alt Hacker NewsIt’s the same with writing: AI writing is coherent on the surface, but is impossible to edit because it’s built on no real insight.
Now the sharpening of a coherent point, challenging one’s assumptions, and editorial decisions of what (not) to include are super important because they’re no longer a byproduct of the writing process.
Replies
Terr_ • today at 7:40 PM
> It’s the same with writing: AI writing is coherent on the surface, but is impossible to edit because it’s built on no real insight.
LLMs lie in the unhappy-medium between an abstract machine we can reason-about versus a person we can instinctively model and simulate.
Instead it's a complicated machine that evades both reasoning and intuition.
Human insight can emerge from attacking the semblance of sense in the LLM's output.
Much of the cognitive work in writing emerges in the labor of writing prose and challenging assumptions against the model you build in your head as you go. I've found this process is inverted when working with an LLM: it in effect emits a provisional structure first, and I discover what I actually think by finding where its output is vague, overconfident, incomplete or outright false.
Accepting surface-level coherence as finished thought is the failure mode to avoid.