Posted by erwald 3 days ago
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.
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.
I think you should write down your thoughts, tell it to make the points you spelled out and be concise and respectful of the reader's time and attention. When I do this, it works very well. But I agree if you just have it respond and reason it tends to often produces bad responses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, but I would!