Science fiction writer John Scalzi: It's easier to write than it is to let a Large Language Model barf something out and

[highplainsdem]

then spend the same amount of time editing as you would have simply writing it in the first place, and still have it be worse than what you would have done on your own

It's easier to write than it is to let a Large Language Model barf something out and then spend the same amount of time editing as you would have simply writing it in the first place, and still have it be worse than what you would have done on your own

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) 2025-05-15T19:17:03.078Z

You should read the replies there, too.

[Alliepoo]

1. I like him.

I follow him on BlueSky.

[electric_blue68]

12. I liked his Locked In book, and i see he's hot 2 more in that universe. Collapsing Empire sounds gokd, too.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Vought and Miller ran tRump 1.0 through an LLM but didn't bother editing the result. Hence tRump 2.0. . . .nt

[erronis]

6. Not a hallucination, a nightmare.

[SheltieLover]

3. Kick

[patphil]

4. I prefer to call AI artificial idiocy.

It has it's place, but not as a creative tool. The problem is that it doesn't know truth from fiction.

[CloudWatcher]

5. I'll second this ...

Except changing it to "write code" ... the software that AI spews out is really impressive. And I don't mean that as a compliment. I've spent way too much time giving it a chance to be useful only to find it's fundamentally crap.

On the other hand, it can be useful and fast when trying to remember the name of that obscure function to call in the API library you know exists but don't use everyday. Still the your response should always be to go read the original documentation and make sure you understand what's going on and not delegate thinking to the idiot AI engine.

AI has its place. It's just not the place it's in now.

[erronis]

7. And we've been using code assistants for years now, not calling them "AI"s

Every IDE I use can offer to complete a set of parameters, look up functions, suggest adding types, etc.

Tack on the "AI" and charge the developers another 30%. Great model.....

[Lucky Luciano]

8. I discovered numpy's einsum functionality by asking ChatGPT how to calculate a few million quadratic forms really fast.

I couldn’t figure out how to do it without slow python loops…einsum makes a one liner that knocks it all out with blazing speed. Now I’m using einsum anytime I have heavy tensor arithmetic that I need to be fast.

I also find ChatGPT useful for asking how to make something I already can do more performant. I sometimes squeeze more juice out that way.

You’re right that it can give you crap too, but it does give some gems.

[Auggie]

9. First (and only) time I tried it I got several sentences of cliche, banal writing

[wysimdnwyg]

10. I'm a software developer and had that same discussion with my boss today

She (not a developer) asked if we could get AI to complete a major rewrite project for us. I had to explain why that’s such a bad idea technologically, and then explain why it’s also bad when the AI - that’s supposedly sandboxed - steals our proprietary code.

[Warpy]

11. A lot of his audio books are read by Will Wheaton

who is even more wonderful than I expected him to be. I liked him as an actor, but I fucking love him as a reader.

I hope there's more Agent Chris Shane forthcoming. While I could offer couple of suggestions to tweak the verismilitude, I've enjoyed the first two immensely.

wheaton narrates a lot of Scalzi's other books. I suppose my Audible bill will be going up.

ETA:: I'd love to sign up for BlueSky, but they discriminate against the blind and nearly blind by using an old version of Captcha with no audio option. Let me know if they ever catch a clue and drop that barrier.