I am not personally like philosophically or ethically opposed to having LLMs help or even write text... the issue is that I see so much LLM-written text that is just _bad_, and very hard for me to read or extract meaning out of, especially relative to it's often long length.

People think they are bad writers, but usually LLMs are actually worse (although they are great writers of catchy slogans and phrases, and then put together an article out of them, which I find just exhausting to try to get more than a "vibe" out of).

What you describe sounds like a fairly reasonable approach, but I suspect the parts the person I was replying to were reacting to was areas were you had not been as succesful at reworking it to be your voice. Which are probably also the parts pangram flagged as likely LLM written.

Pangram gives you a handful of free tokens, it would be interesting if you wanted to see what parts are the 20% pangram is flagging as LLM, and reflect on if they went through your process differently. Perhaps they were the parts you didn't spend quite as much time reworking it to be your voice. (I 100% believe you, because I've been running things through pangram a lot lately, and it's actually pretty rare for it to flag mixed content, instead of 100% likely AI or 100% likely human).

There was recently a post on HN that said if you want to avoid this, you really can't use any words at all that are written by the LLM, you can use it for suggesgting structure or points, or reviewing your work in various ways, but if you accept even a single phrase it provides... it's not going to be "reworked into your voice", it's going to be picked up by people (at least those of us who have become sensitive to it) as AI, because it's like, headline-speak.

(I can't find the article now, because I'm trying to quit facebook so can't log in to find my own post of it there, have to stop using that as bookmarks substtitue!)

Of course, that's not welcome advice if what you want AI for is "phrase choice".

I'm just here to say, LLMs are not good at phrase choice either. Although they may be quick at it. I feel like it's asking the reader to do the work of trying to extract meaning from slop that the author didn't have the energy to use to encode it well in the first place. I don't have time to try to read sentences that the writer didn't have time to write, i find myself bailing out quicker and quicker at signs of AI slop buzzword headline-speak.