Writing with LLM is not a shame

I think it's fair to use AI as an editor, to get feedback about how your ideas are packaged.

It's also fair to use it as a clever dictionary, to find the right expressions, or to use correct grammar and spelling. (This post could really use a round of corrections.)

But in the end, the message and the reasoning should be yours, and any facts that come from the LLM should be verified. Expecting people to read unverified machine output is rude.

Writing with LLM is also not writing. In some abstract sense, it may be plagiarism. In another sense, you're robbing yourself of one of the most crucial parts of writing: improved cognition. Anyone who edits voice transcripts knows just how much a normal person wanders, pauses, misspeaks, etc when talking. The act of writing forces you to refine thoughts you would not have otherwise had.

AI prose is mediocre right now. Too verbose, indirect constructions, passive, etc. That being said, it's actually a great editor and can pick out all those issues consistently.

My workflow right now is to use AI for rough draft and developmental editing stages, then switch AI from changing files to leaving comments on files suggesting I change something. It is slower than letting it line/copyedit itself, but models derp up too much so letting them handle edits at this stage tends to be 2 steps forward 2 steps back.

This part of the text caught my attention the most.

"There are a lot of tools out there (Gramarly, Antidote for naming the most famous) and I did not see someone mentioning he used this or that."

I was criticized in another thread because I used a translation assistant to improve my text, a tool that, long before the current AI hype, everyone used to write more effectively.

People need to stop believing that the watchdogs of reason are the all-seeing eye(1989). Many people, in general, seek to be ethical and utilize tools to enhance their ideas (such as a text in a non-native language), and that's okay.

It's good for what all other LLMs are good for: semantic search, where the output can be generated texts to help you. But never get wrapped into the illusion that there is actual causal thinking. The thinking is still your responsibility, LLMs are just newer discovery/browsing engines.

When I put real time and thought into an email—and the response I get back is obviously AI-generated—and it comes with no disclaimer—it infuriates me. Maybe the model happened to spit out exactly what the sender meant—just dressed up and grammatically polished. Doesn’t matter—I’d rather someone talk to me directly than funnel a thought through a word-grinder and hit send. Downvote me—call me anti-progress—I don’t care. I cannot stand undisclosed AI in conversation.

Only you can decide if you feel shame for it. Just like only I can decide if I judge you for it.

Just got a few recommendations by my colleagues on LinkedIn that were clearly written by an LLM, the long emdash was even present. But then again, the message was tuned to specific things I did. Also they were from Eastern Europe, so I imagine they just fixed their input.

If you call yourself a writer, having tell tale LLM signs is bad. But for people who's work doesn't involve having a personal voice in written language, it might help them getting them to express things in a better way than before.

I would rewrite the title as "There's no shame in writing with LLMs", or, "Writing with LLMs is nothing to be ashamed of".

The problem with LLMs is that they write badly. If you want to use a LLM to write, prompt it with what you wrote and ask it to summarize concisely. If it doesn't understand what you meant, you should fix that part and resubmit (to a fresh context.)

The main reason, however, that one shouldn't "write" with LLMs is because it's a waste of everyone's time. If they wanted to know what GPT-5 thinks, they can ask it themselves.

edit:

> The problem is not the use of AI but the people how think they can, arbitrarily, criticize the work from someone else because he used or not AI in the name of “ethics”.

Ah, I didn't realize that the real problem is that people complain about it. If we can figure out a way to make those people shut up, then using LLMs to write for you would be perfectly fine.

There are several issues at play here that I think need to be disentangled seeing as I'm someone that cares deeply about writing and books.

First, there is the question of the mythology of the author. Would Shakespeare be himself if he had an AI ghost write his books? Would we care as much?

Setting that aside there's nothing to say that an AI will come up with something wholly novel that's not a pastiche of what's come before. Would it be able to come up with the next Dracula? Or the next meme genre of your particular favorite? What about writing style? It could mimic Clarice Lispector but it couldn't create a new one of her. If it did so we wouldn't recognize it as something human that we would be forced to care about in some way. IF an AI came up with a Lispector and we hadn't seen a type of her before perhaps we would think that the machine is hallucinating.

More than that though, why should I buy a book that an AI wrote? I can just ask an AI to tell me a story. Or I can read all of the books that were written pre 2000 - there are more than enough to satisfy my curiosity and desire for enlightenment before machines were used to print money for those that have access to them. For me that's the most galling - it shows that the people that have access to money and the means to make a machine do the thinking for them are unable to come up with an original idea, excepting insofar as they push a button or give a prompt. In a few years when AI achieves consciousness, which I believe it will, we'll be able to have machines that can write their own novels if we wish and they want to do so. Then we can judge them by it's own merits. In the meantime if the person writing the book doesn't have anything interesting to say and isn't an intelligent person and wants to send me a dead tree with information inside it that a machine wrote, what's the value added other than me taking a picture of the blurb on the back and feeding it into an AI and having that AI recreate the book? The paper it's printed on?

EDIT - where AI (not AGI) is important is in doing the sort of hard combinatorial analysis that is so difficult in diffuse systems like traffic control and industrial control of city services or combining chemical and biological synthesis for drug research such as protein folding. AI as a tool for art is one thing, but having an AI create your doctoral dissertation or come up with a book is another. If you can ask an AI to find a cure for a disease or a novel drug and it tells you how step by step by all means do it because it would be absurd not to. It doesn't prove how intelligent you are in that field however - there probably should be altered qualifications for how we rank how useful people are in society given AI prompts and there will be over time unless society just devolves into a "whoever has the most compute wins" dystopia. In which case I'm going back to Plato and Jules Verne.