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johnnyanmactoday at 7:13 AM1 replyview on HN

Add some paragraphs and yes; your style is more "interesting than what an LLM generated. That's the only think truly hard to read compared to the output.

Your style reveals the way you write sentences, the language and vocabulary you choose to employ, and even your emotion.

Here's an obvious example:

> I dont care ion people dont read my stuff. There are people that do and they find it useful. My ideas solidified have already started to bring dividends for me - and not from others reading beut from me being able to ficus my thoughts.

which converts into

>I don't particularly mind if people skip my stuff. Some people do read it and find it useful. And honestly, the biggest dividends haven't come from readers at all — they've come from the act of solidifying my own thoughts. That alone has been worth it.

spelling aside, just look at the first sentence. You show a different kind of derision for your audience here compared to the LLM trying to sugar coat it and soften the blow. That's style, and a small part of why AI feels like it "slops" up any given style.

"Brings dividends" isn't grammatically correct but reveals how your mind sees the idea. you see it as a result to manifest from your ideas. The Ai interpretation of "The biggest dividends..." grinds out the edges back to a more passive action happening more as a side goal.

There's that much subtle changes in meaning from a 50 word passage being converted. Which AI should be "good" at. Now imagine how this breaks down slowly over the 600 word post you made if I broke down every little bit of it. That's what people are doing internally and quickly concluding "this all sounds the same". Which is about the worst thing you can be in an attention economy; boring and unoriginal.

----

P.S. Yes. I don't want to come off as rude. But your prompt also does reveal how you approach writing as a whole. It's clear you a) value the presentation of the writing as much, if not more, than the contents of the writing and b) admire the writing "sounding smart and proper" but do not wish to impart effort to achieve those means yourself.

I do believe there can be interesting prompts to read that is a back and forth correcting and managing the AI to give a more tailored writing as an end result. A conversation that reveals how you go past the basics spelling and grammar and tell the AI how to inject your style and taste into the generated results. That would be true "AI-assisted writing".

This was clearly not that. This was a single prompt: "make me an essay that sounds good and is formatted well". One and done. Not a conversation, but a demand trusting the standard of the average as output.

I won't reject the idea of AI-driven writing one day making bespoke works. But I highly doubt it will be a one-and-done prompt that achieves this.


Replies

supermatttoday at 10:09 AM

My aim was to turn my ramblings into something more coherent. No more. No less.

I have made longer notes using exactly the process you prescribe, but that wasn't necessary for me in this case as it wasn't the most complex of ideas - I just regenerated until it gave me a fair approximation of what I wanted.

And to be fair - even if I had given it follow-up guidance it would still have the LLM "smell". It would receive EXACTLY the same treatment from the anti-llm crowd. Thats pretty much one of the core points of the post (judging the medium ahead of the content).