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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Something I found interesting about reading this thread is that it made me wonder how many people think of ChatGPT as primarily a tool for writing things for you I use ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini possibly 100+ times a day and NONE of those uses are to produce writing that I then share with other people

Dara Lind@daralind.bsky.social

Maybe it will help a _little_ if I and others like me start saying publicly for the record that we just don’t use ChatGPT. Writing can be really hard — organizing a piece of writing can be especially hard — but I don’t use ChatGPT. If you read my stuff you’re reading something an LLM can’t do.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I wonder if I'm an outlier in this? Are most ChatGPT users leaning on it more for writing on their behalf? Aside from writing code and being a thesaurus I see it mainly as a curiosity engine - a tool for helping explore a weird, blurry, occasionally misleading but absolutely vast pool of knowledge

nolen
@itseieio.bsky.social

I regularly feed it my technical blogs before publishing and ask it to highlight sections that are unclear. It's ~ok at that. And similarly if I'm writing about a new topic I might show it an explanation I've written to see if it thinks I'm wrong but I can't imagine shipping LLM-written text!

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Yeah I like throwing things at it occasionally to check if the arguments I'm making have any glaring holes I've missed!

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nolen
@itseieio.bsky.social

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