I think that mostly depends on how good a writer you are. A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better. As in, the prose is easier to understand, free of obvious errors or ambiguities.

But then, the writing is also never great. I've tried a couple of times to get it to write in the style of a famous author, sometimes pasting in some example text to model the output on, but it never sounds right.

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Retric 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I find most people can write way better than AI, they simply don’t put in the effort.

Which is the real issue, we’re flooding channels not designed for such low effort submissions. AI slop is just SPAM in a different context.

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andrewflnr an hour ago | parent [-]

You may be in a bubble of smart, educated people. Either way, one of the key ways to "put in the effort" is practice. People who haven't practiced often don't write well even if they're trying hard in the moment. Not even in terms of beautiful writing, just pure comprehensibility.

	▲	Retric 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I may be in a bubble of smart people, but IMO AI consistently far worse than many high school works I’ve read in terms of actual substance and coherent structure. Of course I’ve had arguments where people praise AI output then I’ve literally pointed out dozens of mistakes and they just kind of shrug saying it’s not important. So I acknowledge people judge writing very differently than I do. It just feels weird when I’d give something a 15% and someone else would happily slap on a B+.

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lich_king 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am really conflicted about this because yes, I think that an LLM can be an OK writing aid in utilitarian settings. It's probably not going to teach you to write better, but if the goal is just to communicate an idea, an LLM can usually help the average person express it more clearly.

But the critical point is that you need to stay in control. And a lot of people just delegate the entire process to an LLM: "here's a thought I had, write a blog post about it", "write a design doc for a system that does X", "write a book about how AI changed my life". And then they ship it and then outsource the process of making sense of the output and catching errors to others.

It also results in the creation of content that, frankly, shouldn't exist because it has no reason to exist. The number of online content that doesn't say anything at all has absolutely exploded in the past 2-3 years. Including a lot of LLM-generated think pieces about LLMs that grace the hallways of HN.

	▲	layer8 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Even if they “stay in control and own the result”, it’s just tedious if all communication is in that same undifferentiated sanded-down language.
	▲	marbro 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

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littlestymaar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> A lot of people aren't, and the AI legitimately writes better.

It may write “objectively better”, but the very distinct feel of all AI generated prose makes it immediately recognizable as artificial and unbearable as a result.