Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

That said, abdicating to an LLM is the worst of all worlds - you’re not thinking and the product is not tailored.

The solution is obvious - write as much detail as you need and allow readers to interrogate the virtual you with an LLM, maybe not even reading what you write.

Take for example a non-native writer of the language. I'm sure having to check up words from a dictionary may help to reconceptualize things, but I'm sure also that it's not often very efficient. And I think similar is going on for natives too for many types of writing.

They’re completely opposed to experiencing any type of friction.

Much like money decoupled selling and buying to move away from bartering, writing decoupled saying and hearing so they didn't have to happen at the same time. The incredible step that happened was not that people had to think a whole lot, it was that thinking that was already happening had to happen once.

> All writing is thinking when done by a human, you’re literally distilling your thoughts into words. You can’t write without thought.

Of course you can. You can write down exactly what you hear, for dictation.

You can write down a stream of consciousness and put barely any thought into it at all.

I can't help but feel most here are massively over estimating human writing. Human writing is, almost universally, terrible. We have entire jobs that are hard to fill just to make things sort of ok. Good writing is a small subset of human output.

Because one can copy a text and write it down and that involves thinking in the sense that anything we do involves thinking fundamentally. But that thinking is different from thinking logically about a concept and writing it down which I think is where you are getting at.

The definition of writing and thinking is too broad in that sentence even though it does apply in several obvious cateogires within that at different levels.

And also "writing helps us think about the world" is too broad again. Why? Why does me writing "apt apt apt apt apt apt apt" help me think about the world? I just wrote it because i felt like writing it. Why wouldn't you consider that writing?

(1) Translation from one language into another

(2) Transcription from one medium (audio) into another (text)

(3) Deception to obfuscate your thoughts

(4) Posting things like "First!", "This.", "Just google it.", etc.

(5) Textbook answers with no original thought.

QED?

That's why there's so many meetings in white collar companies. Because people can't understand what is going on at those documents so they just need to "align".

LLMs are amazing at generating this useless documentation that goes absolutely nowhere.

1. I have a bunch of data or research that I've gathered with a unique hypothesis

2. Having gotten my arms around that pile of information, I believe I have a compelling thesis to put forth

3. I design the narrative arc and of the thesis. The important parts, the necessary but not sufficient scaffolding.

4. An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible.

Who is this for? Well, quite possibly the human who asked for it. It's pretty informative to read back a research brief in full that you helped do the scaffolding.

Also of very clear use is other AI's who did not have the same unique hypothesis and did not gather the supporting evidence. It's an interesting angle for others to build on.

And of course, other humans! Most human written content gets almost zero readers today as it is. And I suppose LLM content probably pulls the asymptote closer to zero, but some pieces of content may be genuinely interesting or useful.

I used to say this was the future of advertising (cr sales person prompts “we have some new EV SUVs on the lot”; GPT generates an ad email with a synthetic video, blinking text etc; then the recipient’s spam processor tells them “that dealer has some new SUVs”. I suppose the same could happen with so-called “long form”.

People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have drafts and editors.

There is a constant refrain here that somehow short messages are more valuable than longer ones. But that assumes it's understandable. Lots of short content is, frankly, awful because the writer cannot put themselves in the position of the reader and explain all the things around the point they're making that the reader really should be told.

You can view writing as translation. From your language to a language your audience speaks. At that level is it so odd if the word count differs from one side to the other?

Why are you reviewing AI code in detail? Do you also review the assembly output of GCC line by line?

Prices are very competitive and today's SOTA is next to free in half a year.

Whether code is maintainable without AI becomes less and less important.

I couldn’t help myself, replied and asked him for a recipe for delicious apple cobbler and hiking trail recommendations in Glasgow, which “he” immediately provided. Highlight of my career.

I think my core argument is this: I have access to every bit of information your AI does, so if I want an AI answer I’ll get one myself. If that isn’t true, why are you hoarding information? Push it somewhere we can all see it. So the only reason I would send you a message is to access _your_ brain. I have no interest in talking to an AI through a worse interface.

Maybe sometimes, but not always. When you need to actually render the thing you have all kinds of micro decisions, like where to put the square, what color, how fast it spins, etc.

You might not care about the details, but maybe you do. If it spins at 10000 rpm, will you care then?

Natural language, and human communication in general, is ambiguous, and coding is in great part about disambiguation.

Sure, you can use English to disambiguate as much as needed, but wouldn’t you then end up with some yaml-like spec that wasn’t much easier to create in the first place?

One of the most rewarding things for me is figuring out a good shape for a system and how it would interoperate with the other systems, especially in a way that reframes other parts of the codebase in a way that bring clarity and makes it more intuitive to work with. Creating the right ontologies can make all the difference in what you can do with a project. It's a form of creating mathematical objects.

For example, a Unity game I work on has quest and dialog systems driven by visual scripting graphs. We had two way dialog with different units for player response choices and npc dialog. But we wanted to expand to letting NPC's have dialog with each other as well as conversations with more than two participants. I went outside and thought it over, which largely amounted to visualizing a dialog node graph and a feeling in the back of my mind like it was trying to perform a kind of geometric shape-fitting exercise. A fitment solution jumped out at me to have only one "Dialog" node shared by all participants, with a "participant" value on it. If the player parses this node then the options go on-screen as responses, while if an NPC parses this node with multiple options in it, it picks one. And this lets you voice the player if you want, and enables some things like overhearing other NPC's talk to an NPC then talking to that NPC yourself and having the same tree.

And for quests, the quests had just been for the player, but I was thinking about how to make scripted events in-game easiest to work with for script team who primarily works in visual scripting. Similar story - let the NPC's have their own little quests, with task stages, which are easy to track and make branching choices from, and let the NPC's definition for how to use that quest contain a collection of actions to override the typical actions available to it, so an NPC in a specific "quest" can't do things you don't want it to do, a common enough case that it's preferable to making a series of conditions on the general action planner like "not in quest A"

And timing myself, it took 1-2 hours each time to write out the detailed plan for how I wanted each thing implemented in the game with some other tasks thrown in, and it paid off after Astra worked on it until it was done. It was awesome coming back to something pretty much exactly what I asked for each time.

Which is exactly what happens with human evolution and development. Sure, we can say LLMs don’t have “human” understanding - which is something we can’t really define anyway - as long as we’re not trying to claim LLMs don’t have understanding at all. The latter is a much higher bar.

> We define goals that we cannot conceive of reaching without something like understanding happening.

Functionally speaking, that is understanding. Again if you want to go past a functional definition, that’s a bar which no one can clear right now.

That is it. We cannot concieve it because we are new to it. Just like we would think of Stackoverflow as intelligent if we are fresh off the jungle and are not aware of how Internet works. Because without know that, we cannot conceive how Stackoverflow can produce answers without it "understanding"

It didnt get it from the docs. There is no public docs. I know it because I wrote the code.

Really? I am having difficulty thinking of any examples of code that doesn't need to be understood. If it isn't understood by someone, then how is it even working?

If you mean like a library you are using, where you aren't even reading the internals or might not even have access to it, OK, but that code is stull understood by its authors, surely?

Similarly if Joe's contribution to his long form "idea" is a couple of bullet points, a program trained on flowery phrasing and a weighted average of everyone else's ideas isn't communicating Joe's thoughts on the topic, it's just adding words.

The debate on whether Claude actually thinks or not is orthogonal to the fact that outsourcing your "thought leadership" to it is avoiding thinking or leading. If I want to know how Wikipedia or Claude summarise wider human thought about the topic, I can find their websites thanks

I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better.

But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem.

Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will

Umm the point is you won't know to ask this question in the first place, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any leverage to demand this because you're a peasant.

Of course, with real books we do have the problem of ghostwriting, where an author willingly writes for a book that will be published under someone else's authorship. That may be where things end up here, with requirements to acknowledge sources, whether ghostwritten for you or written by others.

Machine assisted versus machine delegated authorship?

As a more nuanced case, someone could dictate a long rambling stream of thoughts full of contradictions to an LLM to transcribe and summarize, and then they could reflect on the summary and write the real thing themselves. That's like talking to someone about a subject and writing about it afterwards, and also not something I would really take issue with.

That's my partial answer to the cognitive prosthesis question: keep it off to the side as a tool to help you do the work. There are still many caveats here, and the more complex the demands you make of the LLM, the greater the risk of some kind of break down. For example, continuing the example in the previous paragraph, if I did have the rambling conversation with an actual person who helped me refine and clarify my thoughts, I have some kind of mental model for the dialogue partner that can help me correct for some biases. With an LLM, anything resembling a mental model I could have would be very far off the mark, so I would need to be aware that I can't treat its output the same way I would treat something written by a person.

(By the way, for myself I have a stricter rule: I would only use an LLM in a way that made me a better person independently of the LLM and not dependent on the LLM, and thus I don't use them at all. That's what I actually recommend, but I don't expect everyone to adopt that rule.)

My main problem with having the LLM just do your writing is that it's simply a misrepresentation. It's wrong to claim you wrote something unless you chose the words. I really empathize with the struggle of expressing oneself clearly, but there's just no getting around this. And to be clear this isn't something pedantic or just a technicality, since the act of formulating a thought in an actual human language with valid syntax does require a level of care and attention that simply is not there unless you do it yourself.

Really? I seriously believe that people that think this way underestimate their self, especially if they're going to be sharing something valuable.

> How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?

As many others have expressed, we'd love to read the prompt (and the model's chain of thought if you have it). This scenario is like talking through a person translating things to each other, except from the recipient's perspective, the translator is absent from the conversation entirely.

Additionally, disclosing LLM usage is low hanging fruit to differentiate yourself from the 100x other people who "do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs". If the LLM converted something unreadable (whether due to a language barrier or incoherence) to text relevant to people on the other end, and THEN they disregard it anyway, the fault is not on you for them dismissing the writing too early.

If you're using an LLM to tidy something up, that's one thing. If the LLM is your voice and is supplanting your knowledge, I might as well cut you out and talk to the LLM directly.

Jekill and Hyde vibes

    > I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense.

I for one, think that LLM art looks terrible--the output is something I often dislike aesthetically. This is a matter of taste, and similar to the question of "do I like it and want to engage with it", you're free to make your own judgements here. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer with aesthetics.

However, with the questions of "do I like the technology" and "has the technology advanced", whereas one is similarly a matter of taste, the question of "has the technology advanced" is one that can be answered objectively. Of course it matters what your trying to measure, but take realism for example--something that AI image labs often try to perfect. The fact that the AI labs have gotten drastically better at generating realistic content is undeniable. While it's up to you if this matters, whether realism has advanced can objectively answered yes or no, without bringing taste into things.

I am making no claims here concerning the "high aesthetic value in some abstract sense". I don't think such an objective value of aesthetics exists. Does this clear things up?

Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just associate it with garbage.

In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.

1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.

2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.

3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)

  > You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer

It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppress their intuitive heuristics formed from the bait and switch of being subjected to endless LLM spam every day and blame them for not giving you a fair chance.

Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.

Reading what someone wrote while they were learning = less valuable.

I just want the clear communication.

ALTERNATIVE Thought: I’m willing to post/comment to help them if I think they will listen. An LLM behind the writing destroys this part of the community, because there’s nobody to teach/argue with. It’s just wasting our time and energy.

I won't claim to be a professional author or even good, but lately I've been trying to get more into the "it's a person who writes actually" direction and this was an exploration into that, so any sort of feedback would be most welcome, if you have the time!

And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.

The ship has not sailed, I can just find a human who wrote words, and read them. And if they aren't human words, I will just, not read them.

Without a history of diffs created by this method, I don't believe you.

> I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL).

The rules there vary by style guide and are not objective.

LLMs seem like massive overkill for something the red and green squiggles can already accomplish.

Pardon; the what?

The difference being this variant of blogspam is produced with basically zero cost and thus the infection has spread far beyond SEO into every UI surface with textbox. Plus there are now passionate defenders who insist finding their blogspam unpleasant to read is disrespectful or anti-progress somehow.