How to Write with an LLM

In one line

Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.

Opening excerpt

Two simple rules that let LLMs streamline and improve your writing without pasteurizing and jacking it with corn syrup.

It’s tricky to write about writing. It comes across as a brag; you’re implying that you write well. Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t, but there’s for damned sure a quorum of critics on the Internet somewhere that think you suck at it. I’m vain and insecure like everybody else and find writing this piece weirdly unpleasant. But I’m getting over myself and getting this down because this advice is important, hard to argue with, and straightforward.

Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself.

But LLMs are still extraordinarily useful. It’s just you need to use them like a copyeditor rather than a ghostwriter. So, step one of my method: write your piece. Then, step two: feed it to a good model to find flaws.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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