Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (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).

If I may compare written work to restaurants, a title and byline are like the storefront; I get an idea of what's being served, and if I'm hungry, I'll walk in and order. Sometimes the meal is amazing. Usually it's pretty good. Occasionally it's bland, or even bad, but not often enough to discourage future ventures; of course, I'm unlikely to revisit that particular proprietor.

With LLM writing there's an additional outcome. I walk in and the walls are pleasant, if beige. I follow the smell and promise of food down a hallway. At the end is an unmarked door, which I open and peek through. Myriad hallways lead away, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Say I am very hungry and have the guts to explore; I may find that I can never actually reach the food, that it's just an endless hall of mirrors, presenting structure but with nothing at its core.

Sometimes I do find food, but it's never better than bland.

The facade of these places, at first glance, still looks like human-run restaurants, though we're all learning the tells. Nowadays, when I open the first door and see more hallways, I'll turn around and look elsewhere.

I don’t want to read content written by AI.

A feature I would like on LinkedIn would be a 100% verified human content flag for users. LinkedIn can then do the scans and flip that to false for any users it catches posting AI assisted content. Let me filter that out of the feed.

If we don’t do something to maintain some standard of discourse, we lose intellectually and as a piece of our humanity.

LinkedIn is the only social media I use and it is on thin ice.

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?

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.

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.

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).

So there are people who actually spend time on the LinkedIn social feed?

Man, it has been purely made of fake content, even since before LLM were a thing.

And the notifications are so senseless that everyone disable them -- and people don't even answer the private messages.

There is nothing social about LI.

> with LinkedIn we know that we’re getting something ... that isn’t totally crooked

Citation desperately needed.

LLM writing is boring. Write it yourself. You are more interesting than a LLM because you make mistakes, do stupid things, don't go for the average content, and can be ridiculous in a way that an LLM can never be. LLMs are great for large tasks which would take you several hours or several days to complete that are routine or tedious. Even then, you have to make it human by putting in your own viewpoint and misguided ideas. I really liked the article. I use LinkedIn a lot, I think it is a better platform than he is describing. There is some dumbing down so it meets the average person. That is its strength and weakness.

“…at worst, they will cause people who see it for what it is to question your authenticity entirely.”

love it. I mean, if a world is going to exist that treats LLM-assisted writing with serenity, the content creator should consider themselves mandated to describe how they used AI to produce their content. Do I need the prompts? Not necessarily, although bonus points for transparency if they do share prompts. But just a high-level articulation about how they leveraged AI, so I as the reader don’t have to lose time wondering how much of the content & (like expository & analysis for nonfiction, plot elements for fiction is the author’s own and how much is the LLM’s.

> When you use an LLM to author a post, you may think you are generating plausible writing, but you aren’t

There's some toupee fallacy at play here. The author probably reads a lot of LLM assisted content without batting an eye, but only spots the worse of the LLM outputs. There's a big difference between "write a post about _" vs "improve the grammar/style of my post: _". It's a bit like saying that movie CGI really sucks because you can always tell it's fake.

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’d rather be embarrassed by my writing than embarrassed by an LLM speaking for me.

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

Well, sure, but with his fly open the LLM user harvested more wheat. I guess everyone would walk around with fly open if it allowed them to do twice the amount of work or more.

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.

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

We hired a new guy at work that's leading a specific platform initiative.

In person he's very articulate, able to communicate abstract thoughts clearly, states clear goals and how he's learning about the business to develop a plan.

But dear lord everything he writes in email and slack reads like it's copy paste from chatgpt. It's unnerving.

I'm gonna be contrarian here and say this is a Good Thing. It's very easy to tag to tag this sort of writing, and that makes it an absolutely great signal about hte people who post it. The more vacuous or frequent it is, they less weight you can accord them and the easier it probably is to get past their filters and make use of them for your own ends.

Is that morally bad? Guess that depends on exactly how you make use of them and what those ends are. If you an encourage an idiot to praise your competitor's product in order to get a reverse halo effect, that's kinda bad. If you give them some empty flattery in order to bridge a contact with someone you actually want to connect with, that's probably OK. The point is that uncritical LLM repetition tells you something about the person and lets you see past metrics like the apparent amount of wealth they have, the intimidatingly deep resume, or the degree size or centrality of their network. Two things, in fact: they post any old thing that brings in the clicks, and they're cheap. Previously many of these people probably paid someone to ghost-write their commercial affirmations.

Conclusory zinger goes here - punch up the dramatic contrast PS I'm reducing your fee to 10c/word, hope that's OK. Inflation

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'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.

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

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.

> anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore

Isn't this likely to be a temporary situation though? Are we at peak LLM writing quality?

It’s never been easier to differentiate yourself as a writer. You just write with some personality. People don’t want writing that doesn’t look average, but looks novel.

I despair much less for human writers than a did maybe a year ago.

If a human should read it, a human should write it.

I asked the latest AI model and destroyed consequent amount of water what "fly" is in this context.

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.

I personally use an LLM mostly after I have written my posts/thoughts to fix grammar and punctuation.

The people who are going to be successful in the coming economy is the ones who can channel all the knowledge and experience of an llm without shame. If you are smart:

"... in the style of a my writing"

Another AI-as-amplifier vs AI-as-substitute article.

Wondering what happens when tomorrow AI accepts and learns from the feedback and gets trained on all the failed initiative as well. It wouldn't be so hard if failed (something which wasn't right at all or hasn't got the traction) projects and ideas are all listed somewhere for an LLM to scan through. LLM may finally figure out how to add personal scars, hard decisions and personal insights which can be personalized further.

Also I don't think it might be so undesirable for an org, if there is a system which observes and present hard facts based on last quarter or year JIRA (pi planning and sprint planning) and commit histories.

It’s the best guy around who tells you when your fly is down, thanks.

I did writing courses as elective in college, the biggest lost truth is that there is no one correct writing style, (you build) being a writer at any capacity means cultivating your own writing voice, (yours) which is an expression of who you are. (voice)

Why spend time on linkedin? It's an intellectual wasteland.

I'd rather read reddit than some ghostwritten thoughtleader piece

We seem to be very sensitive to style. It can be rather distracting. This writing contained 7 exclamation marks and 9 colons.

As for em-dashes, there were 7.

LLM use is like Instagram use.

Both are generally most indulged in, by the intellectually and educationally less fortunate.

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.

I struggle with this. I think people just will not want to read what LLMs output, plus perhaps you can still analyze things better than an LLM, although that seems skeptical.

My situation is writing about futuristic long-term business strategy ideas; can that be replaced?

Is this unique at all - s-1.site

I have found LLM’s to be a really good thinking partner for writing. I start with a rough idea then proceed to argue for hours challenging ourselves and throwing away a lot of drafts until something materially useful emerges. It is a very different approach to writing… much morel like attaching a debugger to my thought process.

(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 don't agree. Good writing and good ideas are entirely different things. Just read all the beautifully written, inaccurate stuff by the NYT or the Guardian.

Also, non-native English speakers have to use LLMs to share their views so that they are not judged on their writing.

This post is also a good example; it's well written, and I enjoyed it. The idea could have been expressed simply as: "People can smell LLMs in your writing, it makes you look disingenous"

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.

Gerald Ford references - pop culture wow.

Personally I never use an LLM or "AI" for any reason. Don't find them useful and, like others, don't find their writing compelling or interesting. I can understand using it as a coding tool, but can't fathom anyone wanting or needing to filter their own thoughts and ideas through it. Is it really that difficult for anyone to send a letter or an email without machine assistance?! If someone sent me a machine generated email I would view it as being no different than any other spam message. In my opinion doing so shows a lack of respect for the recipient whose time is being wasted with machine generated trash.

This is basically the main argument of On Writing Well, Zinsser, William Amazing book.

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?