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Once upon a time the word processor was invented, and it made it so much easier to arrange your words on paper. iIf bits were wrong, you could just delete them,
by Kim_Bruning 5d ago
Once upon a time the word processor was invented, and it made it so much easier to arrange your words on paper. iIf bits were wrong, you could just delete them, or copy and paste them across pages. It was actually pretty amazing what you could do; especially if you didn't mind dot-matrix type on fan-fold paper. Of course if you wanted to make a better impression, you'd type it on a typewriter, or better yet, hand-calligraph your writing with a fountain pen.
So LLMs allow you to work at the speed of reading, if not faster. So you can try a paragraph here, completely rewrite the tone. Start a chapter in 1PP and just have it rewritten to 3PP. And sofort and so on. The number of new transformations you can do is endless.
What do a lot of people do? Write a one line prompt and show everyone the oneshot result.
Ok fine, sometimes you don't need to write amazing prose. But you can also be like the early writers who adopted the word processor. If you put the same amount of elbow-grease into using an LLM as you did writing before, you can get some pretty cool results.
- watwut 5d ago> Of course if you wanted to make a better impression, you'd type it on a typewriter, or better yet, hand-calligraph your writing with a fountain pen. Why do people feel the need to invent the past that never existed?
- Isamu 5d agoI lived in that past myself, what are you thinking about?
- watwut 5d agoI have never ever seen anyone to type it on a typewriter in order to make a better impression. That was not a thing. Likewise, the only handwriting for better impression I have seen was in stuff like love letter. It could possibly done also in super high formal situation (diplomacy, school diploma) or some such, but otherwise it was not a thing.
- Isamu 5d agoOkay, this is just time/place/situation dependent. I remember typing job applications, that was something that communicated seriousness. Handwritten pages always signify special care, indeed as you say that’s why you see that in diplomas and such. There was a time when I kept hand written letters going for my close college friends, on good stationary. I think we are just in different situations/places/demographics. [edit] also I kept my job application rejections (paper mail). These were very instructive as they showed a pattern of rote rejection that made me less discouraged.
- MarkusQ 5d agoThat past certainly did exist, within living memory (mine, for one).
- Isamu 5d ago>Once upon a time the word processor was invented, and it made it so much easier to arrange your words on paper. It’s easier to rearrange and rethink and tinker. Hard to imagine now but it was more efficient in the days when you would have to pencil out a memo and have someone type it up, you would make corrections and the final copy would be done in a couple passes. This has been studied, efficiency has actually gone down, in favor of immediacy and direct control. What it frees you from is organizing your thoughts ahead of time, which takes practice and discipline. Using an LLM is just taking that further, you can avoid organizing your thoughts and ideas a bit more.
- orangeboats 5d agoYou nailed it on what I've always wanted to say. If someone uses LLM to help wording their idea in a way that's easier to understand, I am fine with it as long as they don't copy-paste it verbatim into their blogpost. I am getting a little ranty here, but the usual LLM-isms like "not this, but that" or "that's the real footnote here" simply add zero value to the text, and I can't imagine anyone who has proofread the LLM-generated text even once will opt to keep those sloppy paragraphs. If I see them, I can't help but to think that the author had oneshotted the text. And it strongly suggests to me that the author has put zero effort into their work.
- AlexandrB 5d agoAgree completely. The problem is not the tool, it's all the pointless filler (or even hallucinations) that the tool generates that people leave in.
- duped 5d agoI disagree, the problem is the tool. Generating text instead of thinking about what text to use explicitly is not writing, and it's not worthy of someone else reading it. Fundamental to exchanging ideas is discovering which ideas should be exchanged and how to express them. The process of writing itself is that exercise. If you use a tool to outsource the thinking then you're not thinking.
- AlexandrB 5d agoI definitely think that "not thinking about what you're writing" is a big danger with AI-generated text, but it's not a given. If you generate a block of text and then go through and edit it to better reflect your ideas and voice - that's the thinking process in action. It's also entirely possible to generate slop by manually typing every word - see any corporate communication ever.
- timacles 5d agoYou will NEVER be a good to great writer if you use AI to seed your writing and then edit it. _Everything_ AI generates, is generalized slop. All of your ideas will be boring and derivative. Mediocre writers will be improved, but the best would only have their ability to think dulled. Just think through it from the perspective that AI is generating art for you instead of writing. What would all art look like if good artists used it for ideas and "edited" it? It would look like generic, derivative shit. A perpetual crutch that the person can never abandon.
- alansaber 5d agoWell said, the issue being, the form factor of many AI products disincentivises this behaviour. To give an example, using a CLI tool with a frontier model to write a blog (actually fairly common), you have to re-open it in another editor, potentially reformat it or convert MD>DOCX, etc etc. There's a lot of noise and mess, and people naturally tend towards "not bother" and 1-shot some "amazing" prompt (because the value of their elbow grease is disproportionately low, unless they actually have something to say- many do not).
- Retr0id 5d agoAre people really publishing blogs in docx format?