I think if I used AI for the actual writing then, (a) there’d be a lot missing, and (b) I’d rob myself of much of the value, in better understanding, of writing myself.
We’re not all the same so YMMV, but this is what I’ve found from using AI in various ways to see if and how it can help with writing.
The feedback bit is surely more debatable, but I would argue the initial writing and allowing edits are not.
https://antoaenono.com/write/fragments/writing#:~:text=never...
With respect to seeking feedback, my angle is that: even if you do agree with the feedback then what they do. Are you going to take it as is? Are you going to come up with it and phrase it in your own way?
What next? Next, what if there's a bunch more feedback that you agree with and you incorporate it. Then, where do we go from there?
Can you even go back to (b) and make your own edits at this point? I'm not sure and I worry about a slippery slope where you stray too far from your own original form -- so I landed on not seeking feedback either.
note: this all is definitely under progress and as I'm looking at it it's very noisy with all of the formatting... just finally getting my site put together
also not sure about my fish progress bar hah
I tell mine that line editing and formatting are the very last polish.
For audiobooks, I seem to not have as much of a tendency to pause the audio and stop and think, and it’s harder to reread a passage, so it’s a more passive experience.
For online content, there’s not as much of an intention to fully engage with the material. It’s easy to skim or switch to something else.
Thanks for writing that down. It explains in simple terms the difference
Even worse: Facing AI writing, there's a strong suspicion that any concerns or counterpoints you bring won't be actually considered, but rather copypasted into an llm session.
Ironically, that led to a Agile™ consultant-industrial complex that tried to make it a cookie-cutter process again, but we still haven’t escaped the need to break out the IDE and actually put idea into something concrete, and I doubt we ever will.
The writing is downstream of that.
you can dump your thoughts and constraints you can think of, and have it work through untangling, or use it as a summarizing notepad, or yo prototype what you are thinking about in different variations.
its no replacement for pen and paper, but no typed or drawn on tablet picture comes close to a real notebook to scribble on its entirely a thinking tool, as much as a skip-thinking tool
The act of vetting it and finding the failures will increase understanding, but at a cost in speed over doing the research from scratch. (Generating subtly wrong text is often a good way to test understanding, and the output of AI systems is typically a mangled clone of some other well understood system. A very good exercise is building your internal pattern recognition so you can tell what's been mangled, mashed, and served up)
AI is very good at making the mash sound plausible, however, so if you don't look extremely closely, you end up repeating instead of dissecting it. And if you're hoping to learn from the AI how to design a system, you're in trouble.
I used to have a real complicated dilemma on which content exactly to write (& then share), I recently started using handy's TTS and storing it in my scratchpad app within my native language or English and then I paste it into Chatgpt and use its memories to connect with other previous discussions I had.
It helps in saving thoughts which would've otherwise been lost, even provide some new perspectives and get them in a way that I can access them later in more depth.
I think that if I were to now create blogs of these contents. I used to think that it would perhaps be okay to share an blog like thing created by AI if say I spent 10-20 minutes thinking of the rough draft of it, but after reading your comment, I am reflecting on the fact that, atleast once, people should write things themselves no matter which AI thing they use before creating blogs.
As the point of blogs shouldn't be to share unlimited content but rather that it is the specific content where a human effort was placed. Maybe if one still wants, there could be some other blog post which could be written with all the AI blogs content I have created perhaps but still, it should be seperated away from human content.
And there is this fact that as you mention, writing itself forces you to think through ideas and thoughts which are highly relevant. So previously when I used to think that re-writing them would be a waste of time and that AI writes them good enough. I think that writing them still might make a lot of sense as it would be a net benefit if not for anybody else, then for me as it can help me better understand the material myself (even more so than reading/speaking it)
The most typing/writing of myself now occurs in Hackernews comments for me and I do observe that I learn a lot writing them personally.