Intellectual Fly Is Open (2025)

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.

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.)

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 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?

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.

The majority of linkedin posts i see provide transparent examples of sycophancy. It’s not even AIs fault. People think spamming linkedin with such crap will land them the job they are understandably desperate for.

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.

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.

Why was the title truncated and its casing changed? The original title is

> Your intellectual fly is open

which makes more sense.

Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.

I see, we are trying to re-establish ownership over the em-dash. This brings me joy.

Has any research been done to try and determine the percentage of the population that are able to detect obvious LLM-generated text?

(2025)

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...

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.

Personally I wouldn't be writing an open letter to what is effectively a bunch of spam bots. I don't think they'll read it, or care.

I love the analogy. Thanks for sharing!

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.

ai slop is sh8t. but using ai to write thoughts in readable way, with flow, no issues on my side.

my english writing is quite bad. if i write article i myself cannot read it. ai helps with the flow, review editing.

nowadays i record audio, stt and then let ai flow it properly.

i hate blog.md like this, given a topic and it does everything.

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.

This post uses far too much punctuation. Makes it jarring to read.

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.

No clue why people use linkedin posts serious?

I mean, i check it to see if a recruiter has something interesting but otherwise?

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?

Amusingly, there’s a plane rental company called OpenFly.

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.

Funny in either case.

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.

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'.

[dead]

You are right in every sense, but it seems you used llm to write this post, lol!

That's a suspicious number of em-dashes for something that's allegedly against LLMs.

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.

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.