I used to think this, but now that I've been trying to use them to help with writing, it turns out they are not necessarily that great on the deeper level. The grammar and the surface style are impeccable, but they often struggle with continuity and carrying on a point or an argument.
Proofread the following text for grammar, punctuation, and typos while
strictly preserving the author's voice, pacing, and intentional stylistic
choices (such as sentence fragments or character dialogue quirks).
Rules:
- Correct objective spelling errors, misused words, and unintended punctuation mistakes.
- Smooth out unintentional syntactic snags without homogenizing unique phrasing.
- Retain all Markdown formatting.
- Return ONLY the corrected text with no intro, summary, or explanations.
Text to edit:
{selection}
The complexity in this command is there for phi4:14b and qwen3:14b which I run locally via ollama. If the text doesn't have any Obsidian callouts or similar, fancy stuff I just use either of those and they do a fantastic job in seconds. For Big AI (e.g. Gemini, GPT-whatevs, Claude) you can literally just tell it, "fix the grammar." No need for the lengthy command.
NOTE: I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL). Occasionally, Big AI (Gemini, specifically) have disagreements about whether a comma is necessary in a particular spot but it's always of no real consequence.
Without a history of diffs created by this method, I don't believe you.
> I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL).
The rules there vary by style guide and are not objective.
LLMs seem like massive overkill for something the red and green squiggles can already accomplish.
The problem is precisely that LLM writing is that exact thing (at least by default), but even more so. Longer-form, more "perfect" in some technical sense, and yet crappier.
and you can always just ask to be concise.
In my personal experience I strongly disagree. Curious what publications you read wherein this is the case.
It is true that modern journalism on the web is trying to get ad impressions. After all, this is how we ended up with clickbait. Sure you still have the Economist and Atlantic (which aren't beyond criticism), but your local county paper is an absolute mess. The content is stretched, meandering, and designed to keep you scrolling through more impressions.
Pardon; the what?
Calling it better than most journalists is extreme (and probably the reason for down votes), but it must certainly be better than the average person.
We're hearing this criticism from the highly educated professional class people who bother to have their own blog or otherwise spend their time talking about technology online. I mean come on.
To most people, the LLM must feel incredibly empowering, like us wearing a mecha suit. Would we always show restraint and only apply our newfound enhanced physical strength in carefully considered situations?
When a piece of writing is full of LLM tells, I find it as offensive as any formulaic writing, except that the LLM style has quickly become pervasive, much more so than any other type of formulaic writing.
I’m not reacting out of some general dislike of LLMs - I use them daily. I’m reacting because I don’t like terrible writing.
The difference being this variant of blogspam is produced with basically zero cost and thus the infection has spread far beyond SEO into every UI surface with textbox. Plus there are now passionate defenders who insist finding their blogspam unpleasant to read is disrespectful or anti-progress somehow.