alt Hacker NewsUse AI to write things for you to read that you wish someone else had written. ‘Give me a summary of the research on this topic’; ‘Write a report on this data to help me make a decision’. ‘Take this transcript of a meeting and write me the email it could have been’.
Don’t use AI to write things that you are producing for someone else to consume.
Replies
This is 100% my take. It's nice and easy.
I do not personally even think AI is useful for editorial purposes; I would rather read and re-read my own text and edit it down (which, despite my overlong comments here, I actually do), than have someone else do it. The reason is simple: editing is my search for the clearest way to express my thoughts.
I tend to turn grammar checkers off, but leave spelling checkers on, because they catch typos and a handful of my spelling gremlins like "liaise".
I am someone else, if AI can write something that I want to and can consume then it can do the same for other’s consumption. Perhaps a disclaimer would be nice, “co-written with ____” but I see no difference between the two though of course I understand what you are trying to convey conceptually
I think that's somewhat reasonable, but not always: the effort of researching and of writing yourself will teach you better then reading something someone else wrote, especially an LLM that will get things wrong in surprising ways that a human would not.
I'm not saying you should never do this: our time is valuable, and we shouldn't spend it on things that are not genuinely worthwhile to us if we can help it. But we're still losing something by having an LLM write for us, even if the intended audience is just ourselves.