So when people say they never get a good output it's because they're trying to from
thought > article
instead of
thought > exploration > direction > structure > outline > article
My initial reaction to the first half of this sentence was "Uhh, no?", but then i realized it's on substack, so probably more typical for that particular type of writer (writing to post, not writing to be read). I don't even let it write documentation or other technical things anymore because it kept getting small details wrong or injecting meaning in subtle ways that isn't there.
The main problem for me aren't even the eye-roll inducing phrases from the article (though they don't help), it's that LMs tend to subtly but meaningfully alter content, causing the effect of the text to be (at best slightly) misaligned with the effect I intended. It's sort of an uncanny valley for text.
Along with the problems above, manual writing also serves as a sort of "proof-of-work" establishing credibility and meaning of an article - if you didn't bother taking the time to write it, why should i spend my time reading it?
I'm sure it's great for pumping out SEO corporate blogposts. How many articles are out there already on the "hidden costs of micromanagement", to take an example from this post, and how many people actually read them? For original writing, if you don't have enough to say or can't [bother] putting your thoughts into coherent language, that's not something AI can truly help with in my experience. The result will be vague, wordy and inconsistent. No amount of patching-over, the kind of "deslopification" this post proposes, will help salvage something minimum work has been put into.
The elephant in the room is that AI is allowing developers who previously half-assed their work to now quarter-ass it.
I think many of the criticisms of LLMs come from shallow use of it. People just say "write some documentation" and then aren't happy with the result. But in many cases, you can fix the things you don't like with more precise prompting. You can also iterate a few rounds to improve the output instead of just accepting the first answer. I'm not saying LLMs are flawless. Just that there's a middle ground between "the documentation it produced was terrible" and "the documentation it produced was exactly how I would have written it".
That's without even mentioning the personal advantages you get from distilling notes, structuring and writing things yourself, which you get even if nobody ever reads what you write.
Reminds me of a quote from St. Augustine's autobiography, "Confessions":
"I have known many men who wished to deceive, but none who wished to be deceived."
What would you say are the top 2 red flags missing from the piece? Would love to know
This makes me sick.
And even if the style is (or isn't) LLM'ish, it does not say/help if the (even-filtered) content makes sense / is correct or is BS
Style does matter, sure..
https://hbr.org/1982/05/what-do-you-mean-you-dont-like-my-st...
Getting the writing from your model then following up with “here’s what you wrote, here’re some samples of how I wrote, can you redo that to match?” makes its writing much less slop-y.
AI can copy 90% of your tone of voice but still use em dashes and corrective antithesis.
Ideally you'll have both /deslop and /soundlikeme (coming soon)
