Writing with AI: What's the Best Approach?

To me, AI writing always results in this:

They always look nice at first sight, but over time, they look all the same: complex, unnatural, and busy. Same as DALL-E images.

And if it’s read by a human, it should also be written by a human. Nothing worse than having to read through a stack of elaborated text that has been generated on a small prompt. Naval elaborated it best at the The Differences between Writing and Coding

Based on the The Differences between Writing and Coding that Naval Ravikant shared, writing is consumed by human beings, and they discuss, that I’d rather Read the Prompt, why would I need to read your fleshed-out article by AI, and not the lean prompt with all the insights? That’s what Naval asked Garry Tan, and they didn’t have an answer.

It’s like the below meme, AI making you Exhausted both on the creation time, as it never ends, people have more work than ever, but also on the reading side, as you need to read everyone’s bloated AI-written stuff, rather than just the prompt.

Same as we do in programming: sharing AGENTS.md or Agentic Skills so others can use that insight too, rather than sharing 10 different solutions. Obviously, as explained in the difference between writing in programming, it’s not the same as a computer consumes programming, and if you solve a problem, why not generate the app, the solution, and share that? We can’t do that in writing.

What if we have two kinds of writing:

1. The elaborated but bloated (AI-enriched) one - like what Garry Tan is doing on Twitter or articles as he says
2. Or the raw prompt, with all the ideas and insights lean and easy to read (not the solutions, maybe?). Very much like the philosophy of I’d rather Read the Prompt.

And as I argue in Manual Writing and Will AI replace Humans, the second point has character, a soul and human behind, no AI model will ever have.

I was wondering if AI should suggest to me writings - a question asked by Euwyn Goh . It might for brainstorming. I don’t want AI to write my sentences, but it could help me brainstorm.

Usually, the way I work is: first, I do brainstorming, maybe some research on what happened in history. In that phase, AI might help. But also, most often when I ask what I should add to my articles, AI says to add “real-world examples”. So, most of the time it’s not that creative. And the worst part, after using AI, I usually haven’t done my work, and I’m more exhausted than when I just write it 🤐.

What I used it for just recently, though, was to go through my notes, list MY notes, and add them to the chapter of my book (all in markdown, which’s why it works well). What’s nice is that you provide a way to train my own data for that AI using a local model. At least that’s what I’m trying a little at obsidian-note-taking-assistant with local first Second Brain RAG for any Obsidian Vault (works with any Markdown). Works with DuckDB. Also includes a web-app, see the blog article at Building an Obsidian RAG with DuckDB. Or more examples at Second Brain Assistant with Obsidian (NoteGPT).

Also, I pondered on the question on Should I Change My Writing because of AI?

• Byword
• ChatGPT
• LEX by Dan Shipper
• Claude AI with Claude 3.5 being much better than ChatGPT 4.0
• Spiral by Dan Shipper and Every (Writing Tool) ^114b88
• River Docs: The AI Document Editor
• Wordsmith by Euwyn Goh

See also Use Cases of AI Writing (ChatGPT, Lex, etc.) and Creative Prompt Engineering.

To me still the way to go, if it’s consumed by a human being, to writing manually.

• Course with Dan Shipper: AI writing gets a bad rap.
• Plagiarism: Check if AI Written: Tools to Check Plagiarism and AI-Generated.
• Counter Arguments to write with AI:
  • Technical writing is too important to leave to language models
  • Will AI replace Humans

Origin: AOMW Course- The Art of Modern Writing (Foster.co), AI Writing with Dan Shipper - YouTube
References: ChatGPT, Creative Prompt Engineering , My Services and Target Audience (SSP Data),Brainstorming Ideas for Earning Money - Book, SSP Data