How not to write like a bot
The rise of large language models which can convincingly reproduce human writing has made me notice something. I now catch myself “writing like an LLM” more often.
It’s a habit I’ve picked up over the years, and which I am now consciously trying to discard. I don’t write fiction (these days), so my writing is either technical documentation at work, or writing for this blog where I’m mainly trying to explain and communicate my thoughts. In both contexts, I value precision, concision, and clarity.
This great Wikipedia article describes some of the hallmarks of current LLM outputs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
For example,
- “AI writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter”
- “AIs often introduce their own interpretation, analysis, and opinions in their writing, even when they are asked to write neutrally”
- “AI chatbots tend to attribute opinions or claims to some vague authority—a practice called weasel wording—while citing only one or two sources which may or may not actually express such view”
I expect that LLMs have these tendencies through some combination of
- not being capable of the understanding required to communicate precisely,
- not being trained to communicate precisely,
- or just not caring to.
The thing is, it’s really easy to produce these same problems as a human when you aren’t paying careful attention to what you are writing.
Sometimes, I can enter a state of “flow” where I am channeling a style of writing more than I am actually communicating specific information. I liken this to Daniel Kahneman’s “system 1” thinking: the fast, intuitive, instinctive way we can act without seeming to think at all. When I notice myself doing this, I now inadvertently think of myself as having been “writing like an LLM”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking%2C_Fast_and_Slow
Really good writing, I think, has more in common with Kahneman’s “system 2”: the slower, painstaking, attentive approach. At least, good editing should be more like that, and editing is an important part of good writing.
I don’t want to deny the productivity of the flow state. But it’s important to then go back and notice the things that need revision.