My highlight link didn’t work but in the second example, this is the particular passage that drove me crazy:
The punchline works precisely because we recognize that slightly sheepish feeling of being reflexively nice to inanimate objects. It transforms our “irrational” politeness into accidental foresight.
The joke hints at an important truth, even if it gets the mechanism wrong: our conversations with current artificial intelligences may not be as consequence-free as they seem.
Thanks for articulating this – it’s genuinely helpful. You’ve pinpointed a section I found particularly difficult to write.
Specifically, the paragraph explaining the comic’s punchline went through maybe ten drafts. I knew why the punchline worked, but kept fumbling the articulation. I ended up in a long back-and-forth with Claude trying to refine the phrasing to be precise and concise, and that sentence is the endpoint. I can see that the process seems to have sanded off the human feel.
As for the “hints at an important truth” line… that phrasing feels generic in retrospect. I suspect you’re right – after the prior paragraph I probably just grabbed the first functional connector I could find (a direct Claude suggestion I didn’t think about too much) just to move the essay forward. It does seem like the type of cliché I was trying to avoid.
Point taken that leveraging LLM assistance without falling into the uncanny valley feel is tricky, and I didn’t quite nail it there. Appreciate the pointer.
My general workflow involves writing the outline and main content myself (this essay actually took several weeks, though I’m hoping to get faster with practice!) and then using LLMs as a grammar/syntax checker, to help with sign-posting and logical flow, or to help rephrase awkward or run-on sentences. Primarily I’m trying to make my writing more information dense and clear.
My highlight link didn’t work but in the second example, this is the particular passage that drove me crazy:
Thanks for articulating this – it’s genuinely helpful. You’ve pinpointed a section I found particularly difficult to write.
Specifically, the paragraph explaining the comic’s punchline went through maybe ten drafts. I knew why the punchline worked, but kept fumbling the articulation. I ended up in a long back-and-forth with Claude trying to refine the phrasing to be precise and concise, and that sentence is the endpoint. I can see that the process seems to have sanded off the human feel.
As for the “hints at an important truth” line… that phrasing feels generic in retrospect. I suspect you’re right – after the prior paragraph I probably just grabbed the first functional connector I could find (a direct Claude suggestion I didn’t think about too much) just to move the essay forward. It does seem like the type of cliché I was trying to avoid.
Point taken that leveraging LLM assistance without falling into the uncanny valley feel is tricky, and I didn’t quite nail it there. Appreciate the pointer.
My general workflow involves writing the outline and main content myself (this essay actually took several weeks, though I’m hoping to get faster with practice!) and then using LLMs as a grammar/syntax checker, to help with sign-posting and logical flow, or to help rephrase awkward or run-on sentences. Primarily I’m trying to make my writing more information dense and clear.