Words come from machine? Work is of machine. I skip human and employ machine

I recently read DDIA for the first time, and I was surprised by how enjoyable it was after reading AI slop for a year.

I think the key tell is that the writing doesn't actually illuminate anything worth learning. The more I see of AI produced output, the more I believe that there is nothing there that wasn't already in the prompt. It's an inflation of a single idea to pages of text. It meandors about and never actually gets into detail.

It's a lot like talking to someone who doesn't know what they are talking about but are good at faking it for a while. The game works by leaning on pat phrases, circular reasoning, and hoping nobody is paying too close of attention. I think this is why it's so popular with the corporate executive class, as that has been their mode of communicating their entire careers. To them, they don't see anything wrong.

"Shitty writing existed before AI" is unfortunately an all too common rejoinder to this issue. That's not an excuse. That doesn't make it better. Just because the pointy haired boss talks that way doesn't mean we should be gleefully pouring gasoline on the fire.

This guy sure likes to use his own dashes, just saying.

I noticed the exact same thing, and I also don't want the LLM to suggest anything to me. I do want it to comment, and to tell me what could be improved, but not to give me text.

I created a small tool to make this easier: https://www.writelucid.cc/. It's free (bring your own API key), feedback would be appreciated.

I disagree with the advice to avoid having an LLM write a first draft and then editing it yourself.

To me, for most business and academic content, the ultimate goal is to convey information. If I can edit AI copy to legibly convey that information clearly, that's enough and I can move on.

The saying, "Don't allow perfection to be the enemy of the good," comes to mind.

And I'm not convinced an individual can accurately edit without learning just as much as if they wrote the content. I guess the question is: how hard does the person work at editing. And does the individual challenge themselves to not put out content they themselves don't understand.

We're in a transition period. And as in all transition periods, many recoil at what is new. LLM writing still feels strange. And it's understandable.

But, for better or worse, in a business and academic setting, as the years go by, most of us will shrug and move on.

As with any topic, there will always be a minority of fanatics who cling to the rejection of AI writing in all its forms. Just as some prefer Vegan leather or tabs over spaces.

But among those who get things done, most (though not all) will accept that it's not worth it to exclude AI from writing. There simply isn't sufficient ROI.

It's like trying to bring back low-end highly human employed manufacturing to wealthy industrialized nations.

That ship has sailed.

I do agree, however, that in cases where an individual is reading for pleasure -- e.g. not in a business or academic context, authors will be forced to pick their audience: those who enjoy writing, even if it smells of AI, and those who don't.

I guess to summarize, my feeling is that using LLMs to write is perfectly acceptable, and used well you'll likely learn just as much. But you must be willing to lose some of your audience. And, over time you'll lose less and less of that audience.

I don't know, with LLM it feels like I finally have possibility to prepare all the dull text that corporate environment expect in a form that colleagues are able to digest even if they don't specially enjoy it like it's the best poetry their beloved one ever composed specially for them. This is in sharp contrast with the struggle to shrink into a somewhat coherent excerpt the wide web of interweaved psychological experience flow graph into this alien expressions which are text streams. It's still impossible to dump really the whole experience and communicate wholly the full semantics they cast, but at least these automatons are never scared to face far much than they can sustain in what can be thrown at them, and apparently most people prefer the dull soulless prose to whatever can suggest vivide continuous reconnection of everything as the context inevitably drift and everything needs to be reconsidered properly with all the rest.

It's incredibly hard to maintain your own voice while using LLMs. It requires deep discussion with the LLM itself so that it comes to understand your perspectives and also explains to you the premises on which its own recommendations are based.

I haven't really done a systematic analysis to compare the quality of fully human-written content and content generated via this kind of deep human-AI collaboration, but my intuition is that the latter is vastly superior. Perhaps AI at its best is a research tool, but a genuinely intelligent one that we need to engage in conversation with in order to use to its full potential.

The sense that I get is that as a conversation gets more in depth, the LLMs start behaving more like reasoning engines and less like statistical averaging machines. The former is vastly more useful to a person who wants to develop an idea and articulate it well.