My name is Martin the last human organic writer on Earth. I am better than everyone else; my citations in my 4-paragraph article say so.
The problem with LLM voice is that it sends the signal that it's a likely waste of effort to try to figure out if there's any "technical insight" there, because more often than not, there isn't.
Maybe it's not fair that you're paying the price for others using LLMs to abuse their readers, but it's the reality that you have to deal with. It's also not fair to expect readers to wade through all that abusive LLM prose in order to find your (assumed) non-abusive post.
Once LLM writing becomes indistinguishable from human writing, it will be really sad. There will just be a collapse of human engagement, and you might as well just talk to your machine because then at least you know what you're getting and aren't being deceived.
An LLM prose article ABSOLUTELY can mean that. To attempt to conflate the two things is maliciously misleading.
Technical skills aren't worth shit and never were, except as far as they enable you to engage with other people in ways you and they find valuable. This used to be really far! It made it easy to believe that the technical skills on their own were what was valuable.
But the engagement was always the valuable thing, generating technical insight was a necessary prerequisite for it. Now anyone with a $20 claude sub can generate technical insight into niche problems, so what's left is everything else. Everything of value.
I think you're misunderstanding that anxiety. I think this is what's going on:
1. For a lot of people, using technical skills like coding is the part of the job they enjoyed.
2. Closely related to the above point: for a lot of people, technical skills was the part they were good at.
> Technical skills aren't worth shit and never were, except as far as they enable you to engage with other people in ways you and they find valuable. This used to be really far! It made it easy to believe that the technical skills on their own were what was valuable.
> But the engagement was always the valuable thing, generating technical insight was a necessary prerequisite for it. Now anyone with a $20 claude sub can generate technical insight into niche problems, so what's left is everything else. Everything of value.
3. More broadly: if "they" don't find the "technical skills" you provided valuable anymore, why do they need to keep you around? Why not cut your 10-person team down to 3 people (the manager, architect, and technical lead) and fire you and the other 6? Not everyone can re-invent themselves as a product person, even if they had the skills. It's a game of musical chairs.
It really is ultimately a labor relations problem. A lot of people thought they were guaranteed to not face penury and now they're realizing they may have been wrong about that. The issue is that it's ultimately not under your control whether you can sell your labor, and there's no universal fallback if you can't. Solidarity and concrete power for workers are the answer to this and I don't think there's another one.
For the rest, yes, certainly. The vast majority of people do not enjoy their work, are not valued or rewarded for the skills they apply to it. Again, if you thought your job was writing code this sucks. But you're merely one of the billions now. I understand the grief for what people are losing but very very few people ever had that rare privilege.
It's the modern equivalent of going to a thesaurus and replacing all your natural words with five-dollar ones.
If you're not confident in your English then just write your brilliant ideas in broken English. Or at most do a direct translation. But don't fluff it with AI's nonsense.
If the ideas are good they will be recognized.
I can’t distinguish between well meaning slop and blogspam slop. I might be able to if I’m well informed on the topic and can point out inaccuracies. Otherwise I just don’t know what is accurate and what is filler or outright wrong. LLM-isms are very distracting and exhausting to sort through. It just doesn’t make for a good reading experience.
There are few things (relatively speaking, I mean online activities, etc) more annoying than seeing a click-baity headline, and then having to read 17 paragraphs to actually get to the point that I realize I already knew and understood it, and it's just slop padding.
No more LLM voice! Every now and then you might get a nonsensical artifact or two, but that's the price you pay for better groceries.
If you care about your voice, don't let LLMs write your words. But that doesn't mean you can't use AI to think, critique and draft lots of words for you. It depends on what purpose you're writing it for. If you're writing an impersonal document, like a design document, briefing, etc then who cares. In many cases (scientific papers, legal documents) you already have to write them in a voice that is not your own. Go ahead and write these in AI. But if you're trying to say something more personal then the words should be your own, AI will always try to 'smooth' out your voice, and if you care about it, you gotta write it yourself.
Now, how do you use AI effectively and still retain your voice? Here's one technique that works well: start with a voice memo, just record yourself maybe during a walk, and talk about a subject you want, free form, skip around jump sentences, just get it all out of your brain. Then open up a chat, add the recording or transcript, clearly state your intent in one sentence and ask the AI to consider your thoughts, your intent and ask clarifying questions. Like, what does the AI not understand about how your thoughts support the clearly stated intent of what you want to say. That'll produce a first draft, which will be bad. Then tell the AI all the things that don't make sense to you, that you don't like, just comment on the whole doc, get a second draft. Ask the AI if it has more questions for you, you can use live chat to make this conversation go smoother as well, when the AI is asking you questions, you can talk freely by voice. Repeat this one or two more times, and a much finer draft will take shape that is closer to what you want to say. During this drafting state, the AI will always try to smooth or average out your ideas, so it is important to keep pointing out all the ways in which it is wrong.
This process will help you with all the thinking involved being more up-front. Once you're read and critiqued several drafts, all your ideas will be much more clear. Then, sit down and write your own words from scratch, they will come much easier after all your thoughts have been exercised during the drafting process.