alt Hacker News> For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?
Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer.
Outsourcing thinking is bad. Using an LLM to assist in communicating thought is or at least can be good.
The real problem I think the author has here is that it can be difficult to tell the difference and therefore difficult to judge if it id worth your time. However, I think author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells.
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> Because writing is a dirty, scratched window with liquid between the frames and an LLM can be the microfiber cloth and degreaser that makes it just a bit clearer.
Homogenization is good for milk, but not for writing.
> author/publisher reputation is a far better signal than looking for AI tells
Hardly seems mutually exclusive. Surely you should generally consider the reputation of someone who posts LLM-responses (without disclosing it) to be pretty low.
A lot of people don’t particularly want to waste time reading the LLM-responses to someone else’s unknown/unspecified prompts. Someone who would trick you in to that doesn’t have a lot of respect for their readers and is unlikely to post anything of value.
> Outsourcing thinking is bad.
I keep seeing this and I don't think I agree. We outsource thinking everyday. Companies do this everyday. I don't study weather myself, I check an app and bring an umbrella if it says it's gonna rain. My team trusts each other do do some thinking in their area, and present bits sideways / upwards. We delegate lots of things. We collaborate on lots of things.
What needs to be clear is who owns what. I never send something I wouldn't stand by. Not in a correctness sense (I have, am and likely will be wrong on any number of things) but more in a "yeah, that is my output, and I stand by it now" kind of way. Tomorrow it might change.
Also remember that google quip "it's hard to edit an empty file". We have always used tools to help us. From scripts saved here and there, to shortcuts, to macros, IDE setups, extensions and so on. We "think once" and then try not to "think" on every little detail. We'd go nowhere with that approach.
If you use an LLM to refine your ideas, you're basically adding a third party to the chat. There's really no need to copy-paste anything - you are the one that changes before you speak.
If you use an LLM to generate the ideas and justification and formatting and etc etc, you're just delegating your part in the convo to a bot.