Comment by ryankrage77
15 hours ago
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.
> a very derisive rant... the derision the author clearly has...
You either do not know what derisive means or have worse reading comprehension than I do! /derision
Seriously though - it's literally just talking about the use of an LLM as an accessibility aid and argues that the LLM-assisted writing can still contain human thought. What specifically did you consider contemptuous or mocking?
FYI: https://claude.ai/share/601e313e-905c-4e4a-bb6a-24a1315013e5
> slightly ill intent
There was no ill intent. The content itself described the reason for the process. Even simple comments I write here end up with multiple edits over the hour-long edit window.
If you read my entire comment history you will find I rarely make more than a single observation per comment. Anything more complex becomes too difficult to read and revise.
Cognitive impairment is extremely difficult to understand until you have experienced it. I am particularly lucid this afternoon. That doesn't mean the difficulty is not real.