Some Links on LLM (and Human) Writing
I've had a crazy busy last couple of days and my sleep schedule hasn't quite recovered, so this will just be a link dump post. At least it's all 'on-theme', albeit a rather over saturated theme these days. If you're tired of hearing about AI, I don't blame you!
- There have been quite a few good posts on the topic of using LLMs for writing recently: here and here. Both of them land pretty close to my position, which is that there's plenty of background tasks that LLM-based systems could be useful for (e.g. grammar checks, collating notes1) but using it for the actual task of writing as in letting the LLM put words in your mouth is too far for me personally. To be clear, every word here is strictly typed with keys on a keyboard, and I have no plans of changing that.
- Speaking of writing aids using LLMs, there's a skill (a.k.a. a Markdown text file, I still don't quite understand why that took so long to figure out) which acts as a writing coach, providing questions to try to tease out the writer's ideas and improve the clarity of their writing (while never actually doing any of the editing for them, thus keeping with the above bullet point). I tried it on one of my old (already published) posts and... though it's certainly not overly sycophantic (it grilled my post pretty hard) it seems like it wants to squeeze out all the uncertainties and idiosyncrasies for the sake of a clearer, more streamlined post. I couldn't help but think it wants to make my post more... LLMish. Perhaps there are cases where its guidance would be helpful, for instance if I wanted to tailor my writing for a specific audience, but for now I'd rather keep my human-generated idiosyncrasies. Hopefully you find them endearing, or at least sufficiently non-LLMy to seem authentic.
- And for some more general reading on similar themes to above, here's Dynomight on prose vs. formatting.
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Though of course you don't need LLMs for these particular tasks.↩