> When I had started my PhD, I thought the writing part of a paper was just the last thing I needed to do to summarize my results, like a boring epilogue to the more exciting science.

I personally (caveat: in math, not science) always found the writing part more pleasant and exciting than the research part. In research, I was always anxious that I won't have any idea, or that the proof idea won't work. In writing, I was relaxed that I had obtained a result so I got excited about how to write it up beautifully.

Same with reading actually. Reading a book makes you think for a long time about the subject and form your own judgments. I like audiobooks and online content too, but they don’t seem to stimulate this nearly as much.

For audiobooks, I seem to not have as much of a tendency to pause the audio and stop and think, and it’s harder to reread a passage, so it’s a more passive experience.

For online content, there’s not as much of an intention to fully engage with the material. It’s easy to skim or switch to something else.

>it’s telling me that the author tried to take a shortcut in their own thinking and it’s a good heuristic that the ideas will not be thought through enough to warrant my complete attention.

Even worse: Facing AI writing, there's a strong suspicion that any concerns or counterpoints you bring won't be actually considered, but rather copypasted into an llm session.

The trick, I think - at least this has helped me - is not to use the AI to write for me, nor to use it to rewrite my drafts, but is to do the writing myself and to ask it for editorial feedback. This forces me to think through what I’ve written more deeply, and then rewrite it according to that deeper understanding.

I think if I used AI for the actual writing then, (a) there’d be a lot missing, and (b) I’d rob myself of much of the value, in better understanding, of writing myself.

We’re not all the same so YMMV, but this is what I’ve found from using AI in various ways to see if and how it can help with writing.

I feel that way about coding. Sometimes you have an idea and a plan to implement it. But once you start coding you realize that some things were not fully right or way more complex that it should If you let AI code for you, you will lose that

The problem with AI is that it's entire selling point is saving time by not needing to think very deeply about topics.

The writing is downstream of that.

There's a difference between asking a model to figure out your argument and using it to make an argument you've already spent days working through more readable

Absolutely. And ironically one thing I discovered while trying to use AI is that it applies to programming too.

I'd heard that one-shot a project with AI, you need a fairly complete design document instead of a short prompt, so I tried to write one.

In doing that, I'd include the unhappy paths as well, e.g. in describing a list/detail interface: the list shows the X's (I thought: but in what order?) in alphabetical order; when an X is selected, the detail is displayed in the detail pane; (lists should work with multiple selection, so) multiple items may be selected at once, in which case the detail pane should display "N items selected" instead of the interface to edit the items; (a list starts empty, so) if no items are selected, the detail pane should display "No items selected", etc.

Laying out the entire system in plain English helped me have the whole thing inside my head, and see cases where presumptions about how the system would work wouldn't actually hold in practice because they weren't even holding in the text I was writing. So I had to edit the draft to fix my wrong assumptions until it made sense.

And of course the AI managed to do a pretty terrible and disappointing job at it in the end, because it made mistakes in the parts I didn't specify, or placed widgets in the wrong places because the layout that was difficult to explain in text, etc. It's somewhat impressive that anything ambiguous is a spot where AI can make the worst assumption imaginable, like it doesn't have the capacity to intuit "oh, we are making THIS sort of app, so it should look like this". But it was a good learning experience.

I suppose it's a great idea to write out what you're about to do before you set out to do it, because it helps you think about it in whole and in detail. It would be terrible if people stopped doing that.

this lands. and i find it true for software development too. a lot of the initial codebase is me discovering what i am *actually* building (should be building). all that vanishes with vibe coding.

Part of the problem is that the English word "writing" refers to both the process and the result.

I am starting to believe that if something is worth sharing, it is worth writing (atleast once) by a human completely. An AI clean/pass-up after that might be okay but atleast once, an author should try to create the whole piece.

I used to have a real complicated dilemma on which content exactly to write (& then share), I recently started using handy's TTS and storing it in my scratchpad app within my native language or English and then I paste it into Chatgpt and use its memories to connect with other previous discussions I had.

It helps in saving thoughts which would've otherwise been lost, even provide some new perspectives and get them in a way that I can access them later in more depth.

I think that if I were to now create blogs of these contents. I used to think that it would perhaps be okay to share an blog like thing created by AI if say I spent 10-20 minutes thinking of the rough draft of it, but after reading your comment, I am reflecting on the fact that, atleast once, people should write things themselves no matter which AI thing they use before creating blogs.

As the point of blogs shouldn't be to share unlimited content but rather that it is the specific content where a human effort was placed. Maybe if one still wants, there could be some other blog post which could be written with all the AI blogs content I have created perhaps but still, it should be seperated away from human content.

And there is this fact that as you mention, writing itself forces you to think through ideas and thoughts which are highly relevant. So previously when I used to think that re-writing them would be a waste of time and that AI writes them good enough. I think that writing them still might make a lot of sense as it would be a net benefit if not for anybody else, then for me as it can help me better understand the material myself (even more so than reading/speaking it)

The most typing/writing of myself now occurs in Hackernews comments for me and I do observe that I learn a lot writing them personally.

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This happened to me recently. I just asked what the prompt was. I found it really tough to read AI words, not knowing the weight to put in each word. A almost gave it more credit than was due and responded in detail, before seeing the prompt and responding barely at all - equivalent to the thought put in.