The social contract of writing

Summary

LLMs are making inroads into just about every industry on the planet, they’re everywhere now. AI for X, AI for Y, if there’s a thing that somebody is willing to pay for, there’s another person looking for a way to use LLMs to do it. But no human activity is becoming as dominated by LLMs as writing. It’s not that I can’t see the attraction of it as an author, especially where you feel a pressure to produce a lot of content. They’re very good at that, volume. I’ve experimented with LLM assisted writing in the past (nowadays I don’t even use them for spell-checking). People use LLMs to assist them in writing on blogs, social media, newspapers, books, and they use them for spell checking, grammar, fact checking, and unfortunately, in way too many cases, to just write the whole thing outright. Once you learn to recognize the idioms and idiosyncrasies of LLM writing, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s everywhere. And it’s exhausting. Even worse, it’s boring. All writing is homogenizing, slowly turning into the same slop. You see the same patterns everywhere, “it’s not x, it’s why”, em-dashes, or why not: “you’re not imagining it, the problem is real”. That last one actually drives me over the wall, I don’t know why, I just can’t stand it. Increasingly everyone is having a strong negative reaction to this mass produced slop. It’s infuriating to invest time into reading something only to realize the author didn’t invest the corresponding amount of time into writing it. What’s interesting is that this is true even where the content itself might actually be fine. Correct, properly researched, it doesn’t matter. This was the first thing I read that I felt like really articulated the problem. Oxide Computers have this wonderful convention of writing long form documents for enabling discussions and establishing conventions, Request for Discussion(s), and many of them are public. RFD 576 deals with the use of LLMs. The part specifically that’s relevant here is section 2.4, LLMs as wr...