this SPECIALLY for arabic the shit I see everyday

I want LLM translations to die.

We used to have machine translation that worked well enough for readers to know the overall meaning most of the time, but when it failed, it failed spectacularly and the reader would know not to trust the output.

Now with LLM translations we can’t trust anything. Even simple translations which used to work perfectly now shoves extra LLM-isms into the translation making the prose ugly.

Okay, this is just time/place/situation dependent. I remember typing job applications, that was something that communicated seriousness.

Handwritten pages always signify special care, indeed as you say that’s why you see that in diplomas and such. There was a time when I kept hand written letters going for my close college friends, on good stationary. I think we are just in different situations/places/demographics.

[edit] also I kept my job application rejections (paper mail). These were very instructive as they showed a pattern of rote rejection that made me less discouraged.

For most of the 20th century, ordinary people generally had the option of either handwriting or typing. Starting roughly in the 1980's consumers could get their hands on dot matrix printers, and in the 1990s inkjets and lasers started coming in. (For corporate the timeline shifts a bit earlier) .

Relevant for this conversation, dot matrix printouts were considered "cheap", and people were warned not to submit dot-matrix printouts for things like job applications, formal correspondence, etc.

If you were a kid and you tried to hand in a word processed/printed essay in school, even into the early '90s sometimes, you'd get pushback that's very similar to the AI pushback of today. "How do I know YOU wrote it?", "The computer is doing the work for you". They'd force you to rewrite it, properly, in pen.

That past certainly did exist, within living memory (mine, for one).

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49795122 "Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)"

Genuine experiment: Do characters "have a color" for you, maybe? [1][2]

1) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Typed by hand.

2) "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." <- Generated by ai, cut-and-pasted in. [3]

For you, would you classify the former as genuine and the latter as slop?

You'd think I'm being silly, but both yes and no are not unthinkable, and honestly I've actually seen odder arguments in court filings and language standards.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 "What color are your bits"

[2] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-... "what color is your function"

[3] Sonnet 5, Medium, Sept 2026.

There are just times that we stumble upon writer's block.

Personally I have had multiple instances of me knowing the idea I want to express, but utterly failing to articulate it in a way that's understood by most people.

And I unfortunately do not have a human assistant, so for a second opinion on how to articulate the idea better, I turn to an LLM. (Yes, I am using my own idea!) I write something, ask the LLM whether it understood what I said, and make adjustments based on that. In this case, the text is 100% written by me, and the LLM is no more different than a random passer-by giving me advices.

But there are also times when the idea is so complicated that I don't really have a good idea on how to untangle all of that. Ideas that live in your brain as a bunch of abstract concepts, if you can get it. If I were to untangle all of that myself - it's fairly good chance that I'll just leave it for "another day" (read: abandoned). I won't be investing any more thinking into it, LLM or not.

So LLM it is. I dump my ideas (as a bunch of incomprehensible human gibberish ;P) into it, make it make sense of the ideas, generate an ideas-untangled paragraph, which I use as an inspiration (or basis, or template, or whichever word you think suits it) for writing my own text with my own voice and my own style. I was able to continue thinking because the LLM keeps my attention from drifting away!

(I always suspected I have some kinda ADHD, but shrug)

I understand where people are coming from when they reject all forms of LLM assistance in writing, it's just that I hope people don't turn it into a dogma of some sort.

Are people really publishing blogs in docx format?

Start a chapter in 1PP and just have it rewritten to 3PP

I write differently with pen and paper than I do in a word processor. Sometimes one is better than the other. (Word processors are generally better, for me, at editing. One of my favorite uses for LLMs in this way is taking a picture of some text and sketches I’ve made and OCR’ing and rendering them into editable documents.)

Switching from first to third person is in part a grammatical shift. But it’s also a real change in perspective. If you’re only making the motions but not trying to see where the new perspective opens up (or closes) views into what you’re saying, you’re doing copy editing more than writing.

At least right now, this hollowness is part of what makes AI-generated text stand out.

I use it to write in German, because my German sucks.

I first write the thing myself, then feed it through Deepl Write to see how the AI would write it. It's been very helpful.

I write everything else myself. However I don't know how I feel about spending my time on Earth typing personal responses to AI-generated messages. Do those people deserve my time and energy?

Similar recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767937

Proofreading yes, automatic "corrections" no

- why stop at writing? put this advice for coding too

- sure its good to ask AI feedback about your module or code review or identify vulnerabilities or better ways of doing your existing code

- but maybe stop asking AI to generate entire projects from scratch?

I don't want an AI's opinion on what I'm writing. I want its assessments against an objective rubric. The whole point is not to have the model weights do your thinking for you.

If you can't find the source and verify it, don't use it. Seems simple.

I didn't see in the article where he recommended AI to structure an argument? He did suggest it can be helpful for structuring data.

Giving the compiling evidence of how addictive generative AI is actually, it actually makes perfect sense that people are looking for strategies to excuse their AI-usage. I think no matter the strategy (and given AI is actually as addictive as evidence are suggesting), chances are the usage patterns will all converge to “Just use AI dummy“.

This reminds me a lot of smokers who all have a great strategy beat the nicotine addiction. Only smoke on the weekends when out partying with friends, only smoke to use the extra sense of energy, only smoke to suppress my appetite, go to the gym 5 hours a week to offset the negative health impacts of smoking etc. etc.

In reality most smokers will converge to about a pack a day.

The likes of Sir Walter Scott, Peter Ackroyd, Stephen King, Tim Ferris, Robert Greene, Tucker Max, Catherine Asaro, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Nancy Holder etc... all rely heavily on research assistants in various capacities including proofreading.

Honest question - where does an Author like the above place in your authenticity framework?

No. I hate AI and slop. I hated slop before AI, but with AI slop has proliferated to an unprecedented degree. If AI went away tomorrow, slop would go down with it to 1/1000ths of what it is today.

To be clear, I (the author of the article) do not hate AI. A lot of my current work is focussed on making AI work well.

However, I don't think it's a good idea to replace our own thinking with an AI, and that's what I'm trying to avoid with the way of working proposed in the article.

The statement should be: never use AI to draft text that is to be presented as your own authorial voice.

Never, never, do that!

I draft all my own text that anyone will ever read as “that’s James Bach talking to me.” I want no one to be able to credibly question that.

But of course, writing is more than merely drafting the text. As I draft, I write about ideas that other people or AI may have helped me come to.

Structuring your argument is probably something you should do, not an AI. This is the core of what you're trying to convey, and is exactly the type of thing you should be thinking through.

Of course, this is different than having the argument ready and using an AI to make it read a little better, which at that point, is just details.

My take is slightly different.

- Brainstorming with AI is fine, but it takes skill to use it as food for thought, rather than as a source of answers.

- Do NOT structure your blog post with AI. Once the structure is there, it is almost impossible to humanize it.

- Do NOT use it for writing a draft. Same as above. A few times I did it, and ended up rewriting from scratch. Unsloppification is hard.

- AI for proofreading is wonderful. But I always prompt with "only fix grammar mistakes, do not change the style" and actually look at all changes. If not kept in check, it too eagerly homogenizes style.

Anyone who has learned a language knows this anecdotally. The linguistic structures need to be marshalled by active cognition (editing and writing). Merely reading and watching is not enough.

That should tell you something about how much effort (thinking) is required for the activity. The fact you writing is t something you can do as much as reading means you use your brain a bit more. I would claim that consuming information always uses less thought then generating information. For a human brain at least.

I've been watching chess videos for many years but my own chess playing is just recreational.

Writing/programming as a specialization of just going through the damn thing is actually sacrosanct IMO. Spectatorship as a generalization of reading is second-class. You do become a worse programmer as you move to "higher order thinking", it just matters less in a world where LLMs exist.

And reading and adjusting AI output requires substantial thinking.

It does, but less of that thinking translates to skills transferred. What amount of the creativity and magic of Tolkien transferred to his editor? I'm sure it took substantial thinking to edit Tolkien's work.

AI can’t write for shit because it doesn’t have your experience for context and it doesn’t know what you actually want to say.

Hell, most people barely have a rough idea of what they are trying to say when they sit down to write, and they have all of the context.

Writing and coding do have many similarities, at a high level. But the things that make AI good at coding don’t really apply to writing. The analogy doesn’t work well here.

I said this once in my recent "Trustworthy AI" class that... "I think writing with AI is one of the most detrimental things you can do".

The reaction was pretty much silence and most people probably thought I was some angry, arrogant, anti-ai purist... which isn't the case. It can be acceptable to use a language model in code generation but requires new forms of discipline and tooling.

But for for just regular old writing... Should never, ever be generated. I'll likely never change that stance.

I'm on version 6 of a writing an agent voice, style, tone, and orientation guide I have been developing over the course of the past year. Every time the agent writes something using the guide, I edit it and then update the guide where needed. Slowly, the agent is beginning to sound eerily close to my natural writing voice. No, I didn't use it for this comment :)

I agree. Writing manually and thoughtfully and then letting the AI figure out the nitty gritty implementation works very well.

My brain immediately went to "I wonder how many people got this article and used AI to summarize it for them."

Yes but on the sliding scale of how deterministic is this task- writing, not very. coding, can execute and write some tests (even if gamed/bad).

This is a neat workflow. Incentivises you to proactively think about your writing, even as you cut it.

Hah, yeah the copy on that app is pretty bad Claude writing, I should run it against itself!

I write code to be read by just one guy.

He’s five years older, a bit more tired than me, more going on in his life. Easily annoyed by bad code.

Weirdly enough he has exactly the same name and birthday as me.

Okay but I’ve spent 8 years implementing bad code so far. I’ve got a lot of understanding but only half the code is done. Down the line I’ll be dead. Why not implement it now with AI?

Moreover is writing code the only way to understand it?

Here is a good explanation in a deeper way of why using AI to write is not a good thing

https://markgreville.ie/2024/12/10/generative-ai-is-digital-...

I'm not sure where people are going with using LLMs for research on a topic.

LLMs construct documents like a middle manager trying to get you fired, so it's a bad idea to get a system to try to research something for you. Anytime I've used the ol' panopticon-homunculus for something applied and niche I always follow the source linked to verify it. And the source is vague and generally unverifiable. Humans can actually link other documents that are actually readable to a greater degree.

I think a large part of the blame is the dataset for large scale LLMs being thoroughly and disproportionality poisoned with popular media sites like Reddit.

Indeed, even the best models output needs to be checked thoroughly

wow really?

Fixing grammer mistakes wont change the soul.

Pangram disagrees, if your grammar was fixed by AI it's "100% Written by AI"

What is a soul, how do you measure and quantify it? If you can’t, how would you know whether the grammar mistakes change the soul? I’ve heard people say they keep the grammar mistakes in to prove the existence of a soul, so presumably correcting them would alter the soul in some measurable way.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean. An LLM can certainly understand the structure of your writing. It can accurately diagram sentences, identify the grammatical agent, note transitions between sentences and paragraphs, determine the position of modifiers, evaluate topic continuity, spot hedges and qualifiers, count word and construction use and identify overuse, and evaluate openings and stress positions of sentences.

Why is everyone suddenly asking everyone else to not use AI to write literature, essays, comments, emails, letters… but apparently writing code with AI is fine. Oh that sounds natural to you? Not to me, it doesn't. It doesn't feel natural to me writing anything with AI as a human being. But here we are.

Shameless plug of my app! https://revise.io/editor

It's a word processor that lets you selectively accept AI suggestions, or just talk to the agent in margin comments. I've been working on this full time for over a year now.

It feels like you hit a wall. The moment for me was Astra first day of release. It felt like everything I've done up to that point was meaningless, or perhaps that's too harsh; let's call it art projects.

I've been carrying more notebooks, being fine with terminals being idle and focused on 'what is actually being created', and what will remain?

I'm the author of the article.

There are a number of comments that indicate that I'm using coding agents, and wonder if coding doesn't require the same behavior as writing.

Coding agents are absolutely a useful tool - however, that doesn't mean that pure "Vibe Coding" is the best approach for most scenarios. Using coding agents correctly requires a careful approach as well, which also starts with thinking through the problem you're solving! The details of workflows for coding and writing are different (in my opinion), but at a high level the same concept applies; don't let an AI do the important thinking for you!

I'll probably follow up with another blog post with what I've seen work well for coding.

Thinking and writing are complementary processes. If you write things where you don’t have to think, let the AI do the typing. No harm done. But any writing, where you actively think while you type not about what the next word should be but about the entire topic, so it yourself. Otherwise you’re not thinking and that’s pretty much the only value-add that’s left.

Why not ?