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Comment by CipherThrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I've used GPT-4. The writing sounds better, but it still sucks at writing. Most importantly, it feels like it sucks just as much as GPT-3.5 in some deeply important ways.

If you use GPT-4 day-to-day, you've probably encountered this sense of a capability wall before. The point where additional prompting, tweaking, re-prompting simply doesn't seem to be yielding better results on the task, or it feels like the issue is just being shifted around. Over time, you develop a bit of a mental map of where the strengths and weaknesses are, and factor that into your workflows. That's what writing with LLMs feels like, compared to working with a professional writer.

Most writers have already realized that LLMs can't write in any meaningful way.

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I think it is a tooling issue. It is in no way obvious how use LLM's effectively, especially for really good writing results. Tweaking and tinkering can be time consuming indeed, but i use lately the chatgpt-shell [1] and it lends well to an iterative approach. One needs to cycle through some styles first, and then decide how to most effectively prompt for better results.

[1]https://github.com/xenodium/chatgpt-shell/blob/bf2d12ed2ed60...

> Most writers have already realized that LLMs can't write in any meaningful way.

I know a professional writer who is amazed by what LLMs are capable of already and, given the rate of progress, speculates they will take over many writing jobs eventually.

> If you use GPT-4 day-to-day, you've probably encountered this sense of a capability wall before.

Of course there is a wall with the current models. But almost every time I hit a wall, I have found a way to break past that limit. Interacting with the LLM as I would interact with a person. LLM's perform best with chain of thought reasoning. List out any issues you identified in the original output, ask the LLM to review these issues and list out any other issues that it can identify based on the original requirements, then rewrite it all. And do that several times until it's good enough.

At work I have found GPT-4 to exceed the linguistic capabilities of my colleagues when it comes to summarizing complicated boring business text.

> And do that several times until it's good enough

Or just write the damn thing yourself.

What if this is a boring business text summary task that takes additional hours of my time at work? Why should I waste my time? I have better things to do. I can leave early while you sit there at work typing like a fool.

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