Especially since the lack of examples of genuinely good writing would have made it easy to pattern-match me to the kinds of people who get enthused about LLM writing due to sycophancy and then fail to notice how bad it is.
I mean, why wouldn’t people think that? You spend a while describing your setup and work as purely a hobby to cope with depression and about pleasure. Then to describe the results of this intensive many-months-long work with extreme prompt engineering, you describe most of it as being unpublishable trash—not fit for even a quick throwaway blog post:
I have mostly been writing for my own pleasure. The things I’ve been writing have been quite idiosyncratic to my interests and preferences, and I don’t expect many people to necessarily appreciate them. That said, I do have at least one story that I’ve been starting to feel has enough literary merit that I might want to share it more widely someday. I’ve been editing it as I write, but for now, that’s out of a pure love of the craft—I just enjoy working on it for its own sake, regardless of whether I’ll ever publish it.
Nor do any of your examples particularly change the reader’s mind.
You also don’t establish any particular bona fides for you having any literary talent or taste, and you spend time describing how you are a bad writer:
It used to be that I really liked writing fiction, but couldn’t write longer stories myself. I’d manage a couple of scenes and then just run out of ideas, or feel like my characters didn’t come properly alive. My style of writing tends to involve immersing myself in the head of one character and writing from their perspective. This has the problem that it makes it hard to jump into the heads of the other characters at the same time, so they end up flat and lifeless. This problem can be avoided if I have a co-writer. They write one character, I write another, and then we have those characters interact. I also love the interplay of ideas when writing with somebody—I introduce an element into the story and see how the other person builds on it, and then they introduce an element of their own and I build on it. It’s amazingly fun to come up with something and see what someone else does with it...For me, co-writing works off momentum. It takes some investment to drop into that character headspace, and once I’m there, I don’t want to leave. I’ve had several brief attempts at co-writing together with someone that ended because one of us couldn’t commit enough time and energy to make it work. Or worse, it did work and I got obsessed with it, but then my partner couldn’t invest a corresponding amount of time into it and the collaboration sputtered away just as I’d gotten excited about it.
If people write it off as a lengthy description of one person’s masturbatory LLM use generating midbrow (at best) fiction of no value to anyone else, they are only taking away what you seemed to want them to take away. Why should anyone read the post in full?
And why argue with you about it? Certainly I do not enjoy the many comments I have been leaving all other the Internet (not just LW) pointing out LLM confabulations, or blatant tells of ChatGPT use, only to be greeted by downvotes, mockery, lies, denial, or long-drawn-out paltering before finally acknowledging that yeah I was right all along, and that’s the easiest case for arguing with LLM-corrupted users (a mere factual matter of ‘did ChatGPT write this?’).
I mean, why wouldn’t people think that? You spend a while describing your setup and work as purely a hobby to cope with depression and about pleasure. Then to describe the results of this intensive many-months-long work with extreme prompt engineering, you describe most of it as being unpublishable trash—not fit for even a quick throwaway blog post:
Nor do any of your examples particularly change the reader’s mind.
You also don’t establish any particular bona fides for you having any literary talent or taste, and you spend time describing how you are a bad writer:
If people write it off as a lengthy description of one person’s masturbatory LLM use generating midbrow (at best) fiction of no value to anyone else, they are only taking away what you seemed to want them to take away. Why should anyone read the post in full?
And why argue with you about it? Certainly I do not enjoy the many comments I have been leaving all other the Internet (not just LW) pointing out LLM confabulations, or blatant tells of ChatGPT use, only to be greeted by downvotes, mockery, lies, denial, or long-drawn-out paltering before finally acknowledging that yeah I was right all along, and that’s the easiest case for arguing with LLM-corrupted users (a mere factual matter of ‘did ChatGPT write this?’).
That’s fair and very useful, thanks!