I can relate to the inclination, but so many new insights and moments of inspiration are necessarily confined to that painstaking iterative line-by-line process of real writing. When you are simply prompting and editing, you will fill the page (and it might even sound like “you”), but you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.
>but you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.
I feel like you haven't used LLMs very extensively if that is your genuine experience with LLMs.
Without even tuning the heat to a higher setting, a wide range of LLMs have offered me unique content that I had not encountered previously and certainly was not expecting.
I think you missed my point. I don't go back and have AI re-edit my drafts, on average. I have it give me some words that are on a page so I can say 'this sucks' and engage in writing myself, as opposed to continuing to stare at a blank page.
The quality of the AI's writing actually doesn't matter, for me, as much as it might for others, as a result. I write my own stuff. I just find AI helpful to activate me to do it.
There's nothing stopping you from doing that with an LLM. I get more insights refining a draft through prompts than I ever did writing because there's more of it. The end stage of that process rarely sees the light of day because the artifact wasn't the point.
For writing as thinking with trouble starting from scratch, LLMs are the most important technology to emerge in my lifetime. Microblogging filled that gap in a way, but it had too many downsides.
>> you will not have that delightful experience of encountering something unexpected along the way to filling it.
> There's nothing stopping you from doing that with an LLM.
There may be, though. The LLM's initial output may anchor your thinking in insidious ways that may not be obvious at all especially since you're feeling productive. I bet the lack of confidence around starting would also increase over time every time you use an LLM to get over the hump.
Not so far.
I'm not talking about using a default mode LLM with LinkedIn Standard Obsequious Bullshit as a conversational imperative that emerges from simple prompts interacting with the heaviest weights. It pushes back because I told it to and it has redirects around common LLM failure modes, and modes unique to how I use them. That's in a set of instructions I've had a bunch of different models tear apart so I could put it back together better.
I treat it and describe it as a language coprocessor, not a buddy. The instructions are the kernel I boot it with.
Yeah, precisely. My "Bobby" knows my voice, but is not me, and is bad at using it. It is aware of all the tropes, and I've built a writing skill that describes, in great detail, how I write. I have also set it up to challenge me, not make me feel good.
Moreover, it's not like I spend my entire writing time arguing with an LLM, lol. I spend more time writing myself and/or doing research on the internet without an LLM, because sometimes they still get things wrong.
In short: it's a tool, not a solution.