alt Hacker NewsIf you care about voice, you still can get a lot of value from LLMs. You just have to be careful not to use a single word they generate.
I've had a lot of luck using GPT5 to interrogate my own writing. A prompt I use (there are certainly better ones): "I'm an editor considering a submitted piece for a publication {describe audience here}. Is this piece worth the effort I'll need to put in, and how far will I need to cut it back?". Then I'll go paragraph by paragraph asking whether it has a clear topic, flows, and then I'll say "I'm not sure this graf earns its keep" or something like that.
GPT5 and Claude will always respond to these kinds of prompts with suggested alternative language. I'm convinced the trick to this is never to use those words, even if they sound like an improvement over my own. At the first point where that happens, I get dial my LLM-wariness up to 11 and take a break. Usually the answer is to restructure paragraphs, not to apply the spot improvement (even in my own words) the LLM is suggesting.
LLMs are quite good at (1) noticing multi-paragraph arcs that go nowhere (2) spotting repetitive word choices (3) keeping things active voice and keeping subject/action clear (4) catching non-sequiturs (a constant problem for me; I have a really bad habit of assuming the reader is already in my head or has been chatting with me on a Slack channel for months).
Another thing I've come to trust LLMs with: writing two versions of a graf and having it select the one that fits the piece better. Both grafs are me. I get that LLMs will have a bias towards some language patterns and I stay alert to that, but there's still not that much opportunity for an LLM to throw me into "LLM-voice".
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I think you just did another non-sequitur.. What is a graf? Is it journalism slang for "paragraph"?
They’re also great, in my experience, for overcoming writer’s block and procrastination. Just as a rubber duck to bounce ideas off of and follow different threads.
It makes the writing process faster and more enjoyable, despite never using anything the LLM generates directly.
Workshopping with humans is even better, if you find the right humans, but they have an annoying habit of not being available 24/7.
All of this sounds like something you could just do yourself after putting a piece down for a day or two and coming back to it with fresh eyes. What benefit is there of cooking the oceans with a bullshit generator?
Like, sure, it's possible to do this with an LLM, but it's also possible to do it without, at roughly similar levels of effort, without contributing to all of the negative externalities of the LLM/genAI ecosystem.
What I struggle more with the things like Grammarly, where it's a mix of fixing very nitpicky grammar spelling structure issues that push things from casual writing with my own voice into more of a professional tone.