No one should call it writing, either

Now we can churn out text at rates unprecedented and the original problem, no one reading, is left untouched.

The author wonders what happens when the weird lossy gap in-between these processes gets worse.

There’s lots of evidence that writing helps formulate good thinking. Interestingly, CoT reasoning mirrors this even if the underlying mechanisms differ. So while I wouldn’t call this thinking, I also don’t think reducing LLM output to mere algorithmic output exactly captures what’s happening either.

EDIT: previous != precious.

Here on HN, short comments are more appreciated than longer comments. People are skimming, not reading. The ability to say a lot with very few words is what is appreciated the most.

That's nothing new btw. As Mark Twain once wrote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Using LLMs to rephrase things more efficiently is a good use of LLMs. People are getting used to better signal to noise ratios in written text and higher standards of writing. And they'll mercilessly use LLMs to deal with long form drivel produced by their colleagues.

I think proving theorems is a better analogy than rote calculation—like the writing process, it is creative.

While mathematicians don't sit down and smash random symbols together to concoct proofs, many of them will stress the importance of good notation. Chewing on notation a bit can help reveal connections in the hunt for a proof.

When people claim that "writing is thinking" they mean something similar. The free-associative process of writing out our thoughts can help bring an initial clarity that is difficult to achieve without an external medium. Most of the time, we ought to polish those thoughts and connections just as mathematician ought to polish his proof sketch, but there is some extent to which the actual activity does in fact make up a significant portion of the thinking process. This is why offloading all of that activity to LLMs is dangerous. You can judge the string of propositions produced by an LLM, but you haven't thought them.

Or how the thoughts we have as we are writing shape our understanding, and so we come out with not only a written composition, but a new frame of mind; AI generated writing allows us to preserve our frame of mind—for better or worse!

There is something to be said for the ways in which coding, too, is an exercise in self-authoring, ie authoring-of-the-self.

although, I agree with the author since many emails and messages onlinkedin i get these days are just long post shits by AI. I am not reading them anymore but it's some other ai summarising ebcause no human talks or writes like basic ai prompting does. so so difficult to read that

My experience is that people who think this are really bad writers. That's fine, because most human writing is bad too. So if your goal is just to put more bad writing into the world for commercial reasons, then there's some utility in it for sure.

What tool are you using for this?

I too have used LLM to do writing that, frankly, I wouldn't have done without it. Often I don't even take what it says but it helps to get the ideas out in written form and then I can edit it to sound more like how I want to sound.

This already happens. Being the person who writes the doc [for what we wanna do next] gives it ridiculous leverage and sway in the business. Everyone else is immediately put in the position of feedbacking instead of driving and deciding.

Being the person who feedbacks gives you incredible leverage over people who just follow instructions from the final version

This is already how we moved from stupidly long and formal emails to Slack messages. And from messages to reactions.

I understand not every field went there, but I think it's just a matter of time we collectively cut the traditional boilerplate, which would negate most of what the LLMs are bringing to the table right now.

> 2. Augmentation

I see it as the equivalent of Intellisense but expanded to everything. As a concept, it doesn't sound so bad ?

I sort of feel like it would blunt the downsides of AI rewriting everything if it had to explain why it was making all the changes. Being told the rationale would allow users to make better decisions about whether to accept/reject a change, and also help the user avoid making the same writing mistakes in the future.

My manager uses AI when generating docs and emails. I think he does it because English isn't his native language and he goes for the "polished" look.

Frankly, I prefer the grammar errors and the authentic version. The AI polish is always impersonal and reeks of low effort.

I also love how everyone thinks coworkers don't notice the AI touch... of course we do.

This is strange to me. You could give me 100 chances to guess which “mind-altering drug” you are thinking of and Adderall wouldn’t cross my mind. Amphetamine is a stimulant; it’s plainly not mind-altering in the way that psychedelics are. Adderall is mind-altering in the same way that caffeine is. Which is to say, it isn’t.

I'm unfortunately not too optimistic about this. There are plenty of things that are bad for you that everyone is aware of: not exercising, eating junk food, spending all day online, etc. But so many people do these things anyways; the human mind is incredible at cheating itself to make things easier on itself, and I don't think this is an exception.

My memory gets exercised a lot less frequently than it would need to without writing.

But memory is also not thinking. It is a component in thinking, but it is not thinking itself. Discourse, arguably, though, whether in natural or symbolic language is thinking. If we offload all of that onto machines, we'll do less of it, and yes our expectations will change, but I actually think the scenario here is different than the one Socrates faced and that the stakes are slightly higher—and Socrates wasn't wrong, we just needed internal memory less than we thought once external memory became feasible, as cool and badass as it may seem to "own" Socrates in retrospect.