AI writing is better than no writing

AI writing is better than no writing | Andrew Wheeler

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AI writing is better than no writing

AI disclosure – this post was entirely written by myself.

I know AI writing is still pretty cringey – so I get that people are quite opposed to it. For people like me though (academics promoting their work, more technical oriented) I would like to proffer a slight defense of (even cringey) AI writing. Having an LLM tool help you write a blog post is better than not writing at all.

I have come to the personal opinion I just want you to disclose when you use AI. I am starting to get peer review requests for academic papers that are clearly LLM written, and they are not obviously worse than the typical (mostly horrid) way academics write papers (they may actually be better to be honest). Blog and social media posts I think are strictly worse to my personal tastes when using LLM writing (across many dimensions, for now anyway). But it is better to write something than nothing if you have something worth saying.

Where this matters for technical folks (and academics) is that your default SEO is awful. Most academic papers are behind paywalls. LLM research tools are not picking up peer reviewed papers. So if you have something worth saying, having LLMs write out a blog post for you is worth it relative to having no writing at all.

For examples of LLM writing I have on this site:

Notes on Valuing the Cost of Crime

The race to the bottom with AI tools

And then my book, Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python, is around 50% AI generated.

None of these examples I would have finished without the help of AI; either entirely writing for the example blog posts, or writing the first draft in the case of the LLM book. (The LLM book is good by the way, you would not be able to tell I generated that first draft at all with Claude.)

My suggestion is to not let AI entirely take the wheel, but to create a detailed outline and have the LLM review your prior writing. Those two things improve posts by a wide margin (in addition to making sure AI is not too verbose – keep those blog posts simple!). And then you still need to take the time to review your own writing (for references you need to check those for hallucinations).

To be clear again, AI writing is better than nothing if you have something actually useful to say to the world. The bigger issue with AI writing are slop merchants just wasting space. That happened before with LLM tools, it is just much easier and more prevalent now. Just own it when you use AI to help you write.

AI writing is better than no writing

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