These are all important points and I love the analogy. But there is an even bigger issue with having LLMs write for you:
Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.
Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing.
None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.
> Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.
I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there's other work to writing too.
The biggest one is that you have to communicate non-interactively to an unknown audience. Having to (literally) put it in someone else's assumed terms does help giving different perspectives into the matter, but doesn't necessarily help one's one thinking that much. Instead you have to do some of the reader's thinking for them.
You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents.
Not all writing is thinking and not all thinking is writing.
Strange! I would quite specifically highlight “having to do the reader’s thinking for them”, as well as more generally developing the skill to “communicate non-interactively with an unknown audience”, as extremely valuable upgrades to my thinking.
> You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents.
Hard disagree. Constraint is the driver of creativity. Also rewording sentences to sound better or make sense can make you reconceptualize the whole concept you are expressing
The number of times the friction of writing has saved me from prematurely communicating a poorly understood idea must be in the hundreds or maybe thousands. For me when something is difficult to write about, it's a very good signal that I don't understand it well enough. So I think all the things you label as aspects of writing that aren't necessarily "thinking" are nonetheless good for thinking because they provide some necessary friction.
I've thought exactly that "writing is thinking" before as a reason to not let a LLM write for me.
Then again, I've seen a counterargument [1] by someone who clearly heavily uses LLMs for writing (going by both their LLMy writing style and their own admission). The person I'm citing describes a process where they get a LLM to write something, they check over it and provide feedback to the LLM, the LLM rewrites, and the process repeats iteratively. So clearly he is putting thought into the process.
I think there is something valuable missing, even if it's hard to clearly express. I'll try. The acceptable threshold for what I'm willing to accept if I'm simply approving something is likely different from what I'll get if I write something myself, for instance. Saying "LGTM" is too tempting. It seems to me like he's outsourcing his selection of topics to cover as well. If you're not thinking yourself about what to cover then it would be very easy to miss a critical subject. There also an asymmetry between checking and generating something with constraints placed on it. Checks can't catch everything, and a constrained generating process can reduce the amount that needs to be checked, avoid issues that can't be checked so easily, and focus your attention on areas that you know historically have had issues with this generating process. I've thought about this quite a bit in terms of whether to write new code or use an existing library. Sometimes "the devil you know" (my code) is better than an existing library simply because I understand its flaws better.
I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."
My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expanding anything that isn’t completely specified.
LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.
I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.
I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers."
I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
LLMs write better than most journalists. It also writes better than majority people in the world when it comes to English as majority are really bad in writing.
And of course, LLMs write as you prompt.
Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.
I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.
> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing.
People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.
I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs.
The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.
I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.
Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.
I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than posting some other person’s writing uncited. Even if the original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest. Or maybe all these people would be fine having someone else write their content for them if it were free and easy? A social media is a reputation economy, but reputation doesn’t work if gaining karma requires no effort.
I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well.
There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.
And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.
> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:
1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
2. The prose style is horrible to read.
If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
Yeah that's the point. Spammers have an infinite desire to make more spam, so most statistically most LLM writing is garbage.
Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just to associate it with with garbage.
In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.
1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.
2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.
3.
In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you.
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house style.
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
I take a different stance on your final point. I think people should absolutely not use AI tools for functional communication as a crutch because they struggle with writing clearly.
They need to learn to write clearly. I believe there's a direct connection between clear thought and clear words.
I think it's good to be pragmatic about these things. To me, it's similar to wondering whether we insist that doctors learn to write well, or we just give them a computer so that the pharmacist doesn't have to play philologist with their scripts. The vast majority of communication is routine, and can probably be improved with automated tools.
Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.
My worry is that if people can't express clearly, in writing, what it is they want to say then an LLM won't help them much. I've seen LLMs get the wrong end of the stick over and over and produce a huge chunk of text that's certainly readable and says something. It's just not clear that the something is the thing the person originally really wanted to say.
If you can write clearly enough to express your idea to an LLM, then perhaps you should just send that to the person you're writing to.
Reading what someone wrote while they were learning = less valuable.
I just want the clear communication.
ALTERNATIVE Thought:
I’m willing to post/comment to help them if I think they will listen. An LLM behind the writing destroys this part of the community, because there’s nobody to teach/argue with. It’s just wasting our time and energy.
I can always tell when someone uses an LLM to write and never gave the LLM proper context on how to write (i.e., writing samples, skills files specific to writing, etc). These are also the people who tend to complain about AI's writing style.
You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries to replicate that garbage, does a mediocre job, and the result is this sort of weird garbage. Basically the LLM appears to be high on its own supply. Problem is the viral stuff was always what made me want to run out of the room and lock the door, so even if the LLMs did a better job of replicating that garbage, it would still be garbage, just a little less weird.
What baffles me, isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right? And realize how what they put out sounds exactly the same? Or did people completely stop reading what they've "wrote" before hitting that magical submit button?
It blows my mind. A customer of ours, whom I respect the technical opinion of, drops fully unedited Claude posts on LinkedIn now. I don't get how he thinks they read like anything but slop.
Yeah I don't quite understand it either. Where's the intersection between people producing AI slop and people that have never read AI slop? I guess it's bigger than we thought... Or maybe they just don't give a shit. That's probably it.
I suspect people who are putting out LLM "writing" are people who weren't trying to communicate in the first place.
They were likely hunting for a better job, chasing the thrill of a million views, or similar - seeking a side effect of writing, rather than seeking to help someone else understand what was in their head.
Even worse in the corporate world. Most emails about some launch announcements are now entirely written by AI. TTFED (Time to first em dash) is usually like 30 words or less.
What once has been a thoughtful email trying to describe in few words why something is launched and how it might help you etc. is now almost a novel with more paragraphs than substance within the tool being launched.
This makes it almost impossible to stand out as well. Where in the past someone could create a grea looking announcement (eye-candy) and think deeply about what to write there, and then hopefully stand out in the sea of mediocre ones, now every little email seems like it's a multi-million $ SaaS being launched.
Just last week we launched an internal tool which was in development for months, and literally a handful of people even bothered clicking the links within the announcement.
This is being one-upped still by leaders writing big project plans for 4-5 months ahead, using AI. Everything from the inception of the project(s) is AI. It has bizzare timelines, more codenames than actual people working on it, the vaguest descriptions of what the things will do etc.
Then this is trickled down into the teams, and they... to no ones surprise, throw more LLM at it. Now they start working on the LLM project plan using claude etc. The end-effect is baffling in all sorts of ways (quality, ui/ux, all pages looking different), AI generated images and more.
And then, finally, they colaborate on big announcement emails using AI.
And if you don't share the optimism and try to explain why this is silly, you're an AI sceptic...
True story from within one of the biggest companies in the world.
When I log into LinkedIn, it seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand.
Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.
There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
So much this. My average linkedin in exprience is a sprinkling of updates from people i personally know, in an oceon of inane "content" by ~$0 net worth people with 40 word self professed titles.
I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.
I remember when I saw it the "list with things prefixed with emojis" the first time, and started doing it myself thinking it was a great way to break down things visually. Looking back at the things I wrote then people would definitely assume it's LLM.
I sometimes see posts on LinkedIn that look LLM generated but also makes me think it's someone who has seen a post, thinking it's a great way to convey a point and tries to adapt the style, without realizing it's a smell.
Interesting question for sure, but for now the writing is just bad. So people might not know it's LLM prose, they just notice its poorly written and engage with the ideas less
Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously.
I'm not morally/philosophically opposed to someone generating text with AI. I just don't want to read something that isn't really "owned" by the person creating it (that is, the writer knows what he is sending me and endorses all of its contents), and because I can't discern that from people I don't know, I tend to view it with suspicion by default.
I think this is due to the fact that the language game that we have collectively decided to play, with AI, is not yet mature enough. In the language game of “giving a gift”, for instance, there is a distinction between giving a gift that you made yourself, and one that you bought at the store, but it is not that great, nobody cares a lot anymore. Right now, the language game of publishing words on the internet is strongly associated with the notion that these are “my words”, and the fact that they might have been written by a machine instead, introduces some discomfort. But it’s possible to imagine a future where this language game will have evolved enough that the notion of authorship by a particular machine entity, will not in itself be such an important issue, anymore.
Whenever I see a cringe post on LinkedIn, I medically block that person or mark that post as not interested. That’s the only way you can judge the algorithm not to show those posts
The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated; EDIT: I also link to the original article, and an archived copy if available). Now that archive.org doesn’t mirror many press articles, and now that archive.today is having a lot of reliability problems (right now its CAPTCHA is down because it has gone beyond Google’s limit for CAPTCHA use), an AI summary of a news article (along with a link to the real article) is the only way to guarantee the reader will get this gist of the article I’m commenting on.
I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
Actually, it’s because, as per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., facts cannot be copyrighted.
This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are uncopyrightable facts, the only part of the article which can be copyrighted is the stylistic writing.
Let me quote from a recent legal opinion on AI summaries (The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al 2025):
>>>
Exhibit 11 to the CIR complaint provides website links to articles that
CIR alleges were unlawfully abridged by defendants in their ChatGPT and
Copilot outputs. (CIR, FAC Ex. 11.) Examining the similarities between
those outputs and the corresponding CIR articles, including the “total
concept and feel, theme . . . sequence, pace, and setting,” Williams
v. Crichton, 84 F.3d 581, 588 (2d Cir. 1996), the Court concludes that
the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11 are not substantially
similar to CIR’s copyrighted works as a matter of law.
The alleged abridgments are detailed summaries, usually in bullet point
form, of the facts contained in CIR’s articles. Those summaries—which
differ in style, tone, length, and sentence structure from CIR’s
articles—are not “substantially similar” to CIR’s copyrighted
works. They present the “facts in a different arrangement”—bullet
point lists or short summary paragraphs—“with a different sentence
structure and different phrasing.” Nihon, 166 F.3d at 71. In short, the
abridgments in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar, qualitatively
or quantitatively, to the original CIR articles as a matter of law. The
Court therefore grants OpenAI’s motion to dismiss CIR’s claim of
direct infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 insofar as it relates to the
“abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11.<<<
Copyright only covers distribution, but I distribute the AI summaries on my blog. With paywalled articles and the usual archives having serious reliability issues, it allows readers of my blog to get context about articles I comment on.
The links are AI summaries, which, in turn, link to the original articles, but, in some cases, the original articles are paywalled. For the ones which aren’t paywalled, having a local summary prevents link rot.
Fair use covers quoting someone to comment on them. For example, in New Era Publications International, ApS v. Henry Holt and Co., it was ruled that quoting Hubbard saying “The trouble with China is, there are too many Chinks here.” was fair use, since the book in question was commenting on Hubbard’s personality, and could only reasonably do so by directly quoting him.
From that decision:
>>>
these brief quotations from unpublished copyrighted work display a compelling fair use purpose. [...] These quotations are in mockery, to show Hubbard's bigotry, bias and coarse lack of taste. This is not an instance of the biographer/critic free riding on the creative talent of the subject.
<<<
Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around. I know it isn't that easy to detect because I get falsely accused of it. To some people it seems to mean text written in complete sentences without glaring errors and maybe a few uncommon word choices. It has become an all purpose excuse for declining to engage with the meaning.
One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
> Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around
Not.. really?
I kinda see the point you seem to want to make, but the "no U" opener makes it hard to do that.
Beside that, HOAs - from what I heard of them - will use any reason they can make up to ignore what you want from them, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with LLMs.
Much like our voices, DNA, odor, and personalities are unique, so is our writing style. When I read a wholly-human writing, I get a sense of what kind of a human I'm dealing with. Using LLMs will distort this signal, so readers worth their salt will easily skip the piece, because we don't want to acquire LLM-like writing 'style' (reading affects writing).
As soon as I sense Slop, I'm done, this person refused to think when writing, why should I waste my time reading it then?
LLMs are not defacto bad at writing and are not defacto distinguishable from human writers. Lots of people are just lazy, never customize anything, and tell chatgpt to make them a post about x to be a "thought leader". Most are even lazier and blatantly rip off some else for their own means.
However, it is perfectly possible to have an LLM imitate an existing corpus of writing (yours or someone else) and with a good prompt, idea, and editing, to produce high quality writing (in every sense of the word) with an LLM.
So many people seem completely blind to LLM writing, they are fine sharing it on social media or at work. I think it’s people who are “not details people” and are used to judging something without reading it based on superficial cues which is what LLMs are optimized for.
And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.
On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
it's all about money, they write some attractive stuff, they get some views, likes follows, maybe someone will say "this dude is smart". but most times you get idiots liking the stuff, and likely detrimental because a smart person would see is slop, and they also know you don't know people know is slop.
The HN title ("Intellectual Fly Is Open") made me think it's about some startup starting to sell subscriptions. That title should be de-editorialized. Was it LLM-generated?
This feels like satire / parody. Praising LinkedIn. The text itself containing multiple LLM tells, especially in the parts complaining most about LLM writing.
Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.
I was fired from my job at spotify for taking fmla when i my dad was dying from cancer. I've been marking the my directors posts on linkedin as 'looks like ai slop'.
The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader.
And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item.
I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead.
So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post.
I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start.
They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt.
Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time?
It's not that an LLM wrote it down much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.
I hear ya. However, that ship has sailed a long time ago and succumbing to this very idea is exactly why puritans in any form will not survive the next 50 years.
> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.
Writing is thinking. Thinking and deciding. There have been many times when I start out writing something substantial - could be an email, a blog post, a software design document, anything - when my own views substantially changed during the writing process. Writing forces you to serialize your thoughts - and you can't always trust the gestalt.
Reviewing gives you the chance to ensure the arguments connect solidly, that references are accurate (even informal references) and gives you the time to consider counter-arguments you aren't addressing.
None of this matters much on LinkedIn, but it matters a lot in our work. You cannot outsource your understanding to AI. They are powerful tools but they do not have any human understanding - that isn't their optimization target.
I don't disagree, but I think it's often not appreciated how much there's other work to writing too.
The biggest one is that you have to communicate non-interactively to an unknown audience. Having to (literally) put it in someone else's assumed terms does help giving different perspectives into the matter, but doesn't necessarily help one's one thinking that much. Instead you have to do some of the reader's thinking for them.
You also have to spend time on textual matters like grammar and style and a lot of "unspoken rules", which aren't really about linearizing your thinking about the contents.
Not all writing is thinking and not all thinking is writing.
Would love an example where you’re able to write without transferring your thoughts. Besides the obvious: fjcjfjrnjfjfifjfnrnakosifnrbwkofgjrj
And not all thinking is writing is a clear truism, there’s no point to even stating that.
Writing helps us think about the world, it’s a pivotal intellectual technology.
Hard disagree. Constraint is the driver of creativity. Also rewording sentences to sound better or make sense can make you reconceptualize the whole concept you are expressing
Then again, I've seen a counterargument [1] by someone who clearly heavily uses LLMs for writing (going by both their LLMy writing style and their own admission). The person I'm citing describes a process where they get a LLM to write something, they check over it and provide feedback to the LLM, the LLM rewrites, and the process repeats iteratively. So clearly he is putting thought into the process.
I think there is something valuable missing, even if it's hard to clearly express. I'll try. The acceptable threshold for what I'm willing to accept if I'm simply approving something is likely different from what I'll get if I write something myself, for instance. Saying "LGTM" is too tempting. It seems to me like he's outsourcing his selection of topics to cover as well. If you're not thinking yourself about what to cover then it would be very easy to miss a critical subject. There also an asymmetry between checking and generating something with constraints placed on it. Checks can't catch everything, and a constrained generating process can reduce the amount that needs to be checked, avoid issues that can't be checked so easily, and focus your attention on areas that you know historically have had issues with this generating process. I've thought about this quite a bit in terms of whether to write new code or use an existing library. Sometimes "the devil you know" (my code) is better than an existing library simply because I understand its flaws better.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-026-00236-3
My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.
I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
And of course, LLMs write as you prompt.
Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.
I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.
In my personal experience I strongly disagree. Curious what publications you read wherein this is the case.
If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing.
The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.
I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.
There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.
And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:
1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
2. The prose style is horrible to read.
If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just to associate it with with garbage.
In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.
1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.
2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.
3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
They need to learn to write clearly. I believe there's a direct connection between clear thought and clear words.
Now, I also see the counterargument that, in the doctor example, the computer is simply a tool that improves a process rather than a crutch that replaces the underlying knowledge, but I suspect that, in a lot of cases, that's probably OK.
If you can write clearly enough to express your idea to an LLM, then perhaps you should just send that to the person you're writing to.
Reading what someone wrote while they were learning = less valuable.
I just want the clear communication.
ALTERNATIVE Thought: I’m willing to post/comment to help them if I think they will listen. An LLM behind the writing destroys this part of the community, because there’s nobody to teach/argue with. It’s just wasting our time and energy.
You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
They were likely hunting for a better job, chasing the thrill of a million views, or similar - seeking a side effect of writing, rather than seeking to help someone else understand what was in their head.
What once has been a thoughtful email trying to describe in few words why something is launched and how it might help you etc. is now almost a novel with more paragraphs than substance within the tool being launched.
This makes it almost impossible to stand out as well. Where in the past someone could create a grea looking announcement (eye-candy) and think deeply about what to write there, and then hopefully stand out in the sea of mediocre ones, now every little email seems like it's a multi-million $ SaaS being launched. Just last week we launched an internal tool which was in development for months, and literally a handful of people even bothered clicking the links within the announcement.
This is being one-upped still by leaders writing big project plans for 4-5 months ahead, using AI. Everything from the inception of the project(s) is AI. It has bizzare timelines, more codenames than actual people working on it, the vaguest descriptions of what the things will do etc. Then this is trickled down into the teams, and they... to no ones surprise, throw more LLM at it. Now they start working on the LLM project plan using claude etc. The end-effect is baffling in all sorts of ways (quality, ui/ux, all pages looking different), AI generated images and more. And then, finally, they colaborate on big announcement emails using AI. And if you don't share the optimism and try to explain why this is silly, you're an AI sceptic...
True story from within one of the biggest companies in the world.
Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.
There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.
I sometimes see posts on LinkedIn that look LLM generated but also makes me think it's someone who has seen a post, thinking it's a great way to convey a point and tries to adapt the style, without realizing it's a smell.
> Your intellectual fly is open
which makes more sense.
Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
Who decide what is obvious or not?
Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
[1] https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog...
Unless I'm directly interacting with the LLM, someone should endorse the content.
I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are uncopyrightable facts, the only part of the article which can be copyrighted is the stylistic writing.
Let me quote from a recent legal opinion on AI summaries (The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al 2025):
>>> Exhibit 11 to the CIR complaint provides website links to articles that CIR alleges were unlawfully abridged by defendants in their ChatGPT and Copilot outputs. (CIR, FAC Ex. 11.) Examining the similarities between those outputs and the corresponding CIR articles, including the “total concept and feel, theme . . . sequence, pace, and setting,” Williams v. Crichton, 84 F.3d 581, 588 (2d Cir. 1996), the Court concludes that the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar to CIR’s copyrighted works as a matter of law.
The alleged abridgments are detailed summaries, usually in bullet point form, of the facts contained in CIR’s articles. Those summaries—which differ in style, tone, length, and sentence structure from CIR’s articles—are not “substantially similar” to CIR’s copyrighted works. They present the “facts in a different arrangement”—bullet point lists or short summary paragraphs—“with a different sentence structure and different phrasing.” Nihon, 166 F.3d at 71. In short, the abridgments in Exhibit 11 are not substantially similar, qualitatively or quantitatively, to the original CIR articles as a matter of law. The Court therefore grants OpenAI’s motion to dismiss CIR’s claim of direct infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 insofar as it relates to the “abridgments” contained in Exhibit 11.<<<
Here’s an example: https://samboy.github.io/blog/entries/2026-08-28.html
The links are AI summaries, which, in turn, link to the original articles, but, in some cases, the original articles are paywalled. For the ones which aren’t paywalled, having a local summary prevents link rot.
Fair use covers quoting someone to comment on them. For example, in New Era Publications International, ApS v. Henry Holt and Co., it was ruled that quoting Hubbard saying “The trouble with China is, there are too many Chinks here.” was fair use, since the book in question was commenting on Hubbard’s personality, and could only reasonably do so by directly quoting him.
From that decision:
>>> these brief quotations from unpublished copyrighted work display a compelling fair use purpose. [...] These quotations are in mockery, to show Hubbard's bigotry, bias and coarse lack of taste. This is not an instance of the biographer/critic free riding on the creative talent of the subject. <<<
One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
Not.. really?
I kinda see the point you seem to want to make, but the "no U" opener makes it hard to do that.
Beside that, HOAs - from what I heard of them - will use any reason they can make up to ignore what you want from them, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with LLMs.
As soon as I sense Slop, I'm done, this person refused to think when writing, why should I waste my time reading it then?
However, it is perfectly possible to have an LLM imitate an existing corpus of writing (yours or someone else) and with a good prompt, idea, and editing, to produce high quality writing (in every sense of the word) with an LLM.
And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.
On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
I mean, i check it to see if a recruiter has something interesting but otherwise?
Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.
Funny in either case.
If this is straight out of an LLM I am impressed
The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader.
And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item.
I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead.
So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start.
They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt.
Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time?
It's not that an LLM wrote it down much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.
It's just digital pollution.
The ship has not sailed, I can just find a human who wrote words, and read them. And if they aren't human words, I will just, not read them.
No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.