If you’re going to send me the output of some LLM, do me a favour and just send me the prompt instead. Otherwise I’m going to spend as much time reading it as you spent writing it.

The new kind of writer's block

The best way I have found to make sense of why some people are so enthousiastic to shill for AI, is to see AI as yet another product that preys upon people's insecurities. In this case it's maybe the worst insecurity of all: feeling like you're less intelligent than other people.

Taking that insecurity as the through-line, this kind of shilling makes perfect sense IMO. It's essentially a form of self soothing, saying "everyone is or will be using this, it's not just me!".

The only people who would use AI for creative work are those who are unwilling to take the time to become good at it or are incapable of doing so.

If you need an LLM to tell you how to write then you’re a fraud and a hack. It’s a skill, get good or fuck off, if you want to learn then you have to fucking learn, otherwise you’re just a plagiarist who doesn’t know shit.

I've shouted from the rooftops before many times there is nothing creative from AI writing. It just repeats the same terse, sentence structures! AI had never fallen in love, grieved, or inspired before!

to be fair - player piano is a great idea and there were composers who did stuff specifically for it - Nancarrow is the most prominent one. it's a completely different aesthetic and requires not trying to make it seem like anything it is not though.

Pointless sidebar: Westworld (Season 1) uses a player piano as a metaphor for AI.

This is an unpopular opinion, but as someone who builds stuff from scratch, this is the same feeling i get when someone holds up a 3d printed item and goes “i made this”

This made for a nice block list. Thanks!

Some of these fanatics are utterly arrogant greedy narcissists with no redeeming qualities at all.

If she was taking about just a proof read, then I'm okay with it. But I don't believe she is taking about proof reading. AI should be nowhere near the creative process.

I read this as all glazers and I was wondering what this person had against glass installers.

Bruh, NPR had an interview recently with an author who is a fairly big name already. She was preaching the glories of ai. Like how do you fall so hard‽

It's the same thing in game development. Sure AI can actually use most modern game engines now and make an ok-ish game. It's not exactly inspired and without further human touches it's not going to be a saleable product.

Thing is that you can't even use it as a starting point because the code is such a mess that is impossible to use it as a baseline.

Somehow AI has replaced stack overflow as the even more useless advice forum. At least SO had amusingly rude comments.

Indeed, classic. AI isn't good enough for THEIR domain, their expertise, but for stuff they know NOTHING about it's somehow OK. Total lack of introspection and Dunning-Kruger effect.

It's like sitting at one of those old player pianos you'd put the rolled paper in and it would play the sing itself, claiming you are a modern Mozart. Despite not creating the piano, music roll, or ever doing anything special besides putting the roll in.

I don't care. This isn't Reddit. I am not on this planet to spend my time complaining about others.

I am here to have fun, and as an artist. I'd rather just enjoy my own journey than worry about somebody else's.

I’ve been running the Qwen 3.6 MoE model on my gaming laptop and have been using it to critique screenplays lately. It can’t write worth a shit, but it sure can tell me what’s wrong with my own writing.

It pointed out things like this dialog is too wordy and it ruins the joke, this story beat feels “unearned”, this character feels like a “vehicle for jokes”, this line is an “exposition dump”, etc. When I ask it for suggestions on how to fix the problems it points out, its suggestions are all stupid, but when I fix the problems myself, it no longer flags them in follow-up critiques in a new chat session.

Qwen has obviously been trained on a lot of screenplays and writing how-to books. For example, I changed the character names in a classic sitcom script, removed the series and episode title, and it recognized the writing style of the series and then even told me what episode it was. It also gives me the same advice that screenwriting books I’ve read preach, except it can point out specific cases where said principles are not being applied.

It would be better to have a human critic, of course, but finding a human who is skilled at writing and who will take the time to critique your work can be difficult. Your friends also may not give you honest feedback. Qwen will, though. It’s not sycophantic at all from what I’ve seen, and in fact, it ripped my passion project to shreds. After I fixed all the problems it found, though, it ended up being a much better piece of writing, IMO.

I think using a LLM as a tool to improve your own work instead of as a slop generator is the right way to go. I also feel better about running them on my own hardware and using about the same amount of power I’d use if playing a game instead while also retaining control of my data.

Couldn't find one where it doesn't call OP a phony, but didn't look too hard.

was that woman olga tokarczuk?

i dont want to use AI to write cause it trains on anything and it may include some copyrighted elements.

I hate AI just like any normal person should but LLMs are reformulation and bibliographical research tool. If one field could use it right, it is the writing industry.

That doesn't mean it will write for you, of course.