> "..but maybe it's a good thing that most of us don't allow this technology to reframe our thoughts."

No, you're not the only one experiencing this: I too had the same concerns as you: with every new thought, every new creation, I had to ask the AI's opinion, as if I were no longer able to judge, to decide, without consulting the AI (...just to be safe, you never know...).

The only way to regain your creative ability is to write down your thoughts yourself, read, reread, rewrite, correct, express your opinion...

What AI can't do is convey emotions.

I would go a step further, in fact, and when I’m writing something creative, I may choose to avoid whatever the autocomplete is suggesting as the next word (although I have it disabled in most contexts). People have a tendency to fall into grooves in their writing/speaking and this kind of acts as a reminder to not do that,³ although I’m far from immune myself (looking at my comment history, it’s upsetting to see the same verbal tics repeated when I have something to say).

⸻

1. If you don’t know a word well enough for it to come to mind when you’re looking for a word for something, you may not know it well enough to use it in your writing.²

2. Cue the people who will disagree. Suffice it to say that I occasionally will use a thesaurus to pull up a word that’s just out of reach, especially as my brain gets older and weaker, but even that I try to avoid.

3. When I got my MFA, there was a visiting writer who had published a creative writing book which was largely based on his former students’ transcriptions of his lectures. During the lecture he gave, even though he was speaking extemporaneously, he would speak word-for-word whole paragraphs from the book.

should be:

>Although 80% of the content was my own writing, the fact that it was run through an LLM engine for grammar and vocabulary cross-checking meant that it failed the "probably written by AI" metric, and it was rejected.

  1. 80 % -> 80%
  2. in -> through
  3. a LLM -> an LLM
  4. enginee -> engine
  5. cross-check -> cross-checking
  6. cross-checking, -> cross-checking (removed the comma)
  7. made it failed -> meant that it failed, (or "made it fail" depending on whether you want to preserve the past tense or preserve the word "made")
  8. probable -> probably
  9. by AI " -> by AI"
  10. ; and it was -> , and it was (no need for a semicolon when linking with a conjunction like "and", and I would consider another word or phrase such as ", and, as a result, it was rejected" to emphasize the causal relationship between the clauses)

Relying on AI for editing seems to have atrophied the author's writing if that is what he or she thinks is worth publishing on a blog like this. I would suggest practicing editing your own work and not even thinking about passing it through AI (especially when you were told not to use any AI!) to edit for a while. Given that English is not your first (or even second or third) language, I would also suggest having a native speaker with some demonstrable writing skill review your writing and give feedback on how to make it more idiomatic. For example, writing being "run through an LLM" rather than "run in an LLM" is a relatively subtle difference compared to the others, and it's very very common for preposition mistakes like this to show up when writing in another language than your first. I am still hopeless with French prepositions.

First of all, they will make substantive changes you didn’t intend. The meaning will get changed, errors will be introduced. Tone will be off, and as the author says, your voice will disappear. There is no single “correct” way to write something. And voice and tone are conveyed with grammatical and usage variation. Don’t give that up to a robotic average.

Secondly, you will never improve, or even maintain, your own writing skills if you don’t actively engage with the suggested changes. You also won’t fully realize half the purpose of writing, which is to understand the topic better yourself. Doing the work of editing your piece will help you understand the subject even better. If you just let the machine “fix” your errors, you’ll become a worse writer and less of an expert over time.

Why would I put effort into reading something that had no effort put in by the author?

This guy needs an editor, AI or otherwise.

As English is not my first language, I do run into problem where the line between fix my clumsy sentence and rewrite my thought is very thin. Same with writing "boring" technical explanation and more approachable content. I'm getting pushed back for both.

It is very unfortunate that we start value creativity and imagination only when we lose them. Although a good pill for creativity in my case is ... boredom and routine. I cant stand doing the same thing again and again in the same fashion. Maybe you might give it a try :)

And I've definitely used it when I can't remember that one stinking word that I know exists and is perfect for this occasion.

“AI is one possible reference for my actual writing”. Generate info and perspectives, but only ever write stuff yourself. Something about this for me forces me to stay in my own “”writing voice”, at least personally, for the various places I use AI tech in. I think of the tech as a chess engine; they are better than any human player but I use them to help me gain perspective rather than cheat. Otherwise, why bother playing chess?

You're trading ability and competence for convenience.

On the other hand I am way stricter and harder on myself when writing.

This is something I observed for example.

I don’t use AI for writing. Since I mainly read classics regarding belletristic I don’t fear being served AI generated content.

I still don’t see why or even how to write with AI creating large bodies of text like a book for example.

It is like ghost writing. In the best case it is good one, but style changes due to LLM model changes can kill a book because the tone suddenly is a totally different one.

1. There was a lot of slop pre-AI. In fact I’d say the majority of published writing was bad, formulaic, and just written to manipulate your emotions. So in some sense, I don’t really think pre-AI slop had more value. It’s just cheaper to make now.

2. AI has prompted me to study more off-beat writers that followed the rules of language a little less frequently. This includes a lot of people from circa 1890-1970, when experimenting with form was really in vogue.

3. Which brings me to my third point, which is that no matter how much the AI actually knows about writing, the person prompting it is limited by their own education and knowledge of writers. You can’t say, “make me a post in the style of Burroughs” if you don’t know who Burroughs was, or what his writing style was. So in a sense there is an increased importance to being educated about writing itself. Without it you’re limited in your ability to use AIs to write stuff and in your awareness of how much your non-AI written work is influenced by AI writing.

So much content is just straight copy/pasted from the LLM now. Articles, blog posts, linked in posts, reddit comments, etc. Even just using the LLM for 'editing' tends to shift the voice to an obvious LLM voice when used naively. It is getting worse too. Last week a co-worker sent me a screenshot of Claude for me to review their "work", which was just whatever Claude made up.

Usually, if something is very obviously unfiltered LLM output, I just stop reading.

I do use LLMs for writing myself. They are useful, but are poor authors.

I didn't expect AI to write 95%+ of my code, but here we are.

I can't say whether I feel worried or not. I am trying now to gamify manual coding by having to review and edit a random file from my work codebases a day and still do occasional leetcodes and katas.

But overall I enjoy coding less for sure. I can't think of the last time I spent heavy time focusing on a refactor or lower level design abstractions.

I don't think I will be still coding 5 years from now. The joy is just not there.

I've never been surprised at AI writing. Emotion the biggest part of communication and these grey boxes have none.

AI always seems so verbose and wordy.

For now, I just keep scrolling until I find something from before 2020, which is much more likely to be purely human-made and edited.

I get that the mainstream ones have been RLHF'd to death, but surely there must be others that are capable?

I never passed any AI writing as my own. I would feel utterly awful. Also, I love tweaking words until they sound perfect.

The number of people who just nonchalantly admit that AI writes their messages is honestly scaring me.

Making idiotic churn documents (resumes tailored to job) is perfect LLM churn. They use onerous AI on their side.

Dealing with that dumbass cow-orker? Theyre getting LLM tone.

But writing for HN and Masto? Thats more fun. I'll do it myself.

you are missing the writing era, which is gone. whatever we have now will slowly congeal into cold grue that will get a name or names

the madness of bieng chastised for speakerphoning and disturbing people gulping the slop

what do we call that?

Ha. Well I guess you did, _this time_.

Can we not just ask an AI to correct our spelling mistakes and leave the rest alone?

How is the author complaining about the quality of their own writing while admitting to not even bothering reading what they wrote, let alone editing it?

(Also, why would using a LLM based grammar checker trigger an AI writing detector? Did it end up rewriting substantial parts of the original submission?)

What it is going to be is a 'Slop Decade' - a much better label if you insist on having one.