When I write technical documentation, here's how I use LLMs:

* If I need to learn something before I write about it, I rely on LLMs heavily to answer questions that I have about other source materials, e.g. to clear up ambiguities.

* I've recently started prompting it to find grammatical and spelling errors.

* And I've prompted it to find technical errors, places where I'm just wrong.

For all the prompting, I additionally tell it to not rewrite anything or offer any prose suggestions. It can keep all that to itself, thank you.

And I verify what it gives back for correctness.

(I'd encourage non-native speakers to use LLMs in much the same way. Don't sacrifice your human voice by letting the AI rewrite your words. Personally, I'd very much rather hear it from you, blemishes and all, than hear it from an AI.)

But if I could step back for a minute:

Why write anything?

If your writing goal is to flood the zone and make as much money as humanly possible from ads, then hell yeah, paperclip the everliving shit out of that.

But if your writing goal is to learn material or share material, then put that LLM on the back burner and don't use it to directly generate your text. It's bad for you, and the results are subpar.

When I'm learning something, I can go through reams of tokens and then, once I understand it, I digest that to single a paragraph about the topic. The paragraph is as concise and as helpful as I can make it. Now, I could just share the prompts that I went through with those pages of back-and-forth with the LLM... but wouldn't you rather just read the concise paragraph that gets the point across?

It's not hard to be better than an AI at writing for humans, so the minimum low bar to aim for is "better than an AI". And we can all get there with a small amount of practice. The real goal is to greatly exceed the LLMs' capabilities for sharing information.

Finally, I think everyone should write a lot. Blogs, morning pages, fiction, technical books, letters, whatever. Especially when it comes to technical content, nothing makes you do your research like putting your ass out in the ether to get flamed by 5 billion people. And teachers the world over know the best way to learn something is to teach it. Pick a topic, research, and write it up more clearly and concisely than anyone else ever has. You'll learn so much, and your readers will, as well. Writing fires up your brain. Don't give that up to an LLM.

The revolt of the reader