[bluepeter]

Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours) has totally devolved into "prompt-ese." Much like days of yore where we all approached Google searches with acrobatic language knowing how to specifically get something done.

Now? I am pushing so much of my writing into prompts into AI where I know the AI will understand me even with lots of typos and run-on sentences... Is that a bad thing? A good thing? I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words, and the precision and grammar is mostly irrelevant. But I am able to insert nuances and sidetracks that ARE passing vital context to AI but may be lost on people. Or at least pre-prompt-writing people.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> Nowadays my writing (and maybe all of ours)

No. Don't pretend your taking shortcuts is less questionable because everyone else is doing it too. We're not. Own it yourself, don't get me involved.

> I am able to be so much more effective by sheer volume of words

If you think value comes from volume of words you really need to understand writing better.

[bluepeter]

Ok, but 3 generations ago, shorthand was a core skill that any competent professional could read and extract MORE value from than laboriously typeset prose. Something similar is probably happening now with prompt-ese and human-to-human (vs just AI) writing.

[qaadika]

> Nowadays my writing [] has totally devolved into "prompt-ese."

I've noticed this myself. Even in my Obsidian vault, which only I read and write in. I think it's a development into writing more imperatively, instinctually. Thinking more in instructions and commands than the speaking and writing habits I've developed organically over my life. Or just "talking to the computer" in plain English, after having to convert my thoughts to code anytime I want to make it do something.

I've been thinking about the role of "director" in media as an analogy to writing with LLMs. I'm working right now on an "essay," that I'm not sure I'll share with anyone, even family (who is my first audience). Right now, under the Authorship section, I wrote "Conceived, directed, and edited by Qaadika. Drafted by Claude", with a few sentences noting that I take responsibility for the content, and that the arguments, structure, audience, and editorial judgments are mine.

I had a unique idea and started with a single sentence prompt, and kept going from there until I realized it should be an essay. So the ideas in it are mine. The thesis is mine. I'm going back and forth with the LLM section by section. Some prompts are a sentence. Some are eight paragraphs. I can read the output and see exactly what was mine and what the LLM added. But my readers won't. They'll just see "Author: Qaadika" and presume every single word was mine. Or they'll sniff out the LLM-ness and stop reading.

I can make a film and call myself director without ever being seen in it. Is is the same if I direct the composition of words without ever writing any of the prose myself? Presuming I've written enough in prompts that it's identifiably unique from cheaper prompts and "LLM, fill in the blank".

We credit Steven Spielberg with E.T. But he didn't write the screenplay. He probably had comments on it, though. He didn't operate the camera. But he probably told the operators where to put it. He didn't act in it. But he probably told the actors where to stand and where to move and how to be. He didn't write the music. But he probably had a sense of when and where to place it in the audio. And he didn't spend every moment in the cutting room, placing every frame just so.

But his name is at the top. He must have done something, even if I can't point to anything specific. The "Vibe" of the film is Spielberg, but it's also the result of hundreds of minds, most of whole aren't named until the end of the film, and probably never read by most viewers.

His contribution to the film was instructions. Do this, don't do that. Let's move this scene to here. This shot would be better from this angle. The musical swell should be on this shot; cut it longer to fit.

So where, exactly, is "Spielberg" in E.T.? What can we objective credit him with, aside from the finished product: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Coming June 1982?

[throw4847285]

Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.

I think comparing your telling an LLM what to do and Steven Spielberg directing a movie just shows a total lack of understanding of how movies are made, and also inflates your own sense of your self.

[qaadika]

> Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.

That's all meta. Trivia. Decisions he made or feedback he gave, that while influencing the final product cannot be observed in the final product (e.g. show me the actual Spielberg-drawn storyboard in the film; It doesn't exist, because the storyboard turned into a sequence of shots made by the cinematographer, instructing the camerawoman to point the camera at the actors lit by the gaffers, or into a work breakdown strucutre then followed by the SFX team painstakingly drawing it frame by frame). No one but Spielberg could say "That part was me, this part was Kahn's." I can't find any of that out just by watching the movie. When I engage with a piece of media, I presume the author is dead. What is in the media is canon, and what's not in it isn't. The behind the scenes, or the director's biography, or the interviews aren't part of the art. Art shouldn't rely on "Oh it's good, or even better than you thought it was once you know this cool fact or that wild story from production."

Star Wars isn't good only because George Lucas was a genius, or because they spent a lot of time on the models and tried a cool new text intro sequence, or because of any of the other novel effects. Lots of movies spend a lot of time in production, with a lot of experts and a lot of novel ideas, and still fail. Star Wars is good because the finished movie is good. We credit Star Wars generally as being George Lucas' brainchild, but if you know the backstory, it's only good because he had good editors to reign him in. But that's meta. Nobody knew that in 1977. They just knew they enjoyed the movie and it said "written and directed by George Lucas."

When I watch the movie I don't see the storyboard, or the redlines in the screenplay, or the casting notes, or the conversations and discussions with Kahn. All I know from the movie is the credits, and the credits don't say "Written by Melissa Mathison (with close collaboration by Spielberg based on his childhood experience)". Those are, from a lay viewer's POV, 'facts not in evidence.'

E.T. was a single example. I'm comfortable claiming my argument applies to all directors of all films, and all forms of art that are created by more than one person. Another example: "Over The Edge" and "Off The Wall", two books about deaths in US national parks. They each have two authors. Only one author co-wrote both of them. To whom do I credit my love for those books? Only to Ghiglieri, since I can see the consistent tone between them? That would be unfair to Myers and Farabee. Only to Myers and Farabee, because they're the park rangers that witnessed a number of the emergencies and deaths? That would be unfair to Ghiglieri. What about the editors, who surely worked hard to make books that are basically a list of stories about death interesting as a cohesive narrative. My only option is to credit all the authors, and everyone else involved, equally, and not try to break down paragraphs between "this author wrote this one, and that author wrote that one." They didn't distinguish, so I can't either. [1]

I'm all over my essay. I drafted and organized the original outline. I've made substantial changes to the order of paragraphs and what and how the arguments are built and developed based on my personal experiences. I am the final say for whose quotes are included and which ones are cut. My relationship with myself is famously collaborative (famous among my family and friends).

None of that matters to the reader. Whether I wrote it myself or with a friend, or used a ghostwriter, or used an LLM, the audience is going to credit or blame it on the name at the top. My papers in college weren't graded based on whether I spent 300 hours on them and revised them 20 times, or whether it was I or my classmate who coined that pithy line I then used throughout, or because I used niche knowledge about the subject I knew before taking the class. That's trivia. They were graded on the final single copy I submitted. I got once chance.

The only difference between an essay of mine being written by a ghostwriter I hired and an LLM is that the LLM output is always going to sound like an LLM. They are identical in that neither of them are "me". The ghostwriter will sound either like the ghostwriter or like the ghostwriter trying to write like me. But whether I hired a ghostwriter and published their work under my name, or if I used an LLM and the audience didn't notice, at the end of the day they'll credit or blame me entirely, because my name is at the top, no different as if I'd written the entire thing from scratch. I have no excuses except for the final product.

For this essay specifically, If I ever did release it or publish it, it would be under my real name. Firstly because I've never liked being "anonymous" online (I feel I never act or write like myself unless I'm speaking under my own name; opposite of most in my experience), and second because I would want the reader to know that there's a human they can credit or blame for it. I guess for me that's the tradeoff. When anonymous I won't use LLMs, because my ethos comes from being (and sounding) like a human being who merely doesn't want to share their name. Under my real name, however, I feel more comfortable saying "directed and edited by [real name], drafted by [llm]," because then the reader can decide if the ethos associated with my real name and affilations is strong enough to justify reading a logos and pathos that the human freely admits is not entirely from their own fleshy brain.

[1] They do, actually, at times. When one of the authors was directly involved in one of the stories and is recounting their personal experience, they will write "I (Myers)..." or "I (Farabee).." Aside from that they do not say who wrote what, or who influenced who.