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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Broken record: LLMs are exceptionally useful writing critics if you know how to hold them correctly, but you can't use a single word they suggest to you --- the better the LLM's word choices seem, the more likely the LLM is infecting your voice. Better, by a lot, to prompt the LLM not to suggest any words, but just offer objective critiques.

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I see many Youtubers who are certainly still writing their own scripts, but every once in a while you can tell they absolutely used a Claude correction in one place.

IMO, it's still better to not let an AI critique your writing style at all, only the facts and claims you're making against its context / MCPs. Your own writing style is a reflection of your mind's thought process and, especially on forums like this one, is the only way to imbue your ideas with your personality.

But what if your mind's thought process on a specific example (or in general…) is downright BAD? I still think AI text critique has its place when you're certain that's the case for whatever you've written. Above a certain quality threshold I'm with you on it.

> But what if your mind's thought process on a specific example (or in general…) is downright BAD?

Then maybe you shouldn't be making Youtube videos about it… ?

Idk, AI written information is fine if it's purely informative and enables me to do some task or skill better or quicker. I don't mind reading claude artifacts, for example.

But if I'm trying to be entertained, I don't want to hear some machine generated script or even machine-checked script. It feels very impersonal, like you just want it to be correctly worded and grammatically correct, almost like you're going to be graded on it. The viewer isn't grading your grammar, they want to be entertained and see/hear you put on a performance that is your creative output.

Potentially dumb question, but could you expand on how you use LLMs as writing critics? Do you just ask them to flag bad writing? I'm asking because I don't think i'm skilled in writing.

Not at all a dumb question, and I can indeed expand on it!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070

---

Now there's an idea. LLMs may have taken the em-dash from us, but the em-en dash is unknown to Strunk & White and might be human-exclusive for some time yet.

This arms race leading, somewhat inevitably, to the development of the eminem-dash.

-- - --

----- .---- ----- ----- .---- ----- ----- ----- ....... ----- .---- .---- ----- .---- .---- ----- .---- ....... ----- .---- .---- ----- .---- .---- ----- .----

Hahahaha nice.

...._ .. ...._ ``````‾ ••••••—

The Darude-Sandstorm dash

Technically, in latex (and what other format is there?) an en-dash is `--` and an em-dash is `---`. So that was just an em-dash. A `-` is a hyphen.

Us oldies learnt to type these with multiple dashes automatically, as unicode hadn't been invented yet.

I've taken to using the three-em dash⸻it's very whimsical.

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