In times of AI Writing, writing manually is more important than ever. As with many AI Generated texts, I’d rather see the prompts, it would have more soul and character than the output.
I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of
Writing yourself, writing manually is much nicer, to hear your unfiltered thoughts, than condensing them through an LLM, and get average-sounding sentences with no soul. To me, LLM writing is soulless. I even started to turn to Grammarly and Copilot, as these were a mere distraction to the actual task at hand: writing. Instead of writing, I was constantly grammar fixing, and ultimately, nothing got done. Bsky
My experience is in writing, every time I use it for a bigger task (re-structure, or telling me the missing chapters), it does a very average and most importantly, distracting task for me. Instead of following my headspace, I am now adding some averaged chapters that can be found everywhere.
Also from Clayton’s article above:
I would rather see than the original prompt. The resulting output has less substance than the prompt and lacks any human vision in its creation. The whole point of making creative work is to share one’s own experience - if there’s no experience to share, why bother?
If it’s not worth writing, it’s not worth reading.
A great analogy found on Hackernews “Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym”.
If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer." HN
More on Will AI replace Humans.
# Like Driving A Car
Is writing manual like driving a car manually, instead of automatic? At first, I thought yes. But on the contrary, shifting automatic is a convenience that benefits only those who drive the car. The similarities are that both are faster, easier, and do an average job. However, the quality of automatic shifting is much superior to average AI-generated content. AI models are probabilities and are not made for writing. Yes they can write, but, they all sound the same, see How to detect AI Writing.
And with AI writing, we don’t do it for ourselves; we do it to share or impress others. If we only do it for ourselves, why wouldn’t we write it ourselves?
It’s not yes or no, but it’s a bit a nuanced difference. In shifting gears, you don’t need to have character or soul. If you are a race driver, you might shift to be much more efficient and better for each situation. If you go up, shift faster; if you go down, keep a low gear to make the motor break instead of breaking. So there’s some nuance, but it’s more simplicity whereas writing is Art, a way of communication. And much more than just shifting a gear. #thoughtoftoday
Origin: ChangeLog Podcast newsletter by Jerod Santo.
References: AI Writing
Created 2025-05-06
