Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Don't let LLMs write for you. By Justice Mills. Published on March 10, 2026.
Content note. Nothing in this piece is a prank or jumpscare where I smirkingly reveal you've been reading AI prose all along. It's easy to forget this in Roaring, 2026, but Homo sapiens are the original vibus. Long before we adapt our behaviors or formal heuristics, human beings can sniff out something sues. And to most human beings, AI prose is something sues.
If you use AI to write something, people will know. Not everyone, but the people paying attention, who aren't newcomers or distracted or intoxicated. And most of those people will judge you. Heading. The reasons. People may just be squicked out by AI or lawfully compress AI with crypto and assume you're a tech bro or think only uncreative idiots use AI at all.
These are bad objections and I don't endorse them. But when I catch a whiff of LLM smell, I stop reading. I stop reading much faster than if I saw typos, or broken English, or disliked ideology. There are two reasons. First, human writing is evidence of human thinking. If you try writing something you don't understand well, it becomes immediately apparent.
You end up writing a mess, and it stays a mess until you sort out the underlying idea. So when I read clear prose, I assume that I'm reading a refined thought. LLM prose violently breaks this correlation. If some guy tells Claude to help put this idea he has into words, then Claude will write clear prose even if the idea is vague and stupid.
If the guy asks to help find citations and there are no actual good ones, Claude will find random D-tier write-ups and link to them authoritatively. Worst of all, if the guy asks Claude to poke holes in my argument when the argument is sufficiently muddy, Claude will just kind of make up random issues that the guy will hedge against, or, let's be real, have Claude hedge against.
So you end up with a write-up which cites sources, has plenty of caveats, and has no actual core of considered thought.
If you read enough of these, and you start alt-tabbing away real fast when you see structured lists with bold headers, or weird clip parenthetical asides, or splashy contrastive disclaimers every two to three sentences, or any number of other ineffable signs subtler than an em dash.
Is it possible that a 50% AI-generated hunk of text contains a pearl of careful thinking that the poor human author simply didn't have the time or technical skill to express? I suppose. But it ain't worth checking. Second, and closely related, AI pros is a slog.
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Chapter 2: What are the reasons to avoid using LLMs for writing?
You may know me as an editor. In this capacity, I was revising an academic paper's abstract in response to reviewer comments. But I had several papers to work on in the same project, and the owner of that project actively encouraged me to use AI to move fast enough to meet deadlines.
So I gave Claude the paper and the reviewer comments and asked it to come up with a new abstract that would satisfy the reviewers. The result looked good. It's just an abstract, I whispered to myself, face lit eerily in my laptop screen's blue light.
Summary Synthesis I rock back and forth. I could just… But no.
Claude's abstract was a useful reminder of which paper this was, and Claude helpfully catalogued what the review requests were. Still, I rewrote the abstract myself, from scratch. In so doing, I noticed a lot of things I hadn't seen when I was just skimming the AI output. Stuff it included that it didn't really need to. Stafford emphasized that wasn't actually that important.
Did I run my abstract by Claude in turn? Yes. It had two nitpicks, one of which I agreed with and fixed in my own words. Use these tools. You should totally ask Claude to find you sources for a claim, but then you should check those sources like you would check the sources of an eager day one in turn and expect to throw most or all of them away.
You should totally ask Claude to fact-check, but expect it to miss some factual errors and unhelpfully nitpick others. You can even ask Claude to help clarify your thinking. But if you're really just clarifying it, then you won't use its text. Because once your thinking's clear, you can write the text yourself, and you should. This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for Less Wrong.
It was published on March 10, 2026. The original text contained one footnote which was omitted from the narration.
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