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.
You 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.
Agree completely. The problem is not the tool, it's all the pointless filler (or even hallucinations) that the tool generates that people leave in.
I 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.
I 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.
You 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.
Genuine experiment: Do characters "have a color" for you, maybe? [1][2]
1) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Typed by hand.
2) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Generated by ai, cut-and-pasted in. [3]
For you, would you classify the former as genuine and the latter as slop?
You'd think I'm being silly, but both yes and no are not unthinkable, and honestly I've actually seen odder arguments in court filings and language standards.
[1] <a href="https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23" rel="nofollow">https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 "What color are your bits"
[2] <a href="https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/" rel="nofollow">https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-... "what color is your function"
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
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.
orangeboats · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
duped · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
timacles · · focus · HN ↗
_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.
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
1) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Typed by hand.
2) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Generated by ai, cut-and-pasted in. [3]
For you, would you classify the former as genuine and the latter as slop?
You'd think I'm being silly, but both yes and no are not unthinkable, and honestly I've actually seen odder arguments in court filings and language standards.
[1] <a href="https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23" rel="nofollow">https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 "What color are your bits"
[2] <a href="https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your-function/" rel="nofollow">https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-... "what color is your function"
[3] Sonnet 5, Medium, Sept 2026.