[jdietrich]

As a professional writer, the author of this post is likely a better writer than 99.99% of the population. A quick skim of his blog suggests that he's comfortably more intelligent than 99% of people. I think it's totally unsurprising that he isn't fully satisfied with the output of LLMs; what is remarkable is that someone in that position still finds plenty of reasons to use them.

Now consider someone further down the scale - someone at the 75th, 50th or 25th percentile. The output of an LLM very quickly goes from "much worse than what I could produce" to "as good as anything I could produce" to "immeasurably better than anything I could hope to ever produce".

[nerevarthelame]

I'm worried that an increasing number of people are relying on LLMs for things as fundamental to daily life as expressing themselves verbally or critical thinking.

Perhaps LLMs can move someone's results from the 25th percentile to the 50th for a single task. (Although there's probably a much more nuanced discussion to be had about that: people with poor writing skills can still have unique, valuable, and interesting perspectives that get destroyed in the median-ization of current LLM output.) But after a couple years of using LLMs regularly, I fear that whatever actual talent they have will atrophy below their starting point.

[kaliszad]

The author is a great guy and indeed quite smart and meticulous in areas he cares about deeply. He is a published author with a reasonably popular book considering the market size: https://www.melvil.cz/kniha-jak-sbalit-zenu-20/ he has edited probably more books than he would like to admit as well. It's not surprising he is able to write a good article.

However good writing is a skill you can get good at with enough practice. Read a lot, write a lot of garbage, consult more experienced writers and eventually you will write readable articles soon. Do 10-100x more of that and you will be pretty great. The rest is some kind skill and experience in many other fields than writing which will inform how to write even better. Some of it is intelligence, luck, great mentors and perhaps something we call talent even. As with most things you can get far just by working diligently a lot.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Now consider someone further down the scale - someone at the 75th, 50th or 25th percentile. The output of an LLM very quickly goes from "much worse than what I could produce" to "as good as anything I could produce" to "immeasurably better than anything I could hope to ever produce""

That does, to my mind, explain all the vengeful "haw haw, you're all going to get left behind" comments from some LLM proponents. They actually do get benefit from LLMs, unlike the highest part of the scale who are overrepresented on HN, without realizing what that implies and they think they can overtake the highest part of the scale by using them. Well, we'll see.

[antegamisou]

Idk, LLM writing style somehow almost always ends up sounding like an insufferable smartass Redditor spiel. Maybe it's only appealing to the respective audience.