Two simple rules that let LLMs streamline and improve your writing without pasteurizing and jacking it with corn syrup. It’s tricky to write about writing. It comes across as a brag; you’re implying that you write well.

Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t, but there’s for damned sure a quorum of critics on the Internet somewhere that think you suck at it. I’m vain and insecure like everybody else and find writing this piece weirdly unpleasant. But I’m getting over myself and getting this down because this advice is important, hard to argue with, and straightforward.

Readers can detect LLM words in the parts per trillion. However much work you put into scuffing up and humanizing it, an LLM paragraph will register to much of your audience not as writing but as output. So, first the bad news: you have to write for yourself.

But LLMs are still extraordinarily useful. It’s just you need to use them like a copyeditor rather than a ghostwriter. So, step one of my method: write your piece.

Then, step two: feed it to a good model to find flaws. But before we talk about how that works, there are two rules you need to understand. They’ll ward off LLM-creep that will knock you into the uncanny valley between expression and output and knock you out of your reader’s attention.

Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you. Breaking this rule is what’s going to get you into trouble. Reason being: frontier models are supernaturally good at selecting pleasing turns of phrase.

It’s sort of their whole thing. The problems with what models suggest are subtle. Think of it this way: frontier models are wedged in a mode where everything they write is a magazine headline.

Headlines are good, but you’d wonder about someone who wrote an article with dozens of them. So I think that as a form of intellectual personal protective equipment you should adopt the rule that any specific turn of phrase an LLM suggests is off limits. Be strict about the rule! The whole premise here is that you’re not going to reliably spot all the ways frontier models will try to turn your writing into Velveeta.

Even if you like the words, even if you’re sure they’re better than what you already have, LLM-generated phrases are DQ’d.