[mrandish]

I hate slop as much as anyone else and was, until recently, absolute in my zero tolerance of any LLM use in personal posts and correspondence. Now I've adopted a slightly more nuanced view because I sometimes use an LLM when writing but only in a couple very limited, narrowly focused ways. The first is trying to remember a specific turn of phrase I can't recall at the moment (when you get past 50 this happens a bit more often). The other is breaking up overly long sentences, which is a bad writing habit I've struggled with since high school.

I never let an LLM write or rewrite a post, or even a paragraph, for me. I want to write it myself and I want it to be in MY voice. I think I'm a pretty good writer and I like my writing. However, I suspect those who may be less confident in their writing use an LLM to "check" their rough draft but then succumb to the temptation of just pasting the LLM's output because it "sounds better", it's already finished and... writing is hard. This is always a mistake and no one should do it in a forum like HN. It's rude and we'd much rather hear your words and ideas as you express them.

The sad part is this ends up in an all or nothing between "Never use an LLM when writing a post" and "Have LLMs write posts for you."

[kccqzy]

I like my writing too. But I’ve found that the kind of writing I’m most skilled at is memoir-style writing. I don’t actually like my writing when it comes to business proposals for example, so I let LLM rewrite these. Such writing doesn’t really “belong” to me anyways; they belong to my employer. And I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment or craft when writing them.

[mrandish]

I don't have a strong opinion on formal business writing with LLMs because, in my experience, a shocking number of corporate managers are pretty terrible at expressing ideas or conveying information in writing. Frankly, for functional business report writing, in many cases I might find an LLM's rewrite to be more useful than the human written original.

In my experience, most formal business writing fell into two types: 1. Pro forma box-checking that probably didn't need to be written at all (or at least read by me, as a senior leader), and 2. Actually important information or ideas. The majority was Type 1, which I tried to avoid, and if it was Type 2, it was either well-organized and intelligible, or such a mess I'd have my admin schedule a meeting so the author could explain it and answer questions.

But I recently retired so I no longer have to suffer through formal business writing anymore :-)