Treating the act of refining text as a confession of shame misses the point of how writing works. Whether a draft begins as a model output, a dictation, or a scribbled note, the final responsibility belongs to the person who hits publish.

Improving prose to remove predictable patterns is the work of an editor. This process ensures the content is worth reading and respects the audience's time.

Comparing a software tool to "poisoning a well" turns a debate over style into a moral crisis that doesn’t fit the situation. If the information is accurate and the writing is clear, the water in the well is fine, regardless of the pump used to get it there. If the water tastes good, complaining about the plumbing is just a distraction.

Parents complaint is explicitly not about the style of the prose, use whatever you want to check your grammar and reduce redundancy. The complaint of poisoning the well is regarding content that is not intended to express anything at all, the old “why would I read what nobody bothered to write”

The issue is that you're conflating the process of transcription with the act of expression. If I feed an LLM my own raw research notes and technical observations and use it to help structure those thoughts into a readable essay, I haven't "avoided writing".

The "why would I read what nobody bothered to write" argument only applies to people who ask a bot to hallucinate an opinion from scratch. It doesn't apply to authors using the tool to clarify their own ideas.

LLM-generated text that is a hallucinated-from-scratch opinion is practically indistinguishable from LLM-generated text that is rooted in your research notes.

I find putting the former into my brain abhorrent to such an extent that I am willing to forego reading the few instances of the latter. I'd much rather have your raw research notes and observations.

> If I feed an LLM my own raw research notes and technical observations and use it to help structure those thoughts into a readable essay, I haven't "avoided writing".

> The "why would I read what nobody bothered to write" argument only applies to people who ask a bot to hallucinate an opinion from scratch. It doesn't apply to authors using the tool to clarify their own ideas.

You're wasting my time if you share LLM writing. If you're going to do it that way, share your notes and your prompt. Otherwise, you're being inconsiderate.

This seems completely detached from reality.

For example it ignores the gazillion medium(-like) "articles" that are not much more than the output of a prompt. Here AI is not about style, is about content too. If you open such a post, maybe with the intent of learning anything, and you realize is AI slop, you might close it. Making it harder to recognize is poisoning the well in such cases.

>Comparing a software tool to "poisoning a well" turns a debate over style into a moral crisis that doesn’t fit the situation. If the information is accurate and the writing is clear, the water in the well is fine, regardless of the pump used to get it there. If the water tastes good, complaining about the plumbing is just a distraction.

Speaking of poisoning wells, have you heard of this thing called Search Engine Optimization? Absolutely ruined the Internet.

I sometimes use AI to quickly summarise a handful of several MB long PDF files.

This allows me to order them in order of the relevance to start getting my data and information faster.

Applying a constraints like in the published template will make it slightly less awful. It's going to be discarded anyway, but at least the experience is going to be better.

Not every LLM output is going to be published for you to consume. If hazard a guess most never sees the light of the day.

There are two factors I see with this:

I sometimes like having my content editorialized. Some of the LLM writing tropes are ok to me—I'd delete them if I added this prompt to my instructions (but I wouldn't). But my editorial preferences—the sense of voice and tone I want the LLM to make—are rarely these tropes. Instead, I have a positive prompt of the angles I do enjoy.

However, what is cloying about these tropes for many is that they're becoming empty words. Instead of tack-sharp summaries or reductions to simple understanding, the model is spilling extra tokens for minimal value—I don't need to read "it's not X, it's Y" for the n-th time today. I'd really prefer tighter, more succinct reading that actually directly quotes sources (which modern models rarely do to avoid copyright traps).

I really don't like the patterns listed in the link. I'm going to use this just to get the LLMs to stop sounding so "corporate".