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Comment by r0ze-at-hn | Hacker News Reader

The advice of "use your voice" only works if you have a good writing voice and comes off like Henry Cavill's dating advice or famous writers who said that you shouldn't use a thesaurus.

Paying close attention to posts written by folks who are not using LLM's the comments here regularly complain (sometimes extensively) about the writing quality. Doesn't matter what people are saying or suggesting about avoiding LLM writing, the real lesson I am seeing is either to naturally be gifted at writing or somehow figure out how to have LLM's help with your writing. "Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you." isn't helpful for probably the majority.

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Using your own voice is absolutely important, even if your voice may suck. Even a bad writer will manage, if they actually put in effort, to convey some of their own thoughts. This gives the reader a feeling of "there is something there, an actual substance of thought", even if it's hard to find. And that's the Using an LLM risks that the crumbs of actual thought get edited out in favor of meaningless pleasantries.

However, I directionally agree though with your message: if you are bad at writing, often you can use LLMs to surgically improve the flow of your sentences for example. One should use a carefully crafted workflow for this though.

Ordinary people were writing before the option existed to accept words from AI models.

And the question is whether that output is better than what an LLM can produce. I am not a good writer, so in my case it's not obvious.

"Naturally gifted writer" is not a thing. The way to get better at writing is to write a lot.

Developing a voice comes naturally as you go through the pain of being a terrible writer to eventually being mediocre. Accepting the LLM's words is actively harmful to that process because it lets you skip over the part where you read over what you wrote and rewrite until it doesn't suck as much.

I mean, you do you. I'm not your dad.

"Naturally gifted writer" is a thing. Yes like any skill there is a learning curve, but some folks can climb that curve incredibly fast while others will struggle even with a lifetime of practice.

Clearly I am not a gifted writer as my original comment failed to convey this very well. And now I am pondering, maybe next time I should put my comment in an LLM to review it first. This meta lesson is playing out over and over everywhere by anyone writing anything.

I am in no way saying LLM writing in general is good, but ignoring the reality of what is happening is silly. For good or bad the not great writers not only will, but are doing things like voice rambling into an LLM as a starting point and editing it from there.

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