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I do some version of this too. Very heavy use of Whisper for voice input. But it’s always just initial conversations, research directions, and Socratic questioning. Once it comes to writing the final words, I find LLMs can’t help that much. Other than as an expensive thesaurus.

Something I've tried a few times is to dump a long draft blog post into NotebookLM and have the weird fake podcast hosts do an episode about it - I find it useful for checking that the key points I'm trying to make come across, and their interpretation sometimes sparks ideas for clearer explanations

Oh yes I use them for that a ton. But for the final words - the bit where you have to find the exact, concise phrases that say the thing you want to say, in the right narrative tone, with the right structure to them - they’re sadly not much help.

People really hate writing.

I use it to help me write a little code, but I absolutely do not find it useful for writing for me. If I'm sitting down writing a long document, I'm doing so because I will learn during the act of writing. If you can use AI for writing a long document, then it probably just shouldn't be a long doc.

Not outlier. I do the same

A significant portion of the value of writing is being the tool for thinking. I don’t understand wanting something written that was not worthy of being a vehicle for human thought. Aren’t we then, generating content that isn’t worth being read either?

Not at all! I love to write which is why I’m doing it mostly myself, BUT: I use LLMs for research, critique/feedback, checking tone of voice if I’m writing for an audience I don’t typically write for, brainstorming, asking different perspectives, writing draft code for one-off things

I think using ChatGPT as a writing machine isn't necessarily the most popular use case but it's 100% the most high-profile and visible one. Nobody notices all the ways I use LLMs, they notice the slop

Makes me want to get out a guitar and sing it. Love it

Do t use it at all for writing yet. Not sure I'd like that. I (maybe egotistically) like to think I have a unique voice (more humor, less formal) and don't want to give that up.

It's also really good at "what am I missing?" in analysis. Using it to "write" is the wrong use case in my view. Still haven't quite come up with a decent prompt to stop it congratulating itself the whole time.

I usually dump a bunch of my own words and thoughts into a document, then use an LLM (generally Claude) to reorder it into something that flows better, while admonishing it to not use style/language that isn't represented in my original content. It saves me a bunch of rounds of revisions.

I know how elitist this could sound but yes I think filling the world with clumsy AI-assisted prose is bad. I want to read people's authentic voices and I don't think the world needs more slop-assisted prose. There will be plenty of that going around anyway.

I think you are imagining that the starting place is still visible and somehow reachable - it isn't. You may as well discuss "if people ride bikes not walk, is that such a bad thing?"

substack.com/@betterthanr...

I think there is an element of not being exactly sure what to do with them as a novice user. Writing is probably the initial thought that comes to mind and thus what is initially explored.

My gut feeling is that it's still a skill that's worth learning in its own right, though. It's like using a calculator to do basic arithmetic — it's helpful, but you're not going to get a feel for how arithmetic works that way. You can't learn/grow as much when relying on these tools.

This feels like a really important point. Rachel Coldicutt's principles for responsible AI introduced me to the idea of AI as a reasonable adjustment in the workplace (point 3 here): www.careful.industries/blog/2025-4-...

I think LLM’s have revealed how much most people loathe writing, and find it about as painful as arithmetic, and likewise are about as eager to hand off the responsibility to a machine. I’m with you, though, I use LLM’s frequently for code but never for writing.

OpenAI says 1/3rd of all college students are using "Chat" as the kids call it now.

I use mine for rearranging text I already wrote. It's good for bouncing ideas around, create images and speed up projects. It helps a lot with coding (being my code experience Atari Basic and early HTML). And I love when it comes up with clever comebacks if I start pulling its (virtual) leg.

(anecdote alert! I don't have data about this, just my anecdotal impression. feels right in my gut though)

Yes, certainly the anecdotal reports from professors are the same anecdotal reports I hear from colleagues. There's no question that, if you're still relying on take-home 5-page essays, you will get a lot of LLM prose!

...the sources may not be as solid as they seem: bsky.app/profile/aedw...

Outlines are probably the most productive part for students to actually write themselves though :(

I use it (or rather gemini recently) all the time and I don't use it to write anything I expect others to read. Maybe I'd ask it to check something I've written for issues.

Me, too. I use it constantly and, if writing is involved, it’s for editing, brainstorming and thinking things through. The idea of having it just write for me never happens.

Breakout yes. Good? No

Surely you use the pop-up/keyboard shortcut. In my experience developing that muscle memory was what elevated my usage to “any time I have an interesting thought or question.” I think most people don’t even know there is a desktop app, let alone this feature

I'm GenX and a published fiction author and I can see what a useful tool AI is - and how it will be integrated into work and cause catastrophic job losses. The denialism is something to behold.

💯 for curiosity engine. (I like this name over llms) 😂

I mostly use it for exploring or optimizing code (less writing it from scratch), or for exploring learning paths (if I want to learn X, what should I study first). I’ve never used it for writing I’ve shared with others.

Curious if you get a sense for this from the spread of comments, I feel like 70% of my LLM use is for “thinking” and 30% generating code most non-tech people I’ve watched use them for answering questions and writing boring emails - they find my “thinking” usecase somewhat neurotic (which it may be)

I don't know about "most ChatGPT users", but businesses certainly are. When I freelanced for a marketing agency, they used AI as the primary "author" of marketing blog posts. The human content creators sometimes added extra material, but not usually more than 25% of the total length.

My biggest use of the LLM apps has been for market research and related stuff. For me, the deep research models are the real "killer app". This is coming from a person who developed chatbots during the pre-LLM era, so the concept wasn't completely alien to me, except for maybe code output.

One of my favorite things about LLM chatbots is working through language ideas. I can talk about & use examples from English, Polish, Japanese, German, and Ancient Greek and I don’t know where else I could find a conversation partner like that to work through my many silly ideas in polyglot fashion

I can recognize good writing but can't generate it easily. I can arrive at decent prose, but the phase from unstructured thoughts until first draft is 90% of the effort/time. I think I'm not alone. Me: write notes LLM: first draft Me+LLM: update until well-written, well-structured, and in my voice.

Yeah exactly! And I think using them in that way overlaps a lot with how I use them for more complex code; every response is not great, but it's easy to validate the correctness of the response so it's pretty helpful regardless

LLMs also regularly confuse verbosity for clarity or give sidebars too much importance when I ask them to suggest edits - for example, with this response from Claude when I asked it to look at my post about everyuuid.com

I also HATE writing published material as part of a job; I write as myself and that's not what you're supposed to do. I might use ChatGPT for a public job-related blog post specifically to undo my sense of authorship. I'm sure many people have that professional distance from most of their writing

Some of the popular wrappers when ChatGPT first came out seemed like they were mostly around writing. To write emails, blog posts, social media content, writing responses in dating apps, etc.

Recent survey of UK students found a fairly varied range of uses of genAI, more often things like explaining concepts, generating/organising ideas, summarising www.hepi.ac.uk/2025/02/26/h...

I much dislike the future of everyone's output being llm fluff. I followed a popular GitHub repo for a few months and read every issue to become more familiar with the codebase. One of the maintainers used an llm for every response. I hated it so much I stopped following the project.