higher quality product. Getting the wording right matters.

onraglanroad 7d ago
While I mostly agree with you, what is the real difference between an editor saying, 'when generating prose de novo' sounds pretentious to an American audience so let's use 'when writing from scratch' instead, versus an LLM giving the same advice? Not that it's necessarily better but it's the kind of thing an editor might pick up and so why would you reject the advice if it's a machine giving it rather than a human?
- layer8 7d ago
  TFA is about having AI do the writing, not about having AI suggest editorial improvements. The parent comment argues against having the AI write the text and having the human merely review it, not against having the AI review human-written text (and the human deciding which of the AI’s suggestions they might apply). See also this existing comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49768564, which I completely agree with and which is complementary to the above root comment.

rectang 7d ago

Instead of asking AI to write something substansive for you, ask it to critique your writing. Then use your own judgement as to which bits of advice to follow and which to ignore. The LLM will always give you a full rewrite — don't use it. It always does too much, and persuading it to tone it down is a constant battle.

devindotcom 7d ago
AI can't critique because it has no critical faculty. It can only offer critique-shaped language. That may be useful for some, though.
- manmal 7d ago
  That’s not entirely true. High end models will point out things that are misrepresented or plain wrong, and this will often be accurate.
- dwaltrip 7d ago
  Potayto, potahto

AlienRobot 7d ago

I find it so weird that people use AI to write things. Writing is one of the easiest things you can do. Just put one word after the other.

D-Machine 7d ago
Writing is pretty hard for a lot of people, maybe especially so if they are more non-verbal thinkers, and then doubly so again if one must write not in one's native language.
- bigstrat2003 7d ago
  Depends on the writing. Writing a blog post or something is challenging because you want to have an engaging style. But I see people at work using LLMs to fill out tickets, which is the easiest thing in the world. It's just a plain description of things, it requires no skill at writing at all. It baffles me that people are using LLMs for something like that, which should take less than a minute of your time to fill out and will be more pleasant for the recipient than the slop the model produces.
  - D-Machine 7d ago
    Here I would maybe argue that the simplicity makes these kinds of tasks tedious (like doing taxes), so it also makes a lot of sense for people to want to just throw AI at it. Tedious, easy rote tasks can be much more unpleasant than engaging ones. I think people massively over-rely on AI and I really worry about the consequences of this. But there is nothing baffling at all about the basic appeal, IMO.
nephihaha 7d ago
It depends on what you are trying to convey and how.
sublinear 7d ago
I don't think I have to speculate why comments like yours get downvoted so much. Anyway, I completely agree. Writing isn't something to be delegated. The problem is not new with LLMs. Businesses have been delegating writing to idiots who don't really care for the entire history of business. Authors and musicians have traded their souls for inauthentic crowd-pleasing results for about as long. No, the problem with LLMs is that people are all using the same generic models. This only further shows that the future of LLMs is locally trained and locally run. Personal LLMs on a personal computer. Business LLMs on-prem. We will continue see them flourish in ways that generate absolutely no money whatsoever on their own, but do add marginal value when combined with a heavy dose of human creativity. All the clueless old farts that are still alive by this point will continue to lecture the rest of us with more condescending gee whiz "whaddyaknow" and "whodathunkit" nonsense. As if they've even had their finger on the pulse since the early 2000s.

jameshart 7d ago

Use AI to write things for you to read that you wish someone else had written. ‘Give me a summary of the research on this topic’; ‘Write a report on this data to help me make a decision’. ‘Take this transcript of a meeting and write me the email it could have been’. Don’t use AI to write things that you are producing for someone else to consume.

bdangubic 7d ago
I am someone else, if AI can write something that I want to and can consume then it can do the same for other’s consumption. Perhaps a disclaimer would be nice, “co-written with ____” but I see no difference between the two though of course I understand what you are trying to convey conceptually
- boredatoms 7d ago
  There is a higher tolerance for LLM-isms if you asked an LLM to write something for you Elsewhere it’s painful and irksome when you didn’t ask for it
  - bdangubic 7d ago
    this is where I perhaps differ from other commenters, I do not have higher tolerance, regardless of whether I asked it or am reading something someone else posted, fully or partially written by LLM.
    - lelanthran 7d ago
      > this is where I perhaps differ from other commenters, I do not have higher tolerance, regardless of whether I asked it or am reading something someone else posted, fully or partially written by LLM. Perhaps English is not your first language? To people who are well-read, LLM-ism grate on their nerves like the high-pressure sales pitch you hear on 3am shopping channels.
      - 7d ago

calebkaiser 7d ago

I think about this a lot. I started my teenage-to-young-adult life in the literary world as a poet who loved programming, and made a living as a ghostwriter. At some point, I fell in love with mathematics and wound up in ML in research/engineering for the last 8 years or so. So, I've thought a lot about writing and ML and their intersection. I think one of the underappreciated things about writing "substantive" work is that the work you see at the end isn't the first attempt. And I don't mean the first draft of the piece. I mean that almost always, writers iterate on the same topic many times, either with complete published pieces or abandoned drafts or even just conversations and sessions of unproductive daydreaming. It's a cliche that your best work typically also comes out fastest, but it's not because of divine inspiration, it's because you've whittled the big idea you actually care about down so much in your mind that you instinctively know exactly how to write it. My experience has been that for people who don't work this way or don't write a lot, LLMs can give them this incredible feeling of leaping straight from inkling to "substantive" writing. And because they haven't built up those muscles or "taste", they don't immediately recognize that it's imprecise and hard to follow. That's not to say they're not brilliant in their own right, just that they haven't spent a lot of time on this particular thing. Sort of like a very gifted programmer who doesn't have a ton of experience yet (speaking as someone who is gifted at nothing and frequently has to do things they're inexperienced at). So I don't think the problem is that LLMs just write bad. It's that LLMs are so wonderfully powerful that they allow you to confidently leap forward to create something that is a little beyond your experience. And that's why I have different reactions to heavily AI generated writing. When it feels like marketing at scale, it grosses me out. But when I feel like it's just someone who is excited to write an idea and maybe doesn't have a lot of experience doing it, I'm not judgemental. My hope is that it makes them more excited about writing, and that trying to make their next piece better will lead them inevitably to start thinking about where the last piece fell short. And if there's some slop along the way, eh, I'm not compelled to read it.

alicia_research 7d ago

[flagged]

bko 7d ago

> I think so because (1) the writing process is an essential part of the thinking process, (2) AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and (3) writing with AI (and not labeling it as such) is rude and misleading. I’ll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings. 1. Agree writing process is essential, but just getting your thoughts down is the start. 2. Human writing is very often vague and wrong in hard to notice ways, but I would say it's more likely to be wrong in easy to notice ways, which is ... better? 3. I think it's rude to not use the best tools to convey the message most clearly and most respectfully of my time. I often use AI to help me write emails and nearly every time it provides more concise well structured versions of what I have to say. 99% of the time I'm just trying to convey a message clearly, that's all. When I write my draft there is often words I can delete or phrases that I can shorten. It's hard to spot but when you have AI point them out it's obvious. This is the role of an editor (check out Stephen King book On Writing which makes this point). Unfortunately I don't have an editor, but I have AI that helps trim the fat, get to the point and save my readers time. If these tools are available to you and you don't use them, then I think that would be disrespectful. I don't take any solace thinking how much time and effort went into what someone wrote me. If I could save them time and have AI write or edit, and save me time reading it since it would be more concise and better structured, it's a win-win.

mathgeek 7d ago
I think your point on “cutting down on words”, so to speak, is relative to personal writing style. I find that AI tends to write far more words than I personally do, which is sometimes useful, but in the opposite direction that it works for you.
- bko 7d ago
  PROMPT: make this more concise while conveying the same message I think “cutting down on words” depends on personal writing style. AI tends to write more than I would, so I usually have the opposite problem.
elmomle 7d ago
Just a couple of days ago, a customer rep at a company we partner with dropped a long doc that had basic reasoning errors once you got into the individual sections. I would have much preferred if the rep had written a shorter document and reached out about things they were uncertain about. Instead thet wasted my and my team's time as we first tried to make sense of the document on good faith before realizing the problem. I don't care if people use LLMs per se, but if this is functionally the result, then in this aspect of my work things would go much better if people did not use them. They are a great interface for talking to a machine, but due to the laziness they breed, they are a terrible interface for talking to other humans unless approached with a great deal of discipline.

Sharlin 7d ago

Communication between two people is hard enough. Involving another actor as an intermediary rarely helps. It quickly becomes a game of telephone. Doubly so if the intermediary is an LLM.

deleted 7d ago

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oleksii_kpi 7d ago

[flagged]

vanschelven 7d ago

I can't help but think that some of the arguments here apply equally well to writing _code_ as they to to other substantive writings. Writing code is thinking, AI code is often vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and the (human) reader of code is the one that pays the cost for this later. The cost/benefit analysis may still work out differently for code though...

perrygeo 7d ago
I never use AI for writing but do so regularly for code. They are quite different to me. My reason: code can be checked objectively. I can run it and confirm it works. I don't get attached to it. I don't feel pride in it (even when I write it by hand). Code just is. It's lifeless, inert, and entirely replaceable. How do I do the equivalent for prose? How can I tell if my words "work"? Do they clearly convey my ideas to the intended audience? There's an element of subjectivity here forces me to identify personally with the prose. Code has no such personality. I don't tie my identity or ego to code the same way I would an essay.
- vanschelven 7d ago
  Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. -- Hal Abelson
- layer8 7d ago
  > My reason: code can be checked objectively. I can run it and confirm it works. Running the code only confirms that it works with the precise input, in the precise environment, under the precise circumstances you run it under. It doesn’t ensure that the code is correct. Thinking through the code, on the other hand, lets you consider all possible cases. It’s the difference between experiment and (mathematical) proof. For an objective correctness proof, using a formal language is indispensable.
  - preg_match 7d ago
    Even thinking through the code is not complete because our brains make mistakes. They also make assumptions, thousands of them, that you don’t know about. It’s tricky, because every thought you have has an entire sea of preconceived notions and knowledge behind it, which you can’t identify. In that way, it’s similar to an LLM. In practice, for code, testing code is the way to go. Formal proofs work, too, but the barrier to entry is high and it’s overkill for most business applications. LLMs can be very good at writing tests, if you read the test thoroughly and analyze them.

deleted 7d ago

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pigpop 7d ago

I don't know what everyone else is doing but I've certainly been writing a lot more often because of my interactions with AI. Maybe some people used to write more but have been leaning on AI so they can write less but I don't think that's universally the case. I agree that being lazy about writing and simply using a short prompt or list is detrimental if you are replacing your own output but you don't have to do that and you don't have to accept any of the output either. The best chats I've had usually start with a large amount of my own writing up front, thinking through the idea, listing several alternative ideas, asking a lot of questions, jotting down related topics, etc. and then reading the resulting output and critiquing it, asking for clarification, doing my own research on it, even just discussing it with the AI and doing this for a number of turns until I feel like I've exhausted the topic in the chat. I then often take what I've shaped in my own mind from that process and write something myself, either that or take the best parts of the output and edit, rearrange, reinterpret, and add to it in order to produce something. I guess it all comes down to whether you are actively engaging with the material, regardless if that material is the result of a Google search, pulled from a book or generated by AI. If you just read it or copy paste it and don't engage with it and think about it then it doesn't do much good.

tptacek 7d ago

So, I think I agree with all of this, but want to use this post to host my take on AI writing, a take I don't think I can get across on the big thread here on my post about AI writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070 I think people are stuck in the idea that the way you "use AI to write" is to let it generate alternative words for your thoughts. That's a terrible way to write. I advocate for a rule: "any word an LLM suggests to you is disqualified, even if it's better than the word you've chosen". Nobody is vigilant enough to keep LLM word selection from bleaching out their personal style. But LLMs can do things for language (natch) that deterministic programs can't. Those things are helpful and you should consider taking advantage of them. Here's a short list of ways an LLM can potentially improve your writing: * It can instantly spot overused words and turns of phrase, or, better still, worthless filler and throat-clearing like "just" and "very" and "it's important to note". * It can rescue active verbs trapped inside nouns, where sentences are wrapped in zombie verbs like "make" or "reach" or "start" or "have", carbonite-frozen verbs like "decision" or "agreement" or "distortion". * It can match the subjects of your sentences with actual characters in the action of your story or argument, flagging all the times you accidentally nail the subject of a sentence down to some random part of the scenery. It can check to see whether the new detail each sentence adds (if it adds any at all --- something else it can check) is in the stress position of the sentence. * It can check your transitions and flag places where the openings of sentences and paragraphs are abrupt. For that matter: it can check the topic sentences of paragraphs and the flow from graf to graf. * It can check for passive voice, but also note the (many) instances where passive is the right call for what you're trying to say. The model never gets tired. It generally never forgets the rules. It can instantaneously diagram out a sentence and work out an accurate model of the semantics of your writing. It's doing things you cannot do with a grammar checker. You're not going to want to act on everything an LLM flags. LLMs have an idiosyncratic sense of style (I keep saying they write every sentence like it's the headline of a magazine article). Some of these quirks of writing will be part of your voice, and you'll need to keep them. You're not going to want the LLM to give you alternate words and sentences. That way lies Velveeta. And many times, the LLM will flag a usage issue and your response won't be to act on the suggestion, but just to rewrite the sentence or paragraph entirely --- or, better yet: just delete it, which is an awesome feeling. This is using an LLM as a copyeditor. I've worked with professional copyeditors, and the feeling of working with an LLM copyeditor is comparable, except that the LLM is much more thorough, and I don't feel bad about ignoring it when we disagree. This style of working doesn't allow the model to infect your writing; it's just making you better informed about the words you're choosing. I think more people should try it.

Ampersander 7d ago

Who cares? AI gives me lots of text and it's not like it's ever going to go away. Any time in my life in the future when I need text, I can just have AI generate it. Thinking is solved.

59percentmore 7d ago

People were self-conscious about their writing (quality, speed) before LLMs. AI seems like a way out of that weakness. That's just the nature of a tool: it seems to extend our ability. People are going to use it if they don't have a better option. The only cure: be the person people can turn to instead of the machine, whether that's helping them write or helping them become better writers. And, yeah, you'll have to do that cheaper than the AI (netted against the social cost of being the guy/gal who got caught slopping).

vikrantrathore 7d ago

Irony an article written by AI, wants to say do not use AI for writing. Following sentence looks like written by an AI, human do not use double dash, it seems AI instead of emdash wrote double dash; “I think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo,”

in_absentia 7d ago
This absolutely doesn't look like AI writing and this is a pretty weird signal to use. I have a much better theory: as it happens, Substack automatically converts "--" to em-dash as you type. I'm guessing the author knew that and wanted to use this feature, but composed the article in another editor and then copied-and-pasted the whole thing. Because of how Substack implements the feature, the substitution doesn't actually kick in on Ctrl-V, so all these "--" remained in place.
erwald 7d ago
Haha, I do actually use double dash, as I write in org-mode. I then convert that org-mode text to Markdown and copy and paste the Markdown into the Substack editor, which preserves the double dash. In case it needs to be said, the article is 100% human-written.
- vikrantrathore 7d ago
  In some of your other writing can see use of emdash probably thats also intentional, emacs might have very special key combo for it to use unicode emdash instead of ASCII “-“. I commented about double dash (“--“) because because thats what LLM does when asked not to use emdash for writing. “Another promising approach is to conduct on-site inspections regularly—say, every six months— to make sure chips are not just installed to fool inspectors and then removed and smuggled, as has happened before. However, conducting on-site inspections at this scale would likely require additional budget for export enforcement, or for US authorities to implement a third-party export auditor program.”
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a-dub 7d ago

i like to write and then workshop with the ai. i find that i have to push back on tendencies it (has less of these days) has to rewrite my work in massive ways. it also can help with writers block sometimes, or parts of a paragraph i'm not that interested in.

tzumaoli 7d ago

Every time there are some articles like this, some people replied with: "Yeah I agree, but I use LLMs 'this way' and my way doesn't suffer from the problem mentioned." I'm not saying these people are wrong but it's interesting that people always think their way of using LLMs is the best (and other people are using LLMs in the wrong way).

dwaltrip 7d ago
Welcome to the internet :)

theropost 7d ago

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queenkjuul 7d ago

I know I'm an outlier but i truly just can't imagine using an LLM for absolutely anything outside programming itself. I'm something of an expert in programming so i can spot the hallucinations and nonsense. I'm not an expert in lots of other things where i wouldn't be able to spot the problems. That and the writing is so grating and awful, the docs are so verbose yet vague. Reading the responses i explicitly asked it to generate is bad enough, i could never ask someone else to do it with something they could just generate themselves.

gong_hits 7d ago

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AndrewKemendo 7d ago

This has to be the most toxic topic ever

stavros 7d ago

I disagree, but think that there's a specific way to use AI to write. I use AI to get critiques on my writing, but never want it to actually produce text for me. I experimented with this by making https://www.writelucid.cc https://www.writelucid.cc, and I really like it, I use it for all my writing nowadays. Getting comments on specific sentences/passages and being able to debate them has been great for my thinking, and I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work while writing with it.

ruokaelen 7d ago

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foobarbecue 7d ago

It blows my mind that anyone would ever use an LLM to write, if communication is their goal. LLM writing takes your prompt and adds stuff you didn't write, burying your meaning and making it harder for the reader to get your message. Way more effective to just publish the prompt. Of course, it's great if you're just trying to fill space or satisfy demands of a bullshit job.

AustinDev 7d ago
Here's how I use it to write. I dump an unedited stream of consciousness into the prompt. Sometimes it's just me having a conversation with myself thinking through what I actually want to say. Then, I have it ask me to clarify anything that's unclear. Then I have it write me a rough draft. I read that and then just rewrite most if not all of it while I edit the output. I use this workflow for work stuff or dealing with businesses in personal life. I'd never use this to generate a letter or email to a friend or colleague.
- foobarbecue 7d ago
  Interesting. Does your output end up being shorter than your input?
  - AustinDev 7d ago
    Hmmm, I've never actually checked that. Just had codex run the numbers excluding the boilerplate in some of the documents output is on average ~13% shorter than input, I only checked the ones that were all of the same type (proposals) since it was easier to have codex run the numbers on that. I compared at final edited output less boilerplate vs sum(prompts). If I had to guess I'd say far more people are better at editing than they are at writing de novo. My approach probably limits the creativity of the output but I'm not writing a novel.
- grey-area 7d ago
  Definite ‘work stuff’ because most work stuff is read by colleagues, otherwise why was it written?

dalemhurley 7d ago

When I was a graduate 20 years ago, the partner would sit with a print out of every word I wrote and a red pen marking every change required, as the partner knew anything that was written in his name had to be exactly what he would have said. Same needs to go for LLMs, leverage them for productivity both make sure you are owning their output.

malacola 7d ago

This resonated with me - I’ve been avoiding things that affect my word choice since mobile messaging apps started introducing “next logical word choice” features for the exact reasons outlined here. If writing approximates thought, I don’t want some third party process constantly butting in and derailing that train, even if I’m just texting someone. But as a thought experiment, replace “writing” in this article with “coding”, and ask yourself why the same points wouldn’t hold? Maybe it’s because I enjoyed writing essays in college, before I wrote software as a job, but I’ve never seen much difference between writing code and writing natural language. They’re both a means to an end, some lossy way of encoding thought. One is machine executable and one isn’t (arguable maybe, at this point) but I think they both suffer from the same pathologies outlined here when AI takes over, eg, “writing is thought”, “AI writing can be subtly wrong” etc. Yet the preponderance of hot takes I see these days are along the lines of “code review is dead”, “writing code by hand is dead”. Perhaps people largely don’t see code as communication? It bothers me to imagine a world where the vast majority of textual communication produced becomes machine generated, whether that’s natural language or code.

thenthenthen 7d ago
LLM’s can be soooo derailing. Better ask a few friends to give feedback on your writing. Yes, it will take two weeks before you get any, but it is waaay more valuable than any LLM and absolutely worth the time (also gives you some fresh eyes ;) ). Dont forget to give them a gift, copy, credit.

grogers 7d ago

Is editing really any less 'thinking' than writing the original copy? I don't use LLMs to generate prose but I can compare to writing code. Let's say I use an LLM to write code to some specification. After it meets the spec I go over everything with a fine-toothed comb - tweaking things to a style I like better, rewriting pieces or interfaces that I think would be better a different way, etc. Is the final work product any different than if I wrote it from scratch without absolutely any LLM use? Personally I would say no, if I do enough editing to be perfectly satisfied with it then it's the exact same output in the end.

in_absentia 7d ago
I think it's hard to generalize because people have different approaches to writing, but to me, there's a marked difference between iteratively polishing my own text and editing for someone else (and that includes LLM output produced by my own prompts). In the second case, these sentences were never a "voice in your head", and you never invested any effort into shaping them, so it feels more like janitorial work / drive-by nitpicking than craftsmanship.

zamalek 7d ago

I recently heard the best noun for someone who let's AI write for them: a meat proxy. Apart from the extremely good points made in the article; there's also whether you care that someone reads what you (or rather, the AI) has written. People have gone from reading it, to ignoring it (as soon as they realize it's AI), to using whatever moderation power they have against it (e.g. downvoting). My 75 y/o mother wrote a kids' book about the animals on my brother's farm, and she was singing praises about how much AI was helping her. I reminded her that I would rather have her grandchildren reading _her_ words and not some clanker's words. I don't think I am alone in valuing the human soul.

wdutch 7d ago

One way I use AI to help me write that I've not seen anyone else talk about is this: I'll say "give me multiple versions of saying xyz". I'll almost never use any of what it outputs verbatim, but seeing it said in different ways helps me clarify how I'd prefer to approach writing it.

diego_moita 7d ago

Define "use AI to write". If you're talking about the general plan, structuring paragraphs, organizing your thoughts then I totally agree. Claude, in particular, is very hard to read. But if English is a second language for you and you still get confused about what is the proper preposition or phrasal verb then you need AI. I suggest Grammarly.

erwald 6d ago
It's defined in the linked article?

numitus 7d ago

This is just some sort of Luddism all over again. Sorry to be blunt, but nobody cares about your proofreading, because your text will most likely be read by another AI anyway. Your boss doesn't care about what's more convenient for you either. If you generate X amount of value for the company and your colleague generates 3X, you'll soon find yourself out on the street. It's like saying you don't like Googling things and instead prefer spending the whole day at the library reading through articles and books. LLMs are incredibly powerful tools, and everyone's task right now is to learn how to maximize their productivity by leveraging their advantages and mitigating their flaws, rather than urging people not to use AI. The genie is out of the bottle, and the world will never be the same.

Kodiack 7d ago
LLMs are incredibly powerful and useful tools, but offloading your writing to them oftentimes means you’re placing an undue burden on whoever you’re sending the generated output to. To take it to the extreme, a “3x worker” is by definition relative, and someone malicious could achieve that by overloading a colleague with generated text that they themselves hadn’t bothered to read in full. You can stay at your baseline but be “3x” if you’re sufficiently able to sabotage your coworkers. I’ve been on the receiving end of needing to review “documentation” that was generated almost entirely by LLM. It wasn’t anything that was done with malicious intent, but it’s still exhausting, and you need to exercise an even greater degree of caution because of the potential subtle mistakes or inaccuracies that a real human would never make.
- numitus 7d ago
  I agree that sending someone a text you haven't read and understood is a sign of poor skills, much like forwarding someone else's message that has nothing to do with the issue being discussed. But we have to acknowledge that the market for speechwriters and corporate copywriters has existed for centuries. Surely you don't think a president is being dishonest when delivering a speech that someone else wrote for them?
  - jplusequalt 7d ago

afian 7d ago

Unfortunately the sad truth is that any good writing on the internet these days is going to be drowned by a tidal wave of SEO optimized slop. The other unfortunate thing is that LLMs write better than most people I know, so the number of people using LLMs to write, even when the purpose is to inform or persuade, will only grow.

illusive4080 7d ago

I offended a coworker by asking him to not send me AI written things because they’re wrong in subtle ways and overly verbose. I’m glad someone else shares my opinion.

Zaraif13 7d ago

Any form of thoughtful writing is usually meaningful when it's deeply human. Having said that, I've found it helpful to use AI as a sounding board and planner before actually getting into the writing. For me, the hardest part of writing a piece is always in getting the actual writing started, and AI has helped me unblock that a few times.

rajay99 7d ago

I use AI to write all the time. It can write better than I can. This article is wayyy to pretentious.

rootedbox 7d ago

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833dong 7d ago

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Revanche1367 7d ago

I’ve found Gemini and Codex can do pretty well by just telling them to follow my writing style, be brief, be less robotic, be professional, be semi-professional, use less technical jargon, no em-dashes, etc. depending on the task. But, I only use that for short summaries of things I am deeply familiar with to send a slack message about or similar. I also edit before sending. It takes maybe a couple of prompts to get 90% of the way there. Claude on the other hand is atrocious at sounding human, it’s like it’s deliberately following LLM -speak stereotypes no matter how you tell it to write. I finally told it to stop using “Claudeisms,” which gave better though not great results.

ScienceCaptain 7d ago

I built a place to continue the disagreement around Grunewald's article as a structured one-on-one discussion. Its an experiment in finding better ways to have deeper conversations online if anyone here wants to try it: https://hwgo.io/p/7 https://hwgo.io/p/7 Good or bad please let me know what you think of this format!

someguynamedq 7d ago

That's a lot of qualifiers for one title

dcj4 7d ago

"I think" You do not.

peterpanhead 7d ago

Sorta based? “You should never use AI for writing!!” then goes an uses AI for writing. Funny stuff mate. I agree generally but you still use and used AI and are telling people not to.

erwald 6d ago
Why do you think I used AI to write this? (I didn't.)

r0l1 7d ago

I dump my thoughts and a short draft of my message, mail, ... into one of the big LLMs and let it finish my work. Quite happy with the results and I can concentrate on the real tasks. I don't like writing and I am happy with the speedup... Get real work done and enjoy the rest of my time outside in nature.

chasedavenport 7d ago

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stevetron 6d ago

I think we are confusing the line between the tool and the author. The AI is a tool, like a word processor, a typewritier, or a computer running MSWord or LibreOffice. Someone is going to say it isn't authentic if you used a spell-checker or a grammar-checker.

nirava 6d ago
You're wrong in comparing LLMs to a spell/grammar-checker (Syntax v Semantics) If LLM is a tool so is a ghost writer (not) You're probably extending the logic from the idea that a programmer-llm is a tool. That is at least a defensible position. A written program isn't written to be experienced by people (usually), rather to create certain outcomes. On the other hand, the written word is the entire experience of the person reading your thing, and that can all be created by an AI without your input. It has it's own biases and motivations and "alignments" (so to speak). Thus it is not a tool and actually a writer itself. And when it writes, you miss out on the experience of having written it, thus actually you end up becoming the tool (pun intended) that LLM is using to express itself.

throwaway81523 6d ago

Seems like poor advice. Why "almost"?

informal007 6d ago

Much like short-form video, technology that minimizes deep thinking seems bound to gain popularity

p0w3n3d 6d ago

I totally agree! I think AI could be used as a discussion partner or a proofreader. Otherwise it tends to extrapolate (unnecessarily enlarge) parts that are of low value and omit or not stress enough parts that are of most importance. It does not understand or know what's inside my brain and won't take it out from there by itself. It has problems with human thinking in terms of easiness (when trying to explain something for example) etc -- EDIT -- The thing I am mostly scared of is that people who create decisions will start writing them with AI and world will stop making sense in 3... 2... 1...

MetroWind 5d ago

Unfortunately people don't usually "write", at least not in the sense this article describes. > blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel Normal people don't write blog posts, research reports (because normal people don't do research), or novel. They also don't write "thoughtful emails"; they just write low effort normal emails.