AI Can't Help You Write Well
We all want to write something worthwhile - but to be honest, that’s hard. There’s this temptation, now, to try and get an LLM to write for us - especially when we’re new to writing.
Sadly, that won’t help. It’ll produce something that isn’t worth reading, because it isn’t you.
Writing can be broken down into four parts:
The first part is getting information and experiences. We do this in countless ways, constantly, throughout our lives. We’re constantly learning and experiencing, and these are pieces of knowledge and experience that we can share - in a written form or through many other mediums.
The second part is pulling all of that knowledge and experience to the forefront of your brain, and putting it into words. It doesn’t matter that they’re good words, only that they bring to the forefront of your mind what you’re trying to say.
The third part is organising this big blob of words into a format that will make sense to other people - including needed context, putting it in an order so that ideas are introduced before they are used, creating a narrative. A lot of the work of communicating happens here, because you are stepping out of your mind and seeing what is missing from the perspective of your reader, your audience.
The final part is editing it. Fixing up the grammar. Correcting the typos. Making sure your voice comes through, that the tone is right, that the words flow and resonate. Adding formatting, maybe illustration - things to bring emphasis.
The further up you go on that list, the less LLMs can help you with the process. LLMs can’t go out and experience the world for you. They can’t learn for you - the best they can do is take what other people have said and done. Perhaps they can help you get your words on the page a bit - they can provide prompts, or a structure to write into - but they certainly can’t read your mind. You have to be able to pull the words out of it.
Even editing - something that you would think LLMs would be good at - is actually something that you will struggle to get a worthwhile result with. You can pipe in a rough draft filled with mistakes, and it will happily output something grammatically perfect. In the process, though, it will have stripped your voice from it, replacing it with random emphasis, ✨ emoji punctuated lists, or whatever other quirks the model has. Overuse of rule of three, relentless positivity, em dashes, etc. etc.
It’s possible to get around that by inputting thousands of words of precise instructions on specific writing errors you want it to fix - but at that point, for a blog post, why not edit it yourself? A spell checker goes a long way. Asking a friend to give you feedback can help a lot, too.
Fundamentally, this isn’t something that’s going to change with time, either. The LLMs might get better at editing, but they’re not going to be experiencing your experiences, reading your mind or empathising with your readers for you. Writing well will always be valuable. Perhaps now, when content-free writing is so prevalent, is the time to start learning to write well.