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I saw someone reading your book on the Brooklyn Heights promenade the other day.

Nope, the LLM-powered spelling and grammar checkers are worse than the old ones were. I turned off grammar checking in Google Docs entirely because it became useless when they switched over to "AI." LLMs/GenAI are a technological dead end.

You are an idiot.

Have fun with that.

That's the fun bit!

Again, I know how to and enjoy doing research and writing. Because I’m a writer. That’s the process.

During my research on the development of the earliest animation made for television, I ran across one of the worst deconstructions of media I've ever read, about the dark undertones of The Smurfs, and had to debunk its stupid points one by one. It led me down a rabbit hole of research

If you have to research and edit the output of the LLM to ensure it's accurate, you're already doing the work that you're supposedly avoiding by using the LLM, so what's the point?

I do include research and editing as part of the writing process, which is why I don't use AI for those, either. And I wouldn't want to! So many story paths open up during research. As for editing, that's where the true story is born. Outsourcing either makes for a shallower book.

I'd rather gargle molten lead.

Reminds of that quote about writing being easy, you just take out all the wrong words. Letting a machine do the editing..

This is one of the things they are worst at. If you’ve been using them for this your work is probably badly compromised.

Except then you have to fact check the LLM, which is Worse™️ than going to the primary sources to begin with and doesn’t take that much less time.

Honestly, the *beauty* of research is stumbling over information you never expected that either improves your current work immensely, or inspires a facet of a later work. Done properly, the activity of researching is actually MORE valuable than the specific information you expected to get from it.

I do research as part of my business and the AI answers on Google are often completely untrue and stated authoritively. I wouldn't rely on it for anything other than mild curiosity about something specific with massive, long-standing consensus.

I would still never use it. Fuck AI. I'm not going to let a damn clanker do my writing for me, so why the hell would I use one to do my learning for me?

or you could do the research yourself and actually internalize what you're writing about, shocker I know but sometimes that's the whole point

Like what’s editing if not the spirit of writing condensed down to its principals? What’s your “workload” is another art form. Choosing the correct, most apt diction is lightning in a bottle and I chase it every time.

Every time I've used it in an area where I have knowledge, it's been wrong (which has admittedly been 99% Google Overview when I forget to add -ai to my search). Sometimes catastrophically so, literally saying the opposite of reality but making it sound plausible.

Independent of the AI usage arguments, I wouldn't lump those two activities together.

A debut author just lost their major international publishing deal because, according to the author, their editor had used an LLM and hadn't disclosed it. So if you do use one, even if it's Grammarly, definitely say so. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The data is typically bad, and llms are terrible at editing in general.

I mean in my experience most white men don't mind being loudly wrong in public and I can see how using an LLM can help you be wrong in public more loudly and egregiously

If you hate researching, writing, and editing enough to outsource it, at least outsource it to a researcher, writer, or editor. Hire human beings who understand context, nuance, language, and craft and who would like to feed their families by doing their jobs well.

a tool's localized effectiveness is beside the point when it's fueled by mass theft and orphan bones and using it supports history's greediest oligarchs like, LLMs could make breakfast and give blowjobs and it wouldn't matter because they're catastrophically unethical

And that's how you get a protagonist who irons his scrotum and eats rocks

As a talented researcher and writer I would sooner move into a cave and write on the goddamn walls than let an LLM anywhere near my work. And that’s not just pride, I’m in psychology, I know what these things are capable of.

But if you used AI, you could make your writing look much more like that of people who aren’t professional writers…but faster!

Kind of the "AI" version of Wohl's old "I'm in a hipster coffee shop where all the liberals are saying that Trump is right"-lie?

because nothing is fulfilling to them, and they can't compute how it would be to any of the rest of us

Gotta hit 'em with the citations needed... Then the block :)

Fragile self-esteem is a plague 💔

Yeah the elephant in the room is that speed of writing code was never the problem, but now we have bots churning out 10,000 lines per day that literally cannot be reviewed. Who's fault? Anyone but the management/ownership class, that's for sure.

AKA the Dershowitz effect.

I think that, in general, folks who have no understanding of the creative process are the ones looking to AI as a crutch/creative tool. It amazes me that so few people have any understanding of what’s involved in generating anything that meaningfully touches others. They all think it’s formulaic.

As somebody who has always wanted to draw cool shit but never had the patience to truly develop the skills, I can understand this a little more, but even then getting something close to what you want from a robot cannot beat the feeling of achievement of finally fucking doing it yourself.

Mood, that.

My favorite is "Make sure to tell it not to lie to you" People use these tools with a straight face somehow.

I'm just some random guy who talks with his friends a lot on the internet and nothing steams me faster than someone who comes into a forum thread with "I asked chatGPT and-". Just use your own words and thoughts! You've been doing it your whole life, presumably. Why stop now?

AI doesn't know how to fucking swear properly. It's piss poor at swearing which means it is incapable of reliably voicing my opinions in an appropriate manner. It probably hasn't even heard of the term "orange wankmaggot" which is essential language when discussing (and dissing) the evil cunt trump.

Maybe you need to write a bunch of clunky awkward statements using m-dash hyphens and have it seem like a mild head injury?

As a writer I can hardly imagine anything more boring than using AI. Writers enjoy thinking and writing, not producing a product.

If my idea can be condensed down into a prompt that the Tombola of Lies can randomize something plausibly textlike out from it wasn’t a very good or original idea to begin with. Maybe it ought to have stayed in my head.

No one with a brain is using AI, it's just being flogged by money-losing hype-merchants to a vast swathe of talentless hacks in every field.

I wrote a 100,000 word story without AI, fuck anyone who thinks it's inherent.

Writing is like any other skill. The way to get better at it is to do more of it. Anyone letting AI do the writing for them will never get any better at writing.

then don't read it

I fucking agree

More detail: I was working at Google at the time so I first saw it in internal dogfood. It was of many things that led me to resign.

Some authors have gone to great lengths to remove even the possibility that AI will touch my work.

As someone who has tried to use AI to write, I gave up on the tech, when I realized that I was rewriting about 90% of the AI's output by hand. I can see the appeal of the tech, but only for people who don't actually care about what they're making. That's why office workers love it, no more BS emails

Well then follow me I'm your guy

👍🙌

That's really gross. They're saying humans are no longer creative and must bow down to the all knowing AI god. "A talented human?!! Impossible!" #Ai #BanAI

And to know how to write, it takes perseverance. The only way to get better at writing is to write. People relying on AI have no hope of ever improving. Those torturous moments when a manuscript doesn’t feel like it’s working are actually us levelling up—a boss battle if I may.

Same, being a translator, I know how to fucking translate, I don't need an algorithm to throw half-assed suggestions at me.

If you're a writer who doesn't actually like writing, take up pickle ball instead.

or, if making a career out of writing isn't a concern, simply write badly. so long as you're enjoying putting your mind to paper, who cares about quality? online fanfiction authors cracked this code two decades ago

Ideas are cheap. If you had an idea for a skyscraper design, would you assume you're entitled to build it with just a little assistance from a computer? It's the actual process of writing and revision that makes words come to life. Just choosing the right word in a sentence is a creative act.

And like listen, not to be too mean, but ideas are cheap. I know it sucks to have good ones and feel you can't get them out how you want. The greats struggle with it too. They put in the work, the practice. Not everyone will work and be great. But you get better. Do the work, hoss

Also, if you're too lazy to put in the effort on your great ideas, then people are gonna notice that. If you don't give more of a shit than that, why the fuck should they?

Instructions unclear. Putting a rat in a hat to help me write.

I have a different take on your question from some other folks: - Writing is harder for some people than others - Not as a matter of quality but of actually being able to do it - Sometimes because of neurodiversity - Sometimes because of economic hardship - Etc. The solution is: 1/2

Practice?

Spoiler alert: even if you get to the point where you can write well enough, you'll probably still think you can't write well enough to service your ideas. You just do it anyway. Source: Me. I'm the source.

Have you paid attention to the writers here on bluesky? “Write well enough to enjoy it” isn’t what they do. It’s like any craft where you do it, and fail, and do it again, and again and get better, but your eye always improves faster than your craft, so you think you suck but you ARE getting better

Enjoying writing can happen at any skill level. Some people enjoy writing humor, others horror, others nonfiction memoir, others poetry. Writing as well as John Scalzi takes years of skill levelling, but writing for enjoyment can be playing with words or writing jokes or even (sigh) puns.

Take a class. Get some books on writing. Almost nobody just “writes well enough” out of the gate, any more than they drive well enough or bowl well enough or do stage magic well enough. If you’re a beginner, begin. Do things beginners do. It’s a process.

Write short stories instead of novels.

Hahahahahaha no one "enjoys" it. Not if they do it with any frequency or rigor

if someone can’t be bothered to write something, why do you think others are going to be bothered to read it? if you don’t enjoy writing then don’t become a writer.

LOL you think writers enjoy the writing process?

This is kind of like asking how to enjoy lifting a one rep max or sprinting at full effort. With very few exceptions people either do the thing or enjoy themselves, not both. Probly the closest easy-ish thing to writing and enjoying the activity would be to run a D+D game or take an improv class.

That's what being a writer is, my man! You've described it perfectly. The only addendum I'd make is: then you just do it anyway

This post is a good example of what I'm talking about. 😆

It’s art, not the Matrix. You will never get a computer to extrapolate your ideas accurately. You can’t even brainstorm with it. Being an artist, a writer in this case, takes skill which is learned through practice and routine. Your own voice comes with time. No computer can write in “your” voice.

Same thing you do when you feel like playing basketball but are too lazy to get up off the couch Invent a robot that can shoot baskets for you and say it will disrupt the NBA

If you’re ideas don’t motivate you to find a way to write them yourself then they probably aren’t very good. Ideas are worthless. Only in the process and application of ideas do they become something. Just write. Then write again. Get feedback. Write again.

You practice writing. Or you accept that you aren't gonna be a writer, and you focus on something else.

Flash, you remind me a time I was drawing and a woman said, "Oh, you're so talented! I could never do that." I said that I'd been working on my skills for decades. She left in a huff. People would rather believe that art is inborn rather than work.

You write them down anyway in whatever terrible way you can get them out onto the page. And then you start organizing and structuring and refining them into something that seems readable. Then you keep doing it over and over again and keep refining it. Writing is rewriting. THAT is what writing is.

Ideas are the easy part. Writing a good book that readers enjoy is the hard part.

Start small. Write in a daily diary, which can even be your phone. Can be anything: poetry, short fiction, essays arguing a position. You just gotta start and get in the habit of going to the gym to build those muscles, so to speak.

writing is inseparable from thinking - if you have not tried to write your thoughts down - even just for yourself - you probably haven’t engaged with the specifics and details of your idea

Write it anyway. That's how practice works for every skill -- you want to do it, you suck at it, you learn, you gradually stop sucking at it. It's not always a fun process, to be fair. But it works.

Have you never learned a new skill?

Write.

After a lot of scrolling and reading a lot of really good advice, I haven't seen this one: Read. Slowly, carefully, asking yourself "How does that work?" Hand-copy favorite passages. Notice body language and inflections that make a character. See what's important about the scenery. It does help.

the only way to get from "can't write" to "can write" is to write

Use AI to walk you through as small a step as you need to get your ideas on paper. I think presenting your ideas in a generally coherent way is vastly more important than learning to do it "the right way." If you have ideas that you want out there, there's no shame in using AI to get there.

Just in case anyone missed it, John answered here: bsky.app/profile/scal...

lmao at the thought that I should be entitled to say I'm a guitarist if I've never picked up a guitar. Because that's basically what you're implying you should be able to do about writing. You're claiming entitlement to a thing others actually *cultivate* & *understand.* Get good. Sorry not sorry.

i tell people trying to learn how to program computers _exactly_ this same thing several times a day. AI slop won't help you get good at _anything_, it'll just make it easier for you to pretend to be mediocre at something you're not even mediocre at

Here's a great example. One of the most iconic arts in history was not a one-and-done. If you look into the artist, they did not even stop with the great wave, they kept developing their motifs well afterwards! To create art, like all communication, requires work. www.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPo...

So make bullet lists of them. Or use some other crutch or tool that helps you get started. Outlines. Mind maps. piles of paragraphs with bits of your ideas in each. AI can only write the things you tell it to write, so you're going to have to do the hard parts yourself, like the thinking; it can't.

Why would you dance if you can’t fucking dance? Why would you sing if you can’t fucking sing? Why would you draw if you can’t fucking draw? Because it gives you pleasure and by doing it you improve and unlock more pleasure from it.

Record yourself telling them, transcribe them, show a friend, humbly take advice, revise as needed - ideas need careful crafting

hiring a ghostwriter >>> ai

Tell them to people who know how to write but are looking for ideas. Go back and forth. Collaborate. Still would be better than getting generic slop.