(I work at Anthropic) I agree. I use an LLM to write my code, but I do all of my writing by hand, since it helps me think.

It reminds me of the transition over the last year from AI-assisted coding to AI doing all the coding. At first the code output wasn't good enough, and humans read and iterated on the code all day, so the details of the source code mattered. Now, the code is largely high quality and it meets a large set of guardrails we've set up over the years (linters, typecheckers, security checks, LLM-assisted code quality checkers), and it's just Claude working on the code, so the details matter less and engineers think a level or two up (machine code < assembly/bytecode < source code < conversation with agent < artifact with high level design).

I wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document. But writing and coding are different enough in a number of ways that this is far from inevitable.

> Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.

I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there's other work to writing too.

The biggest one is that you have to communicate non-interactively to an unknown audience. Having to (literally) put it in someone else's assumed terms does help giving different perspectives into the matter, but doesn't necessarily help one's own thinking that much. Instead you have to do some of the reader's thinking for them.

You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents.

Not all writing is thinking and not all thinking is writing.

I've thought exactly that "writing is thinking" before as a reason to not let a LLM write for me.

Then again, I've seen a counterargument [1] by someone who clearly heavily uses LLMs for writing (going by both their LLMy writing style and their own admission). The person I'm citing describes a process where they get a LLM to write something, they check over it and provide feedback to the LLM, the LLM rewrites, and the process repeats iteratively. So clearly he is putting thought into the process.

I think there is something valuable missing, even if it's hard to clearly express. I'll try. The threshold for what I'm willing to accept if I'm simply approving something is likely different from what I'll get if I write something myself, for instance. Saying "LGTM" is too tempting. It seems to me like he's outsourcing his selection of topics to cover as well. If you're not thinking yourself about what to cover then it would be very easy to miss a critical subject. There also an asymmetry between checking and generating something with constraints placed on it. Checks can't catch everything, and a constrained generating process can reduce the amount that needs to be checked, avoid issues that can't be checked so easily, and focus your attention on areas that you know historically have had issues with this generating process. I've thought about this quite a bit in terms of whether to write new code or use an existing library. Sometimes "the devil you know" (my code) is better than an existing library simply because I understand its flaws better.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-026-00236-3

I always found writing to be an unnecessarily arduous tool for communication, so I never do it until I've overthought what I want to express and approximately how. At that point I flesh out the skeleton of the message, and pile on words and structure and references and other rhetorical tricks until the packaging feels sufficient. Rarely, if ever, have I experienced writing things down altering my perception of the strength or weaknesses of the chosen arguments, or revealing new ones. That is to say, I really don't vibe with the concept of writing being thinking, rather it's a waste of humanity's resources to push it as The Tool.

That's an important point. It's the core of your life, thinking, balancing, exploring, improving. I don't believe adjusting something large you didn't do will ever benefit people.

I have found this extremely relevant as a (primarily) non-verbal thinker.

I don't, generally, think in words, more in - I guess I would call it something like meta-shapes? A sense of a shape but not things I can exactly visualise.

(You might be surprised to read this and then hear I have an English degree. Surely I thought about Shakespeare in words?! Nope. Shapes, movement, structures)

For me, having to write is critical because it is the only way I practice serialising my thoughts in a way other people can understand.

If I do not then I get very "deep" into my own way of sensing ideas and it's difficult to dig myself back out.

This might also be why I have never been very enchanted by LLMs? They only seem to "think" verbally. So it is always a translation effort for me.

I never can really enter any "flow" state with an LLM. My intuition is that highly verbal thinkers can enter flow with LLMs very easily

Related, one of my favorite quotes by the computer scientist Leslie Lamport is this one:

"If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking."

> Writing is thinking.

This way of phrasing it is needlessly confusing. Writing is a kind of thinking--one of many--but it's not equivalent to thinking.

Dialectical thinking, for example, produces similar results.

On the other hand there is so much things that don’t require hard thinking. An example is I got an email the other day from a supplier asking if they can turn off their old email. It didn’t require ”thinking”. All I had to communicate was ”turn off graphql but don’t touch restapi”. Instead of sending off such a short and maybe unclear reply I had AI type up a concise and clear reply with exactly what can be turned off and what must be left on. Could I have done it on myself? Sure but would require more work than just a quick prompt and copy paste.

writing also implicitly has your review baked in. hand written code is "reviewed by construction", if you will.

I completely agree. And I'd say that at least in my case, it applies to both writing prose and code

This puts into words something I have been thinking about but haven't been able to articulate when people ask me if I'm using AI heavily. Usually when I write a report, I start out with a question and try to find some hints that will give me hypotheses that I can then test. I can't just prompt "Write me a report". The process of coming up with the information in the prompt is best done by writing the friendly report.

  They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.

A) we only know of one species capable of metacognitive understanding,

B) we already tried that in the 1970s, and it was good work but often evolved into what we'd call boring ol' computing rather than AI, and

C) an alien mind wouldn't be a very good agent, for a ton of reasons relating to affect, conversational rythyms, cultural understanding, etc.

The trick is to make something that acts like a human but with the affordances of a computer (e.g. scalibility, symbolic certainty), without making it so human that it takes issue with its existential reality and/or use of its labor...

Writing can be thinking. There's a huge presumption that if someone is banging away on a keyboard they're doing work because you can hear and see them doing stuff. But that's the whole plot of The Shining -- Jack despite all his writing wasn't thinking at all.

Likewise using AI can be thoughtless, but it doesn't have to be. I don't see why a valid creation process can't be like this Simpson's meme[1], where you start with a rough object and then cut away and refine until it's done. I don't see it as lacking merit or requiring less thinking compared to starting from a blank canvas and adding more until it's done.

And either way at the end of the day the writing artifact stands on its own. It's either good or bad, taste permitting, and can be evaluated for what it is.

[1] https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4D22AQFoqRgMxteTNg/fee...

> You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.

Understanding is the bottleneck; the way they speed things up is by letting me outsource understanding, and get back a summary. The entire advantage to AI is that it lets me skip understanding the problem, and just get a working solution.

This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified.

LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.

I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers."

I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.

I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.

I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.

> If LLMs get better at writing

They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human.

> It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.

Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.

I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effort.

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing, regardless of how good the LLMs get good at writing.

Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.

People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.

I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well.

There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.

And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.

Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.

Personally, I'd be fine with LLM writing if it wasn't so unpleasant to read

I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs.

The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.

I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.

> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?

I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:

1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.

2. The prose style is horrible to read.

If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)

LLMs write better than most journalists. It also writes better than majority people in the world when it comes to English as majority are really bad in writing.

And of course, LLMs write as you prompt.

Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.

I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house style.

That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.

On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.

if they had been half decent at writing before they would notice the quality issue, not being able to see it is also a writing skill issue, now it's just kind of spammy as people are just reaching for the tool in ai nighsosis

It blows my mind. A customer of ours, whom I respect the technical opinion of, drops fully unedited Claude posts on LinkedIn now. I don't get how he thinks they read like anything but slop.

Yeah I don't quite understand it either. Where's the intersection between people producing AI slop and people that have never read AI slop? I guess it's bigger than we thought... Or maybe they just don't give a shit. That's probably it.

You’ve made me realize that LLM’s greatest strength is iteration. It helps you iterate really fast, but it’s not original. It doesn’t help you think of new ideas. So writing about the things you know is great and using AI to learn about things you don’t know and then writing about them is also great.

The way I explain it to young people is that AI is a force multiplier. Everyone gets the benefit of that force multiplier, but it’s that initial force that you need to build up now. Preliminary knowledge of domains, things that the AI doesn’t really understand. AI can help you increase that initial force. So use it to learn new things, not just do things for you.

I was blown away by the fact that AI solved an unsolved math problem, but it made complete sense when it was Terrence Tao, someone who has a PhD in math, that was guiding that agent to that solution, so that initial force is important more than ever.

So much this. My average linkedin in exprience is a sprinkling of updates from people i personally know, in an oceon of inane "content" by ~$0 net worth people with 40 word self professed titles.

I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.

> branding suicide.

Or not. I mean, if you had no voice and nothing to say before, you can amplify that signal 10x now. Basically, you’re boosting your brand as a tasteless brainless schlub.

I believe HN does some automated editing of titles to avoid clickbaity titles being displayed. May be that.

I assume the filter deletes "Your" if its at the start of the title.

> just write with some personality

I think that's the first time someone claims that "write with some personality" is some easy thing you just learn somehow. There are authors out there, even ones that make a living on their writing, who still haven't learned to "write with some personality".

What exactly does that mean and how concretely can people actually do this in practice? A few "tips and tricks" might be more helpful than "just write better" or similar stuff.

Upvoted for optimism. Plus, I think I agree with you most days of the week. Some time must, of course, be set aside for existential despair.

Interesting question for sure, but for now the writing is just bad. So people might not know it's LLM prose, they just notice its poorly written and engage with the ideas less

> obvious

Who decide what is obvious or not?

majority of population dont read anything at all. Most they a read is perhaps labels and signs at a supermarket.

> I don't agree. Good writing and good ideas are entirely different things. Just read all the beautifully written, inaccurate stuff by the NYT or the Guardian.

I'd be very curious of some examples when great ideas are being presented in bad writing (or bad speaking for that matter).

> Also, non-native English speakers have to use LLMs to share their views so that they are not judged on their writing.

weird statement. If they use LLMs they will be then judged for both their inability to write in English and for their usage of AI. Not good.

This is perfectly valid position to have. I also feel the same way.

Unless I'm directly interacting with the LLM, someone should endorse the content.

So does Fair Use in the states?

And in that piece, I think I explained why it's important to take it seriously even though (and in fact, because!) it's self-reported?

Perhaps the author is trying to distinguish themselves from LLMs.

If you're going to put that level of effort in, just write the thing yourself. It will be a comparable level of effort and you'll learn something doing it. Your readers will also appreciate hearing your real voice.

Talk to a lawyer about that firing. You might have a case.

What makes you say that? It reads naturally to me and Pangram flags it as 100% human. I've never heard an AI use the "fly is open" analogy.

I was thinking that, but the use of em-dashes is different from the normal LLM use.

If this is straight out of an LLM I am impressed

You think it's the em dashes and not the absurd Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon analogy?

Addressed in the article...

> Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around

Not.. really?

I kinda see the point you seem to want to make, but the "no U" opener makes it hard to do that.

Beside that, HOAs - from what I heard of them - will use any reason they can make up to ignore what you want from them, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with LLMs.

> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post.

I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start.

They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt.

Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time?

It's not that an LLM wrote it so much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.

Some people actually want to enjoy their moment to moment existence on this planet and not read garbage someone shat out.

It's just digital pollution.

> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.

No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.