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Comment by nidnogg | Hacker News Reader

Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell

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"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it? Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine, just another type of validation before you share something, but if you actually let the LLM rewrite what you say, then I feel like that's beyond "running it through an LLM", it's basically letting the LLM write your text for you instead of just checking/validating.

Yes checking and validation is one thing, but there are several engineers in my area that only communicate using agent copy paste. I challenged one fellow about that and he was furious!

"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it?

The article seems to imply this is what is happening, as writing style converges towards LLM's style. You can call it what you want, but the important bit is that this is how it appears that LLM's are being used.

Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine

Why use an LLM? If you're worried about style, starting with your own voice is more efficient. If you're worried about facts, looking something up in a primary source is best, and is probably cheaper on a few axes, especially if you need to check/validate anyway...

The decline of writing is something that's been going on for a long time. Well written and grammatically correct emails are something that's been on the down turn. Consider how often people send emails in all lower case, lacking punctuation, or even without any sentence structure.

The "you need to write in a more professional business oriented way" is something that a lot of people are having difficulty with. Yes, this needs to be addressed earlier in someone's education more forcefully - but the SMSification of long form text started a while ago.

With that said, the "Ok, you need to write long form with correct grammar when sending an email that a director or VP is CC'ed on". It used to be Grammarly as the "install this and have it fix up your grammar and tone" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20191104093353/https://www.gramm... GPT-1 timeframe there). However, LLMs of today seem to be more accessible than Grammarly but it largely does the same thing - fix up and refine tone.

What I don't see from back then is people decrying Grammarly saying that it's making everything sound the same.

I'm also not sure if I would prefer the pre-fixup emails to what is produced by an LLM unless sending coworkers to remedial writing classes is something that is acceptable.

You have to make some mistakes in your communication (or anything) if you ever want to grow and learn.

You're absolutely right here and things have improved significantly at work after dropping this habit even if slightly.

>You're absolutely right

Lol that triggered me too!

That is completely opposite of how I use LLM. If I do not have expertise, I ignore LLM and search for more trustworthy resource. LLM lie very confidently and if I do not have expertise, they will lie to me.

When I do have expertise, I use them because I am able to check.

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