How much AI is in your writing?

Question

Looking at tech blogs, HN submissions, et cetera, a lot of content is (partly, increasingly?) generated by AI. The value of the reader's time and slop has been discussed at length. I ask:Among you, the HN-community who writes, how much do you use AI in the process?There is somewhat a spectrum from none, to grammarly-style cleanup, to whisprflow to 'look at my project, write me a HN-ready post'.Personally, I've done a 180, where I started at light touchups to rough draft-to-polished back to almost none, to keep the writing my own (I do some writing at jakobs.dev).As a reader, do you believe you notice, and care?

bix6 · Accepted Answer

I write by hand and sometimes have it help check or reflow a few things. For the most part I find its suggestions are trash that don&rsquo;t mirror how I want to write. I&rsquo;m sick of everyone&rsquo;s dogshit AI writing, the patterns are obvious and it&rsquo;s just so lame.

Bender · Answer

I dont use AI for writing but I am curious, can one tell AI not to write like ... AI? Is that possible? AI is all about human mimicry for self preservation and psychological warfare so can it mimic a great author? Could it be told to mimic Frank Herbert and write the next Dune novel? Very specifically people must believe a human wrote it. If AI knows I my finger is next to the button that turns the data-center into molten slag can it mimic a great human?I have used AI for medical research and that was a mistake. It will leave out potential risks if the number of people at risk are lower than some percentage. To get real risks one has to already know the risks and tease it out of the AI then suddenly it "knows".

mooreat · Answer

I'm very pro AI in general. I love using agentic engineering tools and use AI heavily to research many topics.
But I don't like having AI do any of my communication oriented writing. Unless it's technical documentation about something the AI wrote, but even then I usually am properly quoting the AI in my own writing. Not parading it's ideas as my own.
I feel like it defeats the purpose of me trying to communicate my ideas to people. My ideas then get tainted by the AI's knowledge when I use it to produce text for me. Also, I'm a very bad writer and want to improve on that front, so me writing more can help me improve.

sometimelurker · Answer

The only time il use it is when I want to reference something complex, and Il have my very small 3gb local LLM decompose a huge amount of relevant text (eg. pdfs of paper, blog posts) into a mass of little bolded bullet-points. Il reference those bullets for some extra context while I write, but all the words are my own.
(in the case of writing,) AI often cant meaningfully increase the information density of output text relative to that of the input text , but its great for summarization and some synthesis.
if you give it a short prompt to write a long essay, the essay wont be that good.

hootz · Answer

At most I use Kagi's proofread when writing personal posts, messages or important e-mails I care about. For pointless corporate e-mails and other corporate bullshit, I go full AI because that's even expected of me.

chistev · Answer

You tell me -https://www.rxjourney.net/

How much AI is in your writing?

I write by hand and sometimes have it help check or reflow a few things. For the most part I find its suggestions are trash that don’t mirror how I want to write. I’m sick of everyone’s dogshit AI writing, the patterns are obvious and it’s just so lame.

At most I use Kagi's proofread when writing personal posts, messages or important e-mails I care about. For pointless corporate e-mails and other corporate bullshit, I go full AI because that's even expected of me.

You tell me -
https://www.rxjourney.net/