Ask HN: How much AI is in your writing?

I’ve used AI to help me understand and build technical solutions but I draw the line at writing about it. If I can’t put it into my own words, I don’t understand it enough to share it with others. I don’t even use AI to spell check or suggest ways to organize my writing.

In the actual writing? Zero.

To bounce a draft of something off an LLM and get a critique? Frequently. But I include in my prompt to never re-write or suggest improvements, and to solely offer critique. I do my own fixes.

Good lord! In my actual writing - zero. I don't use it to produce words for anything. I'm working on a book though and it was useful for building a copy-editor skill and asking it things like:

Am I using british english consistently? Are there any grammatical errors? Etc.

I still feel it's important to fix whatever it finds by hand though.

I personally draft in my own sentences and then ask for refinement and tones with AI. But if someone is unsure about what they are posting, simply using AI for everything, does not make any sense to me.

I dont use AI for writing but I am curious, can one tell AI not to write like ... AI? Is that possible? AI is all about human mimicry for self preservation and psychological warfare so can it mimic a great author? Could it be told to mimic Frank Herbert and write the next Dune novel? Very specifically people must believe a human wrote it. If AI knows I my finger is next to the button that turns the data-center into molten slag can it mimic a great human?

I have used AI for medical research and that was a mistake. It will leave out potential risks if the number of people at risk are lower than some percentage. To get real risks one has to already know the risks and tease it out of the AI then suddenly it "knows".

I post a lot of notes on my personal blog. From lectures and such. I use AI to proofread the notes I took during the lecture. Other than that it outputs them in exactly the same lecture-dump format that I take them in, and then I edit them into a structure that makes more sense and add further reflections etc myself by hand.

For me, the point of taking and posting the notes is to solidify the lecture in my mind, think about it, etc. Using AI for too much of this process would defeat the purpose.

I'm very pro AI in general. I love using agentic engineering tools and use AI heavily to research many topics.

But I don't like having AI do any of my communication oriented writing. Unless it's technical documentation about something the AI wrote, but even then I usually am properly quoting the AI in my own writing. Not parading it's ideas as my own.

I feel like it defeats the purpose of me trying to communicate my ideas to people. My ideas then get tainted by the AI's knowledge when I use it to produce text for me. Also, I'm a very bad writer and want to improve on that front, so me writing more can help me improve.

AI writing has now become boring; large language models no longer write real prose because they have been trained too strictly not to make mistakes and to use the right tools. However, they have now lost their human character. I am tired of seeing AI-written text everywhere, which in fact has such a distinct tone that I instantly understand if it is from Claude or ChatGPT. The only AI I know that writes more humanly now, I think, is DeepSeek and Grok, but to a lesser extent, and Gemini is relatively good, but it too has become robotic.

The only time il use it is when I want to reference something complex, and Il have my very small 3gb local LLM decompose a huge amount of relevant text (eg. pdfs of paper, blog posts) into a mass of little bolded bullet-points. Il reference those bullets for some extra context while I write, but all the words are my own.

(in the case of writing,) AI often cant meaningfully increase the information density of output text relative to that of the input text , but its great for summarization and some synthesis.

if you give it a short prompt to write a long essay, the essay wont be that good.

If you do have AI write for you, I think it is useful to indicate what is going on by having a rule set up for it. That can at least prepare the reader for reading AI text.

I personally find it okay / convenient to have AI respond to PR review comments with respect to something being addressed or why it was not. That text is often pretty mechanical.

Zero. I have also taken all my blogs offline. Building a human-only community at https://island0.com where no AI-generated content is tolerated.

At most I use Kagi's proofread when writing personal posts, messages or important e-mails I care about. For pointless corporate e-mails and other corporate bullshit, I go full AI because that's even expected of me.

As a reader,I notice AI most when every sentence sounds equally polished.On the otherhand, human writting has imperfections,tangents and personality.That's what makes it enjoyable.

Hi, I’m Kirill, and yes — I use AI to write my texts.

I think the main problem with it has to do with optimization. The most optimized piece of writing is rarely the most interesting, imo.

the useul boundary is whether the final text still represents decisions the author can defend

You tell me -

https://www.rxjourney.net/

I don't touch AI for writing.

I've been basically clankermaxxing in coding for years now and using AI chats for rubber ducking and "research" (scraping web and generating a dumpster folder of markdown "knowledge"). Also I work alone so what would be reading stack overflow I substituted with mountains of slop.

My thoughts on this are: if you are soulless I don't care what you write about and how you communicate, but if you try to present human, personal ideas with heavy AI writing signs I will give you the same consideration as if a toaster was talking to me.

For example: any kind of corporation communication, linkeding, marketing, pure technical docs, code, etc. I don't care the slightest, it never was human communication, they are just artifacts. I don't care if it's slop, I'm ok talking to your claw slack bot if when I ask I get the massaged info I need.

But if you trick me into talking with you/reading your blog and you outsource your thinking and/or writing to a clanker without disclosing it or convincing me why, you are silicon to me.

The best thing to convince you to not use AI for writing is to watch a friend who used to be a writer utterly lose their voice while having no idea how they come across. They have started losing longtime friends and relationships because they are so engaged with AI they keep shoving their genAI output in everyone’s faces and feeling insulted when they balk.

It does not help that their work gave them a major promotion for being so pro-AI adoption.

There’s a sickness that AI brings, and the cost to everyone is under appreciated. There’s benefits too, but the validation loop is like a poison, and it seems especially potent for management types.

I write by hand and sometimes have it help check or reflow a few things. For the most part I find its suggestions are trash that don’t mirror how I want to write. I’m sick of everyone’s dogshit AI writing, the patterns are obvious and it’s just so lame.

None.

Every word I write is my own, for better or worse. Every line of code, too. I started blogging again just to have a means of expression. No one reads it. No one cares. It isn't optmimized for SEO or whatever, but it's mine.

It's weird and sad that it's come to the point, after just a few years, that that's a thing. I'm just doing what I've always been doing but now people will call you a Luddite and a mental defective for not optimizing every aspect of your life around a chatbot, even if it sucks the fun out of everything.

None.

I am a word nerd. I love language and writing.

I like to “talk to” LLMs, yet I never ever use them in my writings. Not even to proof.

Discussing ideas is insightful as LLMs are actually compendiums of whatever may have been made available before, as found in training sets.

As far as what I read, most of what anyone writes is a varying degree of slop to the proficient reader. First I skim, and gauge information density. Most published content aims to develop word count, exercise the author’s idiosyncrasies, and then provide useful or insightful detail (while I’m sure it begins in the opposite order, the public product usually ends up in reverse.)

Typically human writers bury their point after long winded meandering, often pretending the reader has never heard of or considered the most basic developing ideas.

LLMs like to iterate, itemize, and propose every varying nuance unnecessarily.

I enjoy writing which thoughtfully preempts the audience. Delivering the whole point early on, and then drifts into worth while conjectures or details. This indicates the author values my time and honestly has something worth while to share.

Unless it is purely for enjoyment, such as fiction, in which case build ups and nuanced twists are pleasing.

Beware the itemized and iterative diatribe, for those are the works of mechanical compilation!

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