FWIW, I tried to read the AI version first, and found myself bouncing back to the prompt multiple times. The AI version just reads as flat, impersonal, and as if it has had all the corners sanded off (both in style and content). The prompt conveys much more about what _you_ want to say, and is easier to read without zoning out and losing interest.
If you must use AI in this way, I'd tell it to take a _much_ lighter touch. It cleans things up without washing away the personality of your writing. ChatGPT example:
> adjust the following for spelling and grammar, making MINIMAL alterations to the original wording and content. do NOT rewrite, just clean up what is already there: [post]
I find amusing that both Claude and ChatGPT realized the "hackers" in "a lot of people on hackers that like to complain about stuff" was about "Hacker News" :-P
Yes, the original prompt is 10000% better than the AI output, because it shows me exactly how much the author (you?) cares about this topic and how much effort they're willing to put into communication, which is barely any at all.
What I read is that you're self-conscious about your writing style and that you find the LLM processed version of your own stream of thoughts to be helpful to you yourself.
Which is fine for you, but doesn't change that many people can get more insight out of your original text than they can out of the generated adaptation, and can do so with more interest and less fatigue.
And indeed, you don't have to care about that. But one would think that in publishing or sharing your writing at all, you do in fact have some investment in whether people receive those insights that you have. Otherwise, you could just keep the AI writings to yourself in the first place.
No, I did read it, and I think I understood it. My summary in my own words is that you find that LLMs can massage your writing and reduce the stress of communication. Did I believe it? Well...
You have an account on HN dating back to 2013 with over 6000 comment karma, you clearly didn't have trouble communicating like a normal person for a decade on this website before the advent of LLMs. Your spelling and grammar in posts predating LLMs are also far better than what you've produced in this prompt, so I'm tempted to think that you're exaggerating your inability to communicate normally to make a point.
But even so, the original wall of text communicates the point much more strongly and sincerely than the LLM trash.
Add some paragraphs and yes; your style is more "interesting than what an LLM generated. That's the only think truly hard to read compared to the output.
Your style reveals the way you write sentences, the language and vocabulary you choose to employ, and even your emotion.
Here's an obvious example:
> I dont care ion people dont read my stuff. There are people that do and they find it useful. My ideas solidified have already started to bring dividends for me - and not from others reading beut from me being able to ficus my thoughts.
which converts into
>I don't particularly mind if people skip my stuff. Some people do read it and find it useful. And honestly, the biggest dividends haven't come from readers at all — they've come from the act of solidifying my own thoughts. That alone has been worth it.
spelling aside, just look at the first sentence. You show a different kind of derision for your audience here compared to the LLM trying to sugar coat it and soften the blow. That's style, and a small part of why AI feels like it "slops" up any given style.
"Brings dividends" isn't grammatically correct but reveals how your mind sees the idea. you see it as a result to manifest from your ideas. The Ai interpretation of "The biggest dividends..." grinds out the edges back to a more passive action happening more as a side goal.
There's that much subtle changes in meaning from a 50 word passage being converted. Which AI should be "good" at. Now imagine how this breaks down slowly over the 600 word post you made if I broke down every little bit of it. That's what people are doing internally and quickly concluding "this all sounds the same". Which is about the worst thing you can be in an attention economy; boring and unoriginal.
----
P.S. Yes. I don't want to come off as rude. But your prompt also does reveal how you approach writing as a whole. It's clear you a) value the presentation of the writing as much, if not more, than the contents of the writing and b) admire the writing "sounding smart and proper" but do not wish to impart effort to achieve those means yourself.
I do believe there can be interesting prompts to read that is a back and forth correcting and managing the AI to give a more tailored writing as an end result. A conversation that reveals how you go past the basics spelling and grammar and tell the AI how to inject your style and taste into the generated results. That would be true "AI-assisted writing".
This was clearly not that. This was a single prompt: "make me an essay that sounds good and is formatted well". One and done. Not a conversation, but a demand trusting the standard of the average as output.
I won't reject the idea of AI-driven writing one day making bespoke works. But I highly doubt it will be a one-and-done prompt that achieves this.
The stream-of-consciousness in the prompt is much better than the LLMs response. Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it. The way it is written lets me follow your thought process, shows that you were getting the words out quickly without much or any editing, and how you were exploring the idea and making it more concrete by giving it written form.
The LLM response has none of that character, it doesn't give me that little sliver of insight into the writer. It strips the idea from the author, making it generic and anonymous. The only thing I can gleam from text edited with an LLM like this (besides the literal meaning of the text), is that the author didn't care enough to express themselves.
Sure, it's more polished, but doing the writing manually is half the point. You have an abstract idea, you refine into something that can be communicated, and in doing so, explore that idea and improve your understanding of it. I've re-written this paragraph a dozen times trying to do exactly that.
It's getting those abstract ideas back out from the word-vomit I find very difficult. It is almost completely impenetrable to me to read that text - even though I wrote it!
Someone in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338214) has shown a prompt to just break it up and fix the sentence structure rather than rewriting, which should hopefully help me to at least re-read what I have written.
"More interesting" =/= "good". Yes, at the end of the day it's a very derisive rant against people the writer feels is too hard on AI and a defense on how they personally wield it. With a slightly ill intent to create a messy, unstructured writing in the prompt to support his point of "see, people like pretty words!".
Even the attempt of using Claude to be a fancy formatter failed when you look closely at the language employed in the final prompt. It's trying to convey the same ideas with better foratting, but still softens up the derision the author clearly has here. Which is the interesting part in my eyes.
I asked claude 4.5 :
"""
Please, with an absolute minimum of content modification, edit this text with proper paragraph-formatting, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Do not alter vocabulary, language, or tone.
"""
And then fed it your input.
And the output was a very easily readable, enjoyable plain-ascii-text, with no Ai-ick, except for an em-dash or two.
Tried pasting it here, but that removed paragraph formatting
This is actually a great representation of what is good and what is insidious about LLM assisted writing.
The practice of writing can serve the purpose of conveying an idea or information to the readers, but it can also be an invaluable tool for the writer to process, digest, and internalize a message.
The act of wordsmithing, and shaping the idea from its raw rambling form into a coherent narrative, is intellectual metabolism.
A good writer will both distill the ideas, present them in such a way that will be pleasurable to their readers, and also bring the reader along the way so they can learn as well, and feel like an active participant.
The LLM tend to produce prose that defeats the purpose for the writer, takes the joy out for the reader, and ultimately does nothing for anyone but take up space.
It's not more words that make good stories, and it's not more code that makes good programs. It's what use is this to anyone, and only humans understand what other humans want and only humans can care.
Seems like people in this thread agree that it's better to express oneself in a less skilled fashion but actually write something that represents your idea, than to present some polished turd and pass it off as your own writing.
Same as a birthday card on some stock paper written in crayon will always be more valuable than a store bought card with generic sentiment.
The stream-of-consciousness is only hard to read because it lacks paragraph breaks, sometimes sentence breaks, and there's so many misspelled words. If you just tweak it to fix that stuff, it becomes fairly readable, like most internet comments or whatnot. (Which do you think this comment is, a polished essay, or lightly-formatted stream of consciousness?)
Meanwhile, the LLM-generated essay is hard to read because it's essentially the high-school essay that's padding its paper to meet a minimum page count. I'm surprised that you find it easier to read than most human text, because I've invariably found that my first reaction to LLM-generated text is "where's the point?"--everything is just buried in so much fluff.
So yeah, I find the prompt much better than the LLM output.
Sure enough, the prompt is infinitely more expressive and interesting.
AI writing is like the voice anonymizer they'd use in TV interviews when they wanted to hide the identity of the person speaking. The output is more adherant to convention but likewise more impersonal and exhausting, and when it's used by too many people it's so indistint that it becomes noise.
It might look good to you in isolation, because you're excited to see that it says what you meant to say without the features you feel self-conscious about, but to others it just reads like yet another sample of the same old AI slop. The message gets entirely lost behind that.
FWIW, I tried to read the AI version first, and found myself bouncing back to the prompt multiple times. The AI version just reads as flat, impersonal, and as if it has had all the corners sanded off (both in style and content). The prompt conveys much more about what _you_ want to say, and is easier to read without zoning out and losing interest.
If you must use AI in this way, I'd tell it to take a _much_ lighter touch. It cleans things up without washing away the personality of your writing. ChatGPT example:
> adjust the following for spelling and grammar, making MINIMAL alterations to the original wording and content. do NOT rewrite, just clean up what is already there: [post]
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a8382b9-3620-83eb-b17e-4397aee5ad...
I find amusing that both Claude and ChatGPT realized the "hackers" in "a lot of people on hackers that like to complain about stuff" was about "Hacker News" :-P
Huh, thats really interesting... That sounds a lot better than I expected, and is readable enough for me to edit it.
Thank you :)
Yes, the original prompt is 10000% better than the AI output, because it shows me exactly how much the author (you?) cares about this topic and how much effort they're willing to put into communication, which is barely any at all.
> which is barely any at all
Clearly you either didn't read it, misunderstood it, disbelieved it, or just DGAF :)
What I read is that you're self-conscious about your writing style and that you find the LLM processed version of your own stream of thoughts to be helpful to you yourself.
Which is fine for you, but doesn't change that many people can get more insight out of your original text than they can out of the generated adaptation, and can do so with more interest and less fatigue.
And indeed, you don't have to care about that. But one would think that in publishing or sharing your writing at all, you do in fact have some investment in whether people receive those insights that you have. Otherwise, you could just keep the AI writings to yourself in the first place.
1 reply →
Many different people in this HN submission have given you similar feedback: given that, you should consider that your priors are not correct.
16 replies →
No, I did read it, and I think I understood it. My summary in my own words is that you find that LLMs can massage your writing and reduce the stress of communication. Did I believe it? Well...
You have an account on HN dating back to 2013 with over 6000 comment karma, you clearly didn't have trouble communicating like a normal person for a decade on this website before the advent of LLMs. Your spelling and grammar in posts predating LLMs are also far better than what you've produced in this prompt, so I'm tempted to think that you're exaggerating your inability to communicate normally to make a point.
But even so, the original wall of text communicates the point much more strongly and sincerely than the LLM trash.
1 reply →
Add some paragraphs and yes; your style is more "interesting than what an LLM generated. That's the only think truly hard to read compared to the output.
Your style reveals the way you write sentences, the language and vocabulary you choose to employ, and even your emotion.
Here's an obvious example:
> I dont care ion people dont read my stuff. There are people that do and they find it useful. My ideas solidified have already started to bring dividends for me - and not from others reading beut from me being able to ficus my thoughts.
which converts into
>I don't particularly mind if people skip my stuff. Some people do read it and find it useful. And honestly, the biggest dividends haven't come from readers at all — they've come from the act of solidifying my own thoughts. That alone has been worth it.
spelling aside, just look at the first sentence. You show a different kind of derision for your audience here compared to the LLM trying to sugar coat it and soften the blow. That's style, and a small part of why AI feels like it "slops" up any given style.
"Brings dividends" isn't grammatically correct but reveals how your mind sees the idea. you see it as a result to manifest from your ideas. The Ai interpretation of "The biggest dividends..." grinds out the edges back to a more passive action happening more as a side goal.
There's that much subtle changes in meaning from a 50 word passage being converted. Which AI should be "good" at. Now imagine how this breaks down slowly over the 600 word post you made if I broke down every little bit of it. That's what people are doing internally and quickly concluding "this all sounds the same". Which is about the worst thing you can be in an attention economy; boring and unoriginal.
----
P.S. Yes. I don't want to come off as rude. But your prompt also does reveal how you approach writing as a whole. It's clear you a) value the presentation of the writing as much, if not more, than the contents of the writing and b) admire the writing "sounding smart and proper" but do not wish to impart effort to achieve those means yourself.
I do believe there can be interesting prompts to read that is a back and forth correcting and managing the AI to give a more tailored writing as an end result. A conversation that reveals how you go past the basics spelling and grammar and tell the AI how to inject your style and taste into the generated results. That would be true "AI-assisted writing".
This was clearly not that. This was a single prompt: "make me an essay that sounds good and is formatted well". One and done. Not a conversation, but a demand trusting the standard of the average as output.
I won't reject the idea of AI-driven writing one day making bespoke works. But I highly doubt it will be a one-and-done prompt that achieves this.
1 reply →
The stream-of-consciousness in the prompt is much better than the LLMs response. Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it. The way it is written lets me follow your thought process, shows that you were getting the words out quickly without much or any editing, and how you were exploring the idea and making it more concrete by giving it written form.
The LLM response has none of that character, it doesn't give me that little sliver of insight into the writer. It strips the idea from the author, making it generic and anonymous. The only thing I can gleam from text edited with an LLM like this (besides the literal meaning of the text), is that the author didn't care enough to express themselves.
Sure, it's more polished, but doing the writing manually is half the point. You have an abstract idea, you refine into something that can be communicated, and in doing so, explore that idea and improve your understanding of it. I've re-written this paragraph a dozen times trying to do exactly that.
Thanks for the feedback.
It's getting those abstract ideas back out from the word-vomit I find very difficult. It is almost completely impenetrable to me to read that text - even though I wrote it!
Someone in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338214) has shown a prompt to just break it up and fix the sentence structure rather than rewriting, which should hopefully help me to at least re-read what I have written.
> Yes, it's messy and unpolished, maybe even a little hard to parse, but it's so much richer for it.
...This part immediately made me link it to the hipster stereotype:
"oh, it's sooooo much better on vinyl because you can hear the cracks & pops"
Neither pieces in the chat log work for me: The prompt was a wall of ramblespeak. The output was a presentation that should've been an email.
"More interesting" =/= "good". Yes, at the end of the day it's a very derisive rant against people the writer feels is too hard on AI and a defense on how they personally wield it. With a slightly ill intent to create a messy, unstructured writing in the prompt to support his point of "see, people like pretty words!".
Even the attempt of using Claude to be a fancy formatter failed when you look closely at the language employed in the final prompt. It's trying to convey the same ideas with better foratting, but still softens up the derision the author clearly has here. Which is the interesting part in my eyes.
1 reply →
I think you intentionally sandbagged your prompt by dragging on and being repetitive and it’s still a better read than the LLM output.
There’s also a difference between “please edit my writing” and “please generate a blog post from these bullet points.”
I asked claude 4.5 : """ Please, with an absolute minimum of content modification, edit this text with proper paragraph-formatting, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Do not alter vocabulary, language, or tone. """
And then fed it your input.
And the output was a very easily readable, enjoyable plain-ascii-text, with no Ai-ick, except for an em-dash or two.
Tried pasting it here, but that removed paragraph formatting
Thank you. Someone else posted similar with ChatGPT and it looks like that strategy could be a way for me to manually edit a lot more easily.
This is actually a great representation of what is good and what is insidious about LLM assisted writing.
The practice of writing can serve the purpose of conveying an idea or information to the readers, but it can also be an invaluable tool for the writer to process, digest, and internalize a message.
The act of wordsmithing, and shaping the idea from its raw rambling form into a coherent narrative, is intellectual metabolism.
A good writer will both distill the ideas, present them in such a way that will be pleasurable to their readers, and also bring the reader along the way so they can learn as well, and feel like an active participant.
The LLM tend to produce prose that defeats the purpose for the writer, takes the joy out for the reader, and ultimately does nothing for anyone but take up space.
It's not more words that make good stories, and it's not more code that makes good programs. It's what use is this to anyone, and only humans understand what other humans want and only humans can care.
Seems like people in this thread agree that it's better to express oneself in a less skilled fashion but actually write something that represents your idea, than to present some polished turd and pass it off as your own writing.
Same as a birthday card on some stock paper written in crayon will always be more valuable than a store bought card with generic sentiment.
I think it's hilarious how AI took something personal and the very first thing it spews out is a classic AI-ism.
Do you read over what the AI spits out? Do you read over what you write?
It takes time to do either, and both are the things that I think are actually useful.
The stream-of-consciousness is only hard to read because it lacks paragraph breaks, sometimes sentence breaks, and there's so many misspelled words. If you just tweak it to fix that stuff, it becomes fairly readable, like most internet comments or whatnot. (Which do you think this comment is, a polished essay, or lightly-formatted stream of consciousness?)
Meanwhile, the LLM-generated essay is hard to read because it's essentially the high-school essay that's padding its paper to meet a minimum page count. I'm surprised that you find it easier to read than most human text, because I've invariably found that my first reaction to LLM-generated text is "where's the point?"--everything is just buried in so much fluff.
So yeah, I find the prompt much better than the LLM output.
Thanks. Im actually seeing that myself since someone helped me with formatting the word salad.
Sure enough, the prompt is infinitely more expressive and interesting.
AI writing is like the voice anonymizer they'd use in TV interviews when they wanted to hide the identity of the person speaking. The output is more adherant to convention but likewise more impersonal and exhausting, and when it's used by too many people it's so indistint that it becomes noise.
It might look good to you in isolation, because you're excited to see that it says what you meant to say without the features you feel self-conscious about, but to others it just reads like yet another sample of the same old AI slop. The message gets entirely lost behind that.
I read your entire jumbled stream joyfully and hated the llm article that was spit out.
definitely prefer the rambling; i can break it up into paragraphs sans LLM
while both are difficult to read, i enjoy reading the prompt more, it feels more human (don't know exactly what).