A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

Surprised that actual writing is not in the list.

By actual writing I simply mean finding the right words, with the right spelling, a good flow, and well constructed sentenced.

I found LLMs to be awesome at this job, which make sense, they are language models before being knowledge models. Their prose is not very exciting, but the more formal the document, the better they are, and essays are quite formal. You can even give it some context, something like: "Write an essay for the class of X that will have an A+ grade".

The idea is to let the LLM do the phrasing, but you take care of the facts (checking primary sources, etc...) and general direction. It is known that LLMs sometimes get their facts wrong, but their spelling and grammar is usually excellent.

Yeah, but that's the only actually creative part of writing. It's the bit that, once you reach a certain level of skill, becomes enjoyable.

I mean, I know what you've described is what everyone will do, but I feel sad for the students who'll learn like that. They won't develop as writers to the point of having style, and then - once everything written is a style-less mush of LLM-generated phrases - what's the point of reading it? We might as well feed everything back through the LLM to extract the "main ideas" for us.

I guess we're "saving labor" that way, but what an anti-human process we'll have made.

> We might as well feed everything back through the LLM to extract the "main ideas" for us.

And I wouldn't bother unless it's corporate memo. Which is already bland once it's past a certain length.