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- Hacker News
- 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.
by MetroWind - 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.
by polotics - 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.
by foobarbecue - 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...
by vanschelven - 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.
by rectang - "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.by alas44
- 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.
by jameshart - 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.
by patrickmay