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.
> 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.
Why do people feel the need to invent the past that never existed?
I have never ever seen anyone to type it on a typewriter in order to make a better impression. That was not a thing.
Likewise, the only handwriting for better impression I have seen was in stuff like love letter. It could possibly done also in super high formal situation (diplomacy, school diploma) or some such, but otherwise it was not a thing.
For most of the 20th century, ordinary people generally had the option of either handwriting or typing. Starting roughly in the 1980's consumers could get their hands on dot matrix printers, and in the 1990s inkjets and lasers started coming in. (For corporate the timeline shifts a bit earlier) .
Relevant for this conversation, dot matrix printouts were considered "cheap", and people were warned not to submit dot-matrix printouts for things like job applications, formal correspondence, etc.
If you were a kid and you tried to hand in a word processed/printed essay in school, even into the early '90s sometimes, you'd get pushback that's very similar to the AI pushback of today. "How do I know YOU wrote it?", "The computer is doing the work for you". They'd force you to rewrite it, properly, in pen.
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.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
Why do people feel the need to invent the past that never existed?
Isamu · · focus · HN ↗
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise, the only handwriting for better impression I have seen was in stuff like love letter. It could possibly done also in super high formal situation (diplomacy, school diploma) or some such, but otherwise it was not a thing.
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
Relevant for this conversation, dot matrix printouts were considered "cheap", and people were warned not to submit dot-matrix printouts for things like job applications, formal correspondence, etc.
If you were a kid and you tried to hand in a word processed/printed essay in school, even into the early '90s sometimes, you'd get pushback that's very similar to the AI pushback of today. "How do I know YOU wrote it?", "The computer is doing the work for you". They'd force you to rewrite it, properly, in pen.