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If you start writing today, there's no way to know if you can write without AI

15 points · 23 comments · zazuke

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unified101 · 1790090703 · focus · HN ↗
Imo we should speedrun to how we can use ai to write well. We'll get past this weird opus5 talk phase.
1. bjt · 1790091083 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm sure it can be taught not to lean so heavily on the stylistic flourishes that bother us so much today, but writing is always going to seem vapid if you're taking 1x the amount of intention (the prompt) and inflating it to 5x or 10x the number of words.
2. palmotea · 1790091793 · focus · HN ↗
  > Imo we should speedrun to how we can use ai to write well. We'll get past this weird opus5 talk phase.
  No. We need to establish Claudish as the new normal. Even if you write by hand, if it's not Claudish, it's inferior and ugly.
  1. chuckadams · 1790092310 · focus · HN ↗
    "Claudish", that's a great term, a homophone of "cloddish (adj): foolish, awkward, or clumsy".
    Deepseek 4.1 has (unsurprisingly) started speaking with a strong Claudish accent too, throwing around "honest" and "load-bearing" with abandon, and just generally obfuscating sentences with dense and unnatural phrasing. I'd give it a longer prompt in AGENTS.md regarding my preferred tone, but I don't care for wasting tokens adding an extra translation layer on all output (caveman mode costs tokens trying to chop everything down)
3. ygjb · 1790092512 · focus · HN ↗
  There are lots of folks trying different ways to do this. I think that generative text as a form of writing is a dead end for human creativity and cognition, but I think that there are roles for AI to play, and I am working with my wife to build Oghmere, a writing tool built around the author having full control of writing, and only have the AI elements be able to provide coaching and feedback.
  We are almost ready for our full launch, but definitely interested in getting feedback! I posted my take on here last week - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49716388">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49716388
4. philipkglass · 1790092787 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
jdw64 · 1790090828 · focus · HN ↗
I wonder how much my post would come across as AI-written. I wrote almost all of it by hand. Of course, I do use AI for technical reinforcement, but I wonder how this kind of principle would come across.
1. pixl97 · 1790091342 · focus · HN ↗
  My joke around this is
  "HN, detecting 200 of the last 10 AI written articles"
  Tools like Panagram will simply fall into uselessness as more people read AI and write like AI. Language converges. Much like people started saying "that's cool" to mean something is neat rather than cold, "If not X then Y" will become a pattern humans use far more commonly because they read it in AI all the time.
  1. derwiki · 1790091752 · focus · HN ↗
    We’re speedrunning to Newspeak
  2. kurthr · 1790092315 · focus · HN ↗
    At least for now, it's still very biz-tech with most users in their little bubble. It's more awful office emails than actual conversations. Claude is only ~50M active users (I'm sure Gemini, Copilot, and GPT are larger, but they have different quirks) so it's still more of a "valley girl" quirk than standard.
    If the slop really starts to take off on theTok, and teen girls start to say, "You're completely right, we're not just focused on the load bearing substrate, we're delving the seams of our relationship", I'll start to worry.
    pixl97 · 1790093237 · focus · HN ↗
    >t's still very biz-tech with most users in their little bubble
    This is a very weird take to me and honestly may be more of your (and my) bubble thinking than ground reality.
    <a href="https://www.nms.org/blog/helping-students-and-teachers-use-ai-responsibly" rel="nofollow">https://www.nms.org/blog/helping-students-and-teachers-use-a...
    >Student AI use is already widespread — the question isn't "if" but "how." A 2025 College Board study found that 84% of high school students reported using generative AI for schoolwork, commonly for brainstorming, editing essays, and research.
    <a href="https://dailynexus.com/2026-03-05/seeing-and-believing-how-ai-content-is-dominating-social-media/" rel="nofollow">https://dailynexus.com/2026-03-05/seeing-and-believing-how-a...
    >But this was over a year ago, and as the percentage of AI-generated content on social media rapidly grows, my own ability to identify generated content has begun to falter. 71% of social media content was AI generated as of March 2025, with a forecasted increase to 90% throughout this year.
    Simply put, AI generated media isn't just the "you're completely right" stuff, there is a whole lot more going on here.
    kurthr · 1790093646 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree students are big users. It just seems like they use it for HW rather than for communicating with each other (I could be wrong). The one big counter example I can think of is AI generated meme art. That is just rampant!
  3. jdw64 · 1790092953 · focus · HN ↗
    I've observed this too. I've also started using AI-style writing a lot.
kdazzle · 1790090961 · focus · HN ↗
I had a professor who said that writing is thinking. If you outsource writing to an AI, there’s no thought in it.
Using AI for any part of the writing process has a way of seeping into the rest of it, so I try to stay away from using it at all when writing.
1. dgellow · 1790092062 · focus · HN ↗
  LLM also makes it way too easy to “cheat”. It’s really like gollum: “this is pretty hard to explain in a coherent way, maybe, just maybe, I can just this one time use AI? Nobody will know!”. And little by little you end up arguing with yourself that actually generating the whole article isn’t really that bad, while slowly morphing into a human harness
2. Aarostotle · 1790092615 · focus · HN ↗
  Your professor is right. There’s nothing wrong to use AI to aid the process _of thinking_. That’s actually really helpful, at least to me.
  You’re right about firewalling it in your mind. The moment it starts steering you into ideas that aren’t yours, the piece is screwed.
3. copperx · 1790100842 · focus · HN ↗
  > I had a professor who said that writing is thinking.
  Socrates would have laughed at that.
  Maybe in the future we'll believe that prompting is thinking.
jayd16 · 1790091769 · focus · HN ↗
Looking at it a bit further back, we're in an era drowning in bullshit (spam, scams, ads, posers, cons, wannabes, on and on). Our ability to quickly and effortlessly discern signal from noise has evaporated.
Jtsummers · 1790091998 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
1. hagbard_c · 1790110102 · focus · HN ↗
  Yes, silly title both because it isn't in the article and because it is not true. Of course you can write without "AI", al it takes is a person and a writing implement of choice ranging from a clay tablet through a slate, papyrus, paper, typewriter or a free software document processor like LibreOffice which does not contain "AI" tools. Once so equipped all the person has to do is to start writing, write whatever is on his mind and finish the job. Voila, "AI"-free writing, started "today".
NiloCK · 1790092107 · focus · HN ↗
If you start thinking today, there's no way to know if you can think without writing.
- Socrates
(The problem is real, but the future equilibrium is not easy to predict.)
1. copperx · 1790100528 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
tombert · 1790092607 · focus · HN ↗
AI has, at the very least, confirmed something that I (and many others) have been saying for more than a decade: a lot of the writing you need to do while working in the corporate world is strictly performative.
I used to work at a very large BigCo [1]. On the first day, one of the first things they had us do was set up email filters. A lot of email filters. Many, many, many email filters. This is because it was not uncommon to get multiple-thousands of emails every day. Of course it would be impossible for anyone to read that much, so you set up filters to have emails moved to folders that you never open because you never read them, and you needed to make sure that important emails weren't missed because if you took more than an hour to respond back to an email you risked a phone call from an angry middle manager yelling at you asking why you didn't respond to their email [2].
Email, and most written documentation in tech companies, isn't there for humans to read, it's for plausible deniability. You send out emails that you know no one will actually read because then you can say "I told you so!" when things go wrong. You write pages of documentation that you know no one will read because you can tell people that you wrote the documentation. You can generate infinite comments for your code that no one will read so you can show people that you did your work to write comments.
When I complained about the quantity of emails I got, I would universally be given the response of "just set up filters", presumably because they know that most of the emails I receive were a useless waste of time.
It never mattered if the writing was "good", and it never mattered if it was up to date, and it never mattered if it corresponded to anything useful, because "human comprehension" was never the point. It was there to some bureaucratic rule-of-thumb that a middle manager would religiously adhere to in order to justify their existence in the company.
I'm sure there are exceptions but it always felt like all this performative writing was disliked by everyone. No one liked spending time reading low-effort "cover-my-ass" emails and no one liked writing pages upon pages of documentation that no one will read. Having Claude write and read all this shit and cutting humans out is the natural conclusion, because, at least in my experience, no one will ever seriously suggest we stop with all the performative writing.
[1] It's not hard to find my history, and it's fine if you do, but I politely ask that you don't post it in relation to this thread.
[2] That's not a joke, and it's not hyperbole. I had gotten phone calls from higher-ups complaining I hadn't responded to their email within two hours. I usually bit my tongue because I was a bit more of a coward in those days, but now I probably would have tried to explain to them the very basic concepts of synchronous and asynchronous communication.
1. galetrog28 · 1790591152 · focus · HN ↗
  Email clients like Gmail and Outlook have built-in filtering options. You can set up rules to automatically move or label emails based on sender, keywords, or even the 'List-Unsubscribe' header for newsletters.
  If it helps, and only if it does - I built Quietmail, an email sorter platform built to tackle this stuff so you see the important stuff first. Check it out if you wish, otherwise have an amazing day.
spiderdev · 1790093173 · focus · HN ↗
"If you haven’t, there’s no way for readers to know if you can write without AI, whereas if you have written long enough, people know."
I disagree... I can see where a person uses a degree or certificate of some kind where they have a large focus on writing in person without the use of a computer, and they can use that to prove they can write without AI.

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