So let me get this straight:

- You can use AI to look through docs and do research.

- You can use AI to structure your argument.

- You can NOT use AI to actually write the prose.

- You can use AI to proofread, especially for how effectively you've communicated.

I don't know, man, that sounds a lot like using AI to write. Your writing probably says "load-bearing" less than Claude's outputs, but I'm not sure it's much less AI.

Reading through docs and doing research: of course. They're like much better search engines in that regard. It would be silly not to use them. Obviously, you need to review their search results against their sources.

Structuring arguments: bad idea. Here you're having the model do your thinking for you. The problems that occur with having it write text recur at a macro level; too-obvious patterns. Readers just want to know what the prompt was.

Writing the prose: obviously not.

Proofreading: I think this works pretty great, as long as you have a structure to how you're doing it. "How do I make this better or sharper": bad, you're having the model structure your arguments for you. But for a predefined rubric of stylistic things --- writing you know how to do, that's just tedious to check manually? Hard to see a downside.

The likes of Sir Walter Scott, Peter Ackroyd, Stephen King, Tim Ferris, Robert Greene, Tucker Max, Catherine Asaro, Neil Gaiman, Charlaine Harris, Nancy Holder etc... all rely heavily on research assistants in various capacities including proofreading.

Honest question - where does an Author like the above place in your authenticity framework?

there's a growing contingent of anti-ai extremists shouting down anything that looks or feels like the thing they hate: actual slop. but there's a missing understanding of where slop really comes from - "you used ai instead of thinking" is just another guess, and mostly wrong since you literally cannot use ai without thinking - the prompts don't write themselves.

slop has been around a lot longer than ai - the contingent needs to realize what it is they hate. instead of "don't use ai to write" it's "don't use ai to write slop" or better: "don't write slop"

I didn't see in the article where he recommended AI to structure an argument? He did suggest it can be helpful for structuring data.

Giving the compiling evidence of how addictive generative AI is actually, it actually makes perfect sense that people are looking for strategies to excuse their AI-usage. I think no matter the strategy (and given AI is actually as addictive as evidence are suggesting), chances are the usage patterns will all converge to “Just use AI dummy“.

This reminds me a lot of smokers who all have a great strategy beat the nicotine addiction. Only smoke on the weekends when out partying with friends, only smoke to use the extra sense of energy, only smoke to suppress my appetite, go to the gym 5 hours a week to offset the negative health impacts of smoking etc. etc.

In reality most smokers will converge to about a pack a day.