One of the most egregious negation issues I run into a lot is when I (or someone) makes a statement of the form: "not X" or "X is thus not true", and the AI then proceeds to interpret or summarize this as 'whatever is the opposite of X is the case'". This will cause it to go down a useless path investigating or disputing the opposite of X, which generally has no relevance or bearing on anything.
It also often very harmfully will replace your carefully chosen words with weirdly specific academic operationalizations or formalisms, then again waste huge amounts of text refuting / showing "problems" that result from that formalism, all of which again have no bearing or relevance on the original statement. An example would be you saying something like "intelligence, generally, must surely explain some of the differences in X", and then it will go "actually IQ does not correlate with X", unless you specifically tell it not to conflate psychometric IQ with intelligence generally.
Sometimes this is helpful, but the more specific / technical the domain, the more often you specifically have to prevent it from going down stupid paths that should be obvious given the expert context and wording, because it can seem almost hungry to try to catch you in some kind of insipid 'gotcha'. Much of these issues often clearly arise immediately from the first-pass "reword what the user said" part, given the reasoning traces.
Only ever use AI to make yourself think harder, and more.
That said, I have a lot of situations at work where I am asked to simplify something I am an expert in or convey something for a different audience, particularly as I prepare for presentations and I do find it helpful in helping me step down my writing or work. YMMV.
I also skip words a lot and can miss that even after 2-3 editorial passes and it's very helpful at that vs. say normal spellcheck.
This is the best articulation I've seen of why simply reviewing and copy-editing does not provide remotely the same value as writing from scratch. I spent a considerable amount of time over the past two weeks reviewing and improving a work document that was the output of an LLM. Given the number of people involved and the final level of effort, I'm firmly convinced that writing it manually would have been faster and resulted in a higher quality product. Getting the wording right matters.
The LLM will always give you a full rewrite — don't use it. It always does too much, and persuading it to tone it down is a constant battle.
Don’t use AI to write things that you are producing for someone else to consume.
I think one of the underappreciated things about writing "substantive" work is that the work you see at the end isn't the first attempt. And I don't mean the first draft of the piece. I mean that almost always, writers iterate on the same topic many times, either with complete published pieces or abandoned drafts or even just conversations and sessions of unproductive daydreaming. It's a cliche that your best work typically also comes out fastest, but it's not because of divine inspiration, it's because you've whittled the big idea you actually care about down so much in your mind that you instinctively know exactly how to write it.
My experience has been that for people who don't work this way or don't write a lot, LLMs can give them this incredible feeling of leaping straight from inkling to "substantive" writing. And because they haven't built up those muscles or "taste", they don't immediately recognize that it's imprecise and hard to follow.
That's not to say they're not brilliant in their own right, just that they haven't spent a lot of time on this particular thing. Sort of like a very gifted programmer who doesn't have a ton of experience yet (speaking as someone who is gifted at nothing and frequently has to do things they're inexperienced at).
So I don't think the problem is that LLMs just write bad. It's that LLMs are so wonderfully powerful that they allow you to confidently leap forward to create something that is a little beyond your experience.
And that's why I have different reactions to heavily AI generated writing. When it feels like marketing at scale, it grosses me out. But when I feel like it's just someone who is excited to write an idea and maybe doesn't have a lot of experience doing it, I'm not judgemental. My hope is that it makes them more excited about writing, and that trying to make their next piece better will lead them inevitably to start thinking about where the last piece fell short. And if there's some slop along the way, eh, I'm not compelled to read it.
1. Agree writing process is essential, but just getting your thoughts down is the start.
2. Human writing is very often vague and wrong in hard to notice ways, but I would say it's more likely to be wrong in easy to notice ways, which is ... better?
3. I think it's rude to not use the best tools to convey the message most clearly and most respectfully of my time. I often use AI to help me write emails and nearly every time it provides more concise well structured versions of what I have to say. 99% of the time I'm just trying to convey a message clearly, that's all. When I write my draft there is often words I can delete or phrases that I can shorten. It's hard to spot but when you have AI point them out it's obvious. This is the role of an editor (check out Stephen King book On Writing which makes this point). Unfortunately I don't have an editor, but I have AI that helps trim the fat, get to the point and save my readers time.
If these tools are available to you and you don't use them, then I think that would be disrespectful. I don't take any solace thinking how much time and effort went into what someone wrote me. If I could save them time and have AI write or edit, and save me time reading it since it would be more concise and better structured, it's a win-win.
I would have much preferred if the rep had written a shorter document and reached out about things they were uncertain about. Instead thet wasted my and my team's time as we first tried to make sense of the document on good faith before realizing the problem.
I don't care if people use LLMs per se, but if this is functionally the result, then in this aspect of my work things would go much better if people did not use them. They are a great interface for talking to a machine, but due to the laziness they breed, they are a terrible interface for talking to other humans unless approached with a great deal of discipline.
Is it a great book? It's meh, but not necessarily below average of what you can find in bookstore or a library. But it didn't eat that much of my subscription, took like 2 days, and saved me a lot of time.
Long story short, context matters.
atdt•46m ago
LLMs are helpful because their idiom-list is vast and they are indefatigable and infinitely patient. You can keep iterating on a sentence and it will keep giving you fresh takes. Eventually, whether through careful steering or brute-force iteration, it will come up with something that has the right resonance. Like a word on the tip of your tongue, you recognize it when you hear it.
For me, the end result of this writing-process is often a document where much of the language first came from the agent, but the voice is recognizably mine, and I feel a clear sense of authorship. It is still my work because of the microscopic attention I paid to every word. The marble is the agent's, but the chisel and mallet are in my hands.