I think this is the opposite of how most people tend to use LLMs, and I actually think my way is the "better" way. My issue has never been the act of writing well, or clearly expressing what I mean... it has been the inertia of putting words on a page at all.
(and an LLM had nothing to do with this comment :P)
I feel like you haven't used LLMs very extensively if that is your genuine experience with LLMs.
Without even tuning the heat to a higher setting, a wide range of LLMs have offered me unique content that I had not encountered previously and certainly was not expecting.
The quality of the AI's writing actually doesn't matter, for me, as much as it might for others, as a result. I write my own stuff. I just find AI helpful to activate me to do it.
For writing as thinking with trouble starting from scratch, LLMs are the most important technology to emerge in my lifetime. Microblogging filled that gap in a way, but it had too many downsides.
> There's nothing stopping you from doing that with an LLM.
There may be, though. The LLM's initial output may anchor your thinking in insidious ways that may not be obvious at all especially since you're feeling productive. I bet the lack of confidence around starting would also increase over time every time you use an LLM to get over the hump.
I'm not talking about using a default mode LLM with LinkedIn Standard Obsequious Bullshit as a conversational imperative that emerges from simple prompts interacting with the heaviest weights. It pushes back because I told it to and it has redirects around common LLM failure modes, and modes unique to how I use them. That's in a set of instructions I've had a bunch of different models tear apart so I could put it back together better.
I treat it and describe it as a language coprocessor, not a buddy. The instructions are the kernel I boot it with.
Moreover, it's not like I spend my entire writing time arguing with an LLM, lol. I spend more time writing myself and/or doing research on the internet without an LLM, because sometimes they still get things wrong.
In short: it's a tool, not a solution.
>clearly expressing what I mean
I have use for it here too - I use it like a "power thesaurus" when I've got the feeling that the word I have doesn't have quite the right connotation, or to test out different versions of rephrasing something when I feel it could flow better or be clearer but I can't quite get my finger on it. But I don't just take output and paste it, I use it like a pair programmer for writing, where I'm the driver and the AI is the observer.
As someone who also has ADHD, I would beg you to reconsider this strategy.
Getting the first thoughts down on paper is the hardest part, especially for those who may have trouble with focus, but that's exactly why you should practice it!
It's 90% of the task, it's where you have to practice executive function to plan what you're going to write in the overall broad sense. Please don't give up on it and hand that task over to the LLMs There are a lot of strategies you can use to break through that barrier and you'll be better off by strengthening that muscle instead of leaving it to wither.
ive been fighting the way my brain works my whole life, and only recently have i switched to trying to work with the way it wants to work. i get so many more things done that are important to me, and i get them done without the implicit "i need to flagellate myself with this thing i hate because there is something wrong with me" that comes with those fights.
and yeah, the ai's come with their own problems. but the trade is so exponentially in the direction of being worth it. even just the being a decent rubber duck aspect of them can keep me on a task when i would never otherwise hope to see it through.
But I also have an automatic car, even though I know how to drive stick.
Tools are tools, and how you use them is the important part.
For me, the issue of getting words on paper isn't focus, but an inability to decide how I want to start a page; it's decision paralysis. Whatever an LLM writes is going to be crappy, because it isn't me, but seeing it immediately gives me guidance as to what I want to say, because I have something to respond to as opposed to just being in my head.
It generally has enough "activation energy" to get me over the hump of wherever I've been mentally stuck.
I don't like how LLMs write. I like how I write.
But I do like that LLMs get me to write. People seem to miss that a lot, because most of the "AI slop" you see is AI-driven, not human-driven. But human-driven writing, with AI as a tool, is a far better way to go about it, imho.
I usually start with "I don't know what to write but" and then just don't let myself stop. I have to keep putting words down, only rule.
It sometimes starts or turns gibberish, but eventually I hit a flow and real stuff starts to come out, and then I'm just writing.
I've seen the concept applied to art/drawing as well. I highly recommend trying!
Quick edit while I can: after googling this there's a lot of woo/spiritual stuff about it. I don't really subscribe to that, I just think it's a great tool to get out of your head and enter the flow state of writing, when it feels inaccessible.
Most of my best short stories were written precisely this way. For creative writing, I find that works really well.
I also do a version of this now, which is simply record myself speaking extemporaneously about the ideas I want to write about. It’s all in my head, so speaking it out loud (or writing) helps me organize my thoughts. Then I take that recording, shove it into an LLM, and have it turn it into sentences with punctuation, without changing meaning.
Inevitably, it sucks, but gives me a starting point.
Most people in this thread are talking about the output stage. You know: polish my text, fix my grammar, generate my message. That's where you lose your voice. But the blank page problem borski describes isn't really a writing problem, it's a thinking problem. Once you know what you want to say, saying it tends to be the easy part for us writers (sometimes lol!).
The most useful thing I've found is using AI to figure out what I actually think, using it for rubber ducking, exploring angles, stress-testing arguments, and then closing the tab and writing it myself. You get the cognitive help without losing the (or your) soul. I've output more writing in my own genuine voice in the last year than I did in several years prior, and it's because I use AI for clarity instead of replacing my output.
Only with humans, it's admittedly way more fun. :)
There's grammatical mistakes and then there is sloppiness. Only the second makes me disregard someone's comment.
> I will lose the credibility of my message if there is too much mistake...
The correct way to write this is "if there are too many mistakes", because mistakes are countable and plural. And it's fine to make grammatical mistakes if English is not your native language. You can only get better by practising :-)
Your post is comprehensible but has multiple mistakes and they are a distraction (which is fine in this context, but in other contexts it might hinder communication).
some other people call moles a beauty spot and feel a genuine affection towards such aysmmetries.
theres a time and a place for everything. taking a look at the topic that the thread is discussing, and taking a look at the positive emotion in the comment that you responded to ...... well im not gonna argue that youre wrong per se ...
Plus, I think Claude is a better model than the one used by Google Translate, but correct me if I'm wrong.
But you're right, DeepL should be perfect to do it, because is model is dedicated for translations !
google translate on the other hand i suspect is using LLMs in the background because sometimes the translation is absolutely nonsensical.
Haven't been able to reproduce that myself though. (LLM-powered translation might be US-only? Or part of an A/B test and I don't have the right account flags? Or maybe the screenshots are fake)
This is not always true. Once there was an online reaction to short content that made people treat "long-form" content as desirable entirely due to its length. I rather like reading books and the New Yorker's fiction section when I still subscribed, but much of this "long-form" content was token-expansion of a formulaic nature which I did not enjoy. LLMs have mastered this kind of long-form token-expansion.
This is assuming people are using an LLM in good faith, obviously. One day, perhaps LLMs will learn to express what someone is saying in an elegant way that is enjoyable for people like me to read. But even then, I will have the difficulty of distinguishing whether this is a human speaking through an LLM in good faith or a human who has set up a machine that is set up to mimic a human.
The latter is undesirable to me because I have access to the best such machines at a remarkably low cost. Were I to desire a conversation with an LLM, it is trivial for me to find one. I'm not coming here for that[0].
A sufficiently insightful LLM which prompts my thinking in certain ways wouldn't be unwelcome to me, I suppose. I have a couple of my friends for whom I still go on Twitter to read what they say even after I have stopped using the site routinely. If I found out the posts were entirely an LLM I think I would still read them simply because I find the posts useful and with sufficiently high signal-to-token.
0: Certainly, if every place only spoke about things I was interested in and never in things I was not interested in, I wouldn't need separation of interest spaces at all. But the variation of interest vectors for different humans has made this impossible.
My favourite people, interactions, stories are all from those who are outside of that bell curve peak. I want weirdness and quirk.
LLMs shouldn’t be used for communication at all if you want any form of authenticity.
It's one thing to have Claude polish a message and another thing for it to write out an entire message.
There's a huge difference between having AI clean up a text you send privately to someone you have worked closely with for years, versus a broad spectrum text sent by a VP to hundreds of people or more. The first case is reprehensible, for the reasons the author lays out. But as for the second case, corporate doublespeak has been a meme since long before the advent of AI and it would remain even in some AI-pocalypse. Just because your boss puts out sanitized language in a mass communication, doesn't inherently mean your boss won't still be present and real with you in a more private setting.
On other side, you have to think uproar what something that could be perceived as say racist by most radical people would cause... You really don't have much left and to aim at blandness. With certain flourishes that makes you look more "Learned".
Which is to say, tuning fights with prompts less as the models and interfaces improve.
Chris McCausland says he relies a lot less on others due to AI.
It has been quite effective in showing how diversity can influence opinions when he has been on radio programs and offered his perspective. There have been conversations which have started on the usual circular crapping on AI that I'm sure that everyone here has witnessed themselves that becomes much more nuanced when he says how his life has changed.
That's why diversity is important. Don't do it like Star Trek Discovery which has 'I know! let's use diversity to solve this problem. Great! That was super effective! Now everybody go back to your minor roles'
Discovery was just so ham fisted when they tried to make points and missed massive opportunities when they could have been done organicity because of the situation.
I really thought the first extra plus future season was going to be a comment on colonialism, but no they just turned up, said they were the more civilised ones and y'all should join our new improved federation. The opportunity was just sitting there to show people figuring out their own culture and not appreciating an interloper dictating how their lives should be simply because they have a fancy starship.
Not to mention declaring their ship sentient because it dreams. It just screams 'conform to our expectations of what sentience should be and we will accept you as a person' They portrayed the exact opposite of what they intended.
(sorry for the rant, I was mauled by a Federation as a child)
I always thought it was one of those banana hair clips, spray painted gold.
As an admirer of low budget creativity, it’s very inspiring. But it still looks ridiculous.
(only half-joking, a part of me fears that this is the reality we’re moving towards)
It's funny though. For computer to computer conversation, we have invented (deflate+inflate) algorithms to save bandwidth, time and money.
On the other hand for human to human communication, we are in the process of inventing a (inflate+deflate) method and at the same time we are spending insane amounts of time, money & bandwidth to make it possible!
Edit: And now I forgot the most important. When the knowledge the llm retrieved is insufficient to answer colleagues question or the agent skill can not execute the requested task from my colleague, it asks me just for the missing info or skill and with me (the human) in the loop work is done x times faster. Eventually it will replace me and all my colleagues one day. Looking forward to do other stuff then
If I asked you for your particular experience on something and got an obvious LLM reply, I might say nothing or I might ask if it was an LLM, but either way I’m unlikely to ask you something or trust you ever again. Which also works for you, I guess, since it’d be one fewer person taking up your time. But if you had instead told me “I’m too swamped to help right now” I would’ve instead offered to help take some burden off your back.
It also sounds like you were overworked and when you started to use LLMs you've stripped yourself of the chance to work with a colleague.
I pictured the normal work from home slack experience.
But I suppose your picture and mine might not have been so different.
Something I have seen a lot of people talk about in the comments here, as well as do in practice within my company and friends, family, etc., is that they say something and then let Claude or GPT rephrase it to be added as a prompt that they'll then use.
In my experience, this will almost always bring about worse results than if you communicated directly with the LLM. I believe this happens because of a few reasons.
1. LLMs tend to do word inflation in that they'll create plausible-sounding prompts, but the words that they introduce have a higher propensity to create worse cookie-cutter results from other agents, coding assistants, writing assistants, or any other form that has been used.
2. By putting a layer in between what we're saying and what the LLMs interpret, we're not honing our ability to articulate and prompt better and wholly depend on the intermediary getting better or being able to interpret better, which does not translate well in practice.
3. Anecdotal, but in my case, when I was doing this myself, it was because I assumed I was harder to understand and not articulate enough to get good results. So I tried speeding up the results by trying to use an intermediary. What I learned, though, was training myself to be articulate and to not doubt myself was easier than getting results from the LLM interpreters.
of course with anything, ymmv.
We may choose words for a reason, but sometimes we choose the wrong words. Sometimes it may be closely spelled words, and you choose the incorrect version. Sometimes it may be because our understanding of the definition of a word is wrong. Either way, it can be problematic when you say one thing when you meant to say something else.
Now I grew up in the olden days. I reach for a dictionary in such cases. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why people would reach for an LLM. LLMs can examine an entire document at once, it will catch errors that you are not familiar with, and it will catch a much larger range of errors. Is it perfect in doing so? Of course not, but it is better than nothing.
In a work context, of course, things are a bit different: I want to move the project forward and not jeopardize my future paychecks. Authenticity tends to take a back seat there. However, I’d be more concerned about inefficiency. Is it really necessary to run every piece of communication through ChatGPT to refine the wording? Are you sure nothing gets lost in the process? Doesn’t that end up wasting a lot of work time without adding any real value?
And on top of that, it leads to alienation and frustration. If you talk to me as if you were an LLM, don’t be surprised if I talk to you as if you were an LLM.
Autocomplete drives me up the wall. I have what I want to say in mind. I go to write it. There are times when it can replicate what I have in mind word by word. I don't know whether the emotional reaction is caused by feeling robotically predictable or because the words no longer feel like my own.
I guess everyone using LLMs for text is similar to that. If everyone uses the same LLM style, its hard to understand where the other person is coming from. This is not a problem for technical and precise communication though(the choice of LLMs in that context has other risks).
It is also strictly not an LLM capability problem because they can mimic or retain the original style and just "polish" with enough hints but that takes time, investment and people go through path of least resistance. So, we all end up with similar text with typical AI-isms.
There are other reasons to dislike LLM text like padding and effort asymmetry that have been discussed here enough.
The only thing is that my anecdata contradicts it. My AI cleaned up writing seems to fare much better and this seems to be true across all channels. To be clear I do not mean AI generated just AI cleaned, that is spelling, punctuation, grammar mainly, the occasional word order change.
In the end it's about getting the message across first and "get to know me" second and proper and clear expression helps a lot with the first.
All of those you could already achieve with tools before LLMs.
There are good arguments to get to know someone "mistakes and all", I just don't think this is a particularly good one. No matter how much you (think) you know someone, they probably know them(selves) better.
It was about how people would get a thing (a robot?) that would repeat whatever they said but in a more fancy way (or something along those lines), to make them sound smarter. Then the people would start depending on these robots to communicate at all, to the point their speech degrades and they start making unintelligible noises that the robots still translate into actual speech.
EDIT: Found it, from 2014: https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3576
Otherwise, not using em dashes, adding some mistakes and writing more like how you think/talk helps :)
When in the middle of a group text-chat, someone replied with AI-generated blather. It was dead-clear with the usual sterile vocab, structured buzzphrases, and other LLM "tells".
I politely called him out and asked to use his own voice. In public he insisted that it was his voice and that he used AI only for "formatting". But in private he admits that he created a "gem to assist with multicultural comms", which generated the text. He claims he did it because "not everyone can take the native American English well". A load of bovine manure. I nicely told him to cut this crap and just write as it comes to him. (Basic spell- and grammar-check is fine.)
i can ramble without an LLM, and i suppose you can ask an LLM to keep it short. but both are results of not taking the time to craft an appropriate message.
But this was the first year I saw it in performance review write-ups which frankly was jarring. Here is feedback supposedly 1:1 that massively affects this person's life and their perception of "worth" so to speak...and it's just AI.
Notably it was split by geography. EU countries closest to organic, india slop trainwreck, US in the middle
Sorta made me conclude "ok i guess that's the end of performance reviews that vaguely mean anything & actually get read"
“Powered by AI” is a trendy marketing term on every website today. In a couple years it’ll be considered blasé, and while AI features will still exist, they’ll be called something like automation or workflows.
If this is true, you really want to be fired. That is a horrendous work environment, and you should quit if at all possible.
Most workplaces (any certainly any good workplace) will seek to understand, not fire you immediately.
Never once was I "one misunderstood message" away from getting canned. I would have quit immediately if that were true. I understand not everyone can quit, but more people can than do.
Nobody deserves to work under that kind lack of of psychological safety, and certainly anyone on Slack and not in a factory has more of a choice.
100% you have been, you just didn't understand nor send the wrong message.
As a sidenote, working for a Corporation is not solely the bar for what people mean when they say working for Corporate. "Corporate" implies a larger organization that promotes policies developed under different circumstances to your work environment which minimizes liability and promotes homogeneity in all aspects of the working experience.
Sure, there are thousands of messages I can come up with that would be immediately fireable; but that’s true anywhere, not just in corporate life, and is thus a strawman.
Ugh, you are not entitled to get to know me. There is a threshold between all that I share with the world and the rest of me. Hell, not every person gets the same picture, and that's deliberate and healthy--my customers don't get to know what my proctologist knows. My mother doesn't get to know what my wife knows.
You don't get to know all of me, because I don't trust you.
This post comes across as sweet, and innocent. It also comes across as absurdly self-entitled, and it's not an OK posture to take towards the world. It's not OK when the police take this posture, it's not OK when private companies take this posture, and it's not OK when strangers on the internet take this posture.
You are entitled to withdraw from relationships that don't fulfill your emotional needs. A reasonable audience for this missive is your girlfriend, your child (who relies on you), or your employer (to whom you are vulnerable).
I personally think that the people who can’t be bothered to actually write authentic messages, and assume that everyone will just read their word salad full of repetitive AI patterns, are being the ones acting entitled.
likewise for friends (not just your girlfriend), getting to know you is part of developing friendship.
so family, friends, work, business, that pretty much covers everyone you deal with on a regular basis.
i would go as far as saying that if you don't trust me then you have no business even communicating with me unless the interaction is incidental.
True: Nobody is entitled to be treated nicely. Nobody is entitled to an open, friendly relationship. Nobody is entitled to get to know you. If we only did what we were entitled to do, and received what we were entitled to receive, the world would be an even shittier place than it already is. We have enough people walking around with the "You're not entitled to me being nice, so I'm not gonna be! nyaaaaa!" attitudes.
If your comment is at all indicative of how you are in real life, I really don't think you have to worry about people wanting to get to know you.
The thing that worries me most is that it's going to redefine the way we write. We absorb language. To compensate for all this AiSpeak I consume, I need to read more literature.
What’s human writing going to look like in a few years if this trend doesn’t stop? I believe that the LLMs will catch up soon and introduce more variance and fewer words designed for impact in their language, delivering us from this AiVerse into one where AI writing is almost indistinguishable from human writing. But until then, we must read more.
This depends on what you consider AI writing. If I dictate what the AI must write word by word verbatim, is it considered AI writing? Is it something to do about the percentage of the text generated? Does it have to do with the vocabulary the AI knows? What if I don't know any other words than the AI does? Does it have to do with the efficiency of communication?
Nevertheless, I don't think AI writing can ever be human writing. No matter if it uses the same words as a human and it's indistinguishable. This is because humans participate in a society as independent conscious actors and thus communication has meaning. The only way text can become communication is when the writer has intents, they're willing to participate in society.
I'm curious as to what you mean by this. I assume you don't mean it literally, as that would be trivially falsifiable (for example, the text readout on a digital caliper doesn't have "intents", yet it absolutely communicates meaning), but I can't think of another way that you might have meant it. Could you elaborate?