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Comment by rockinghigh

19 hours ago

Using tools to fix your writing style or grammar is not exactly cheating.

This implies that writing styles are simply "correct" or "incorrect". I'd prefer to read someone's natural writing style, even if they do not consider themselves a good writer, because it comes from them genuinely. Much better than enduring text that has been fed into an LLM and homogenized.

There’s a world of difference between using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter.

  • I'll push back and say it's the former. Good business writing is all about the editing, and autoregressive LLMs are terrible editors. They roll dice on every word and put the same tics on every text. They meander.

    Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

    • >Suppose you check something with ChatGPT, get nine hundred words, edit that down to three or even one and send that. You won't get AI;DR for "I checked, we're good."

      Maybe. The issue here is we know most people are simply posting 900 words wholesale, maybe editing down 20-30 words to try and sweep some dust under the rug (meanwhile the trash is still fully featured on top of the carpet).

      For your style: I'm not a writer but I question if it's even more efficient to edit 900 AI words down to 100. I can see some people finding it easier to change other's words than generate your own ideas, but I don't think it's a majority. I certainly know it's more annoying to edit 900 lines of AI code into a succinct 100 line function/class.

  • > using AI as an editor vs letting it write a whole essay for you. AI;DR is about the latter

    I'm sure that's the intention, but the alarming trend, at least here on HN, is crying wolf at the first em-dash.

    • Why is that alarming? Your immune system will also do some small amount of collateral damage to your own cells when its in a heightened state.

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