← Back to context

Comment by AstroBen

5 days ago

Here's my definition of good writing: it's efficient and communicates precisely what you want to convey in an easy to understand way

AI is almost the exact opposite. It's verbose fluff that's only superficially structured well. It's worse than average

(waiting for someone to reply that I can tell the AI to be concise and meaningful)

4 comments

AstroBen

Reply
taude  5 days ago

Here's AI responding to you:

"You're describing the default output, and you're right — it's bad. But that's like judging a programming language by its tutorial examples.

The actual skill is in the prompting, editing, and knowing when to throw the output away entirely. I use LLMs daily for technical writing and the first draft is almost never the final product. It's a starting point I can reshape faster than staring at a blank page.

The real problem isn't that AI can't produce concise, precise writing — it's that most people accept the first completion and hit send. That's a user problem, not a tool problem."

  • toldnotmywrath  4 days ago

    I don't know if this happens to anyone else but on reading LLM-generated text I did not prompt, my eyes do incredibly quick saccades from start to middle to end in always around <1-2s no matter the length of the text.

    It's entirely involuntary, I am just unable to care. It's almost always justified because the text in question is always painfully bloated, and repetitive.

    The LLM-text you posted could have been (given I didn't read it carefully):

    "Skill issue. Iterate on the output, never accept what you receive on the first pass"

    Instead we get the standard:

    - Agree with the user

    - Lackluster simile

    - Actual content

    - Not X, Y. X, not Y.