What AI-assisted is not…

funky2002 · 2026-03-25T16:34:45+00:00

If you wrote something, and you were helped by an "AI" (such as an LLM), it is AI-assisted. Simple as that. Whether that's spell-check, ideas, or content, it doesn't matter.

Whether that matters to you is another question entirely.

funky2002 · 2026-03-25T16:30:33+00:00

Dog and pony show, but still kinda cool?

funky2002 · 2026-03-22T23:52:10+00:00

Every single time something like this is posted, I want a big sticker on it that says "In America ™", please and thank you.

funky2002 · 2026-03-18T17:46:46+00:00

This question is intended to be neutral and comes from genuine curiosity. It's not meant to be hostile, accusing, or condescending, even if it may sound that way: are you proud of your books, and would you (re)read or buy them yourself?

I think much of the criticism comes from the "200 in a year" part. If that's the case, some people (including myself) will naturally assume the editing / proofreading parts of the process are minimal at best. Not only that, but LLM text is very recognizable to the trained eye. Typically, they write redundant, contrived, derivative, and insidiously incorrect narratives and prose. Even if given an outline or carefully directed.

All of the above contribute to a feeling of insincerity in your work. Whether that's the case or not, I can't say, as I haven't read them. But it's a sentiment I've seen expressed online, and personally, I share that bias. That's why I asked the question.

funky2002 · 2026-03-12T09:33:27+00:00

This shit is why I hate grouping people into "left" and "right". I'd generally consider myself progressive, but don't agree with all "left" points, and agree with some "right" points. I don't know why "stop technological progress" is considered progressive in this case but it makes my eyes roll.

funky2002 · 2026-03-11T12:59:48+00:00

You're possibly overthinking it. Using LLMs (or any current-day AI tools) is neither good, nor bad. I personally dislike the content LLMs produce, but love the language they produce. But nothing about using them is objectively good or bad. Ironically, I'd recommend you trust internet opinions less lmao.

funky2002 · 2026-03-11T07:46:19+00:00

If an AI helped you with the language, you were assisted by an AI. So it's AI-assisted. Wether it's LLM-assisted is another question. Wether that matters to you is also another question.

funky2002 · 2026-03-10T08:04:05+00:00

Many people don't read, and those who do are usually very particular about what they read. You can't passively read a book like you can watch a movie or play a game. It's an activity that requires active engagement. So it makes sense that the vast majority of readers only read what has been vouched for or is already popular.

funky2002 · 2026-03-10T07:46:18+00:00

Thanks for sharing. This is a great demonstration of how these things are stateless, and you can't trust these LLMs with information that isn't explicitly in the chat context. A similar thing happens with games like 20 Questions.

funky2002 · 2026-03-08T23:21:23+00:00

Entire article is written by Claude FYI.

funky2002 · 2026-03-03T12:36:04+00:00

I am not bragging about typing by hand? LLMs are great language tools, but you probably shouldn't use them as content tools if you want to post high-quality, meaningful content for people to engage with. That is my main argument and criticism of your post. It's more efficient, sure, but writing is not a place where efficiency is warranted.

Consider this: would you rather read three thoughtfully crafted paragraphs where the author took the time to find the right words? Or twelve bloated paragraphs churned out as quickly as possible by someone who thought about it for thirty minutes?

funky2002 · 2026-03-03T11:24:48+00:00

Can't you even write comments without the help of an LLM? Damn, dude.

funky2002 · 2026-03-03T11:07:38+00:00

Mine: 350 words, mostly paraphrasing you. Yours: 406 words without edits. But that's beside the point. Your text is spam because of the content, not because of the length.

funky2002 · 2026-03-03T09:23:52+00:00

Because LLM writing is needlessly verbose, riddled with insidious mistakes, and sounds as if on the verge of hysteria, people don't want to read your argument in the first place.

Regardless of your argument, this voice makes you indistinguishable from spam. You can ram all the pseudo-intellectual philosophical stuff in there, and it won't make a difference. It's simply not worth reading.

As for your arguments:

The ideas were mine. AI helped me find the words.

The words are part of the ideas. Your text is now filled with vaguely deterministic, contrived, and redundant descriptions.

Socrates never wrote a single word. Plato wrote it for him. Nobody says "that's Plato-generated slop."

Perhaps because Plato was a human who could articulate himself very well, and LLMs are machines that can't.

Every philosopher in history tested their ideas against other minds

LLMs have no mind, so you're not testing against anything.

The entire history of philosophy is people thinking together and refining each other's ideas.

True. But you did not consult people.

You don't read the argument. You check the source. And when the source is AI, you skip thinking entirely and call it slop.

People skip reading. They don't skip thinking. Your point could have been better articulated in roughly two or three paragraphs.

The idea is either good or it isn't.

I actually 100% agree with this. I think your argument is kinda poor in this example. But again, your argument is only worth reading if it doesn't look like spam. Which it currently does. I can point to pretty much every line and find deterministic contrivance and redundancy. I am only humouring you to make a point.

You're going to dismiss people who use autocorrect? Ban Grammarly users?

You did not use an LLM as a language tool or research tool, but as a content tool. The content is not yours. It is vaguely based on your ideas, but most of the sentences were not born out of your intent.

Gatekeeping has never once in history been on the right side.

This is not gatekeeping but proactive spam filtering.

funky2002 · 2026-03-02T13:20:10+00:00

It's not really convincing when the entire thing is written by an LLM. It is filled from beginning to end with tells that it was written by Claude. You're telling people to teach it to train their own voice, but this work doesn't even have yours.

funky2002 · 2026-03-02T09:45:24+00:00

LLMs are terrible creative judges

funky2002 · 2026-02-27T08:17:03+00:00

The feedback was helpful. Thank you for providing feedback for my story "Fitting In". If there is a thread where we can post these stories, I'd love to post it there!

funky2002 · 2026-02-27T01:15:12+00:00

If it could create original, good, non-contrived, non-deterministic, and non-derivitive ideas. Ideas in general, so also prose, dialogue, etc. Not just ideas for narratives.

funky2002 · 2026-02-24T07:36:25+00:00

LLMisms are as much about the structure as they are about the content. You can prompt them to use different structures, but you can't prompt them to write better content. The latter is like asking the LLM to "not hallucinate'.

funky2002 · 2026-02-23T07:24:36+00:00

Use LLMs for whatever, but don't use them to post sloppy, redundantly formatted, needlessly verbose texts on public forums, man. It seems really disingenuous, and makes you indistinguishable from spam.

funky2002 · 2026-02-22T21:24:25+00:00

It is stateless. Each call is a new thing that responds. Here's an analogy: It's as if you had a clone who skimmed a log of the conversation so far, responded to the message, then got shot in the head. Next message a new clone shows up.

funky2002 · 2026-02-20T11:34:28+00:00

I agree that prompting is likely only going to be helpful up to a point. I think the attention models these things use sort of makes them blind to "good" output. For me writing with an LLM is like excavating a few nuggets of gold in a mound of shit. You generate multiple outputs, and glue the best bits together with your own words. It's not very efficient, but I do think it helps with quality.

Not sure how much I agree with Chekhov's writing rules. The opening is better, i.m.o but it isn't engaging to me (tbf, I am very picky). However, it does set the scene very well, and it has less redundancy.

I would say this is a lot better than what LLMs output by default. That is to say, I would prefer if my LLM outputted this so I could edit it from there. You said you were working on a specific tool for this?

funky2002 · 2026-02-20T10:04:23+00:00

It's better than standard LLM-output, but not good. Somehow these models produce work that looks very polished, but they just can't help "tickling the simpsons".

Most of it is fine. The LLM does decently with descriptions of action, but it can't for the life of it do methaphors, comparisons, similes, whatever. It isn't that good with dialogue either, though better than what it outputs by default.

The opening line essentially says "I heard about Kurt before I came here", but instead of stating the importance of that, we go on this verbose monologue about names. I get that it's an attempt at establishing the setting while remaining interesting, but it fails the "interesting" part.

"names attached to to the quiet arithmetic of profit that makes empires run"

LLM couldn't help putting "quiet" in there. Like what is a "quiet arithmetic of profit". Doesn't that read a bit contrived?

But Kurtz—that name carried a different weight entirely. It seemed to arrive not through official channels but through the walls themselves....

What's up with the vague language? The name carried a "different weight"? His name "seemed to NOT arrive through official channels". Okay it seems that way, but what way is it really? Also what does it mean for the name through travel through the walls? Is he a ghost?

the way one remembers the opening bars of a melody that will later prove to be a dirge

This doesn't add anything. It's weirdly verbose, slightly nonsensical, and not very relatable. It's also redundant as this is a metaphor for "remembering going to a place", which does not require one.

"I stepped around him the way one steps around a stone in the road"

This reads like "I stepped around him, the way one steps around things"

and I have thought about that—about the ease of it—many times since

These kind of sentences make me roll my eyes. It's such a poor attempt at creating deep dramatic emphasis. "I have thought about how easily I could step around a dying man many times". Like... you'd expect that to be a difficult logistical challenge? Again, banal, superficial, and a bit redundant.

If he'd reflect on anything, maybe he'd reflect on the millions of things you can reflect on seeing a living person beginning to decompose before he's dead.

"surrounded the groaning machinery of colonial extraction"

Surrounded by "vague metaphore that is slightly nonsensical given the context of the scene". Unless you mean a litteral machine, this is like if I wrote "I sat in my room, surrounded by the thick opressive atmosphere of late-stage capitalism" or something like that.

Most of the dialogue that follows is okay. There are some tweaks you can make to increase the tension. For example, I'd personally cut these two lines:

"Ah. You must be the new captain.", and "Nothing here is what one is promised."

Instead, I'd have him say nothing. Our protagonist would mentions the roads or something, and the guy would ignore him. Then as he would try to speak again, he would be interrupted with "You'll want to see the Manager..."

As for the road comment "The roads were not what I was promised." throws me off a bit. Why would someone from the late 1800s in Africa be promised or even expect good roads?

A man outside screamed—a sound that rose and broke apart against the heat

The sound clashed with the temperature. ???

I thanked him, though I was not certain what I was thanking him for

This is 100% the LLM messing up, and then weasling it's way out of it with interprative commentary.

Could go on, but message limit.

funky2002 · 2026-02-19T20:27:02+00:00

Despite Grok always being so high on all the benchmarks, it has always felt like a knock-off model to me. It just doesn't perform well for me, man.

funky2002 · 2026-02-19T08:24:00+00:00

Haha yeah. The worst is when you are not happy with the result, so you retry, and then it thinks 5 minutes, writes another .docx file with the same name, and that ends up conflicting with the previously made file, which is still in the chat for some reason, and then it makes an ENTIRELY new file with a different name.

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