TDelta2258

I would say it depends on what kind of text the LLM returns to you and what you do with it. If you're only receiving feedback and suggestions, and making the edits yourself, I would say that the final result is your writing. If you're asking the LLM to do a rewrite, and you're checking its results before sending it off as your own, then that's a bit blurrier... Like, if you gave that task to an actual human, would they need or expect to be credited as a ghost writer?

Personally, I use LLMs for writing assistance as well, but I never ask it to generate text. I only ask it to:

1. Do basic copy editing. I give it a version of my document with prefixed line numbers, and ask it to find any typos, grammatical errors, or "hard to parse" sentences, and then generate a table of lines with issues. I make all of the fixes myself.

2. Do style and sentiment analysis. I previously worked as a tech writer (design docs, test reports, policies, etc...), so my natural style has become incredibly dry. Too dry for what I try to write these days. So I ask the LLMs for feedback on readability, voice, descriptiveness, emotion, etc... Yes, I know they're not actually "performing" reviews, but there must be enough literary and language analysis embedded within the models that they can take my text and return an appropriate response. They provide basically the same feedback that I've received from actual human readers (mostly that my writing is too dry...), but they're obviously a lot faster. I specifically ask it not to provide suggestions for changes to the actual text.

I'm too early in the process to worry about taste. Most of what I produce still has the voice of something like... a test report or design doc. Because that's the kind of writing I produced for decades.

The article explicitly says "no text that is generated by AI" but is a bit more ambiguous on whether AI can be used as an aide to writing. There's this section:

>This doesn’t mean nobody doing work here can ever use any of the softwares that are broadly lumped together as AI. Much as we respect the Luddites around here, we’re not against technological innovation. Nothing in our rules prohibits writers from using a new tool to help them research something, or prevents an artist from using a tool to, say, add a texture or change a color, or make some kind of small element.

As someone trying to pickup writing fiction after years of doing technical writing, I use LLMs for fast feedback to see if my words are having the intended effect (i.e., are they inducing emotions? am I describing things in interesting ways? or is it a slog to read? etc...). Since Current Affairs is a commentary magazine and not just straight facts reporting, I could imagine authors wanting similar feedback. Would this kind of usage be permitted? Seems... yes? But I'm not completely sure.

>Once I figured out that this was a skill and not just something people that are not me are born with

I agree that it is a skill, but like any skill it helps immensely to start learning it as a child. It took me until my 30s to realize that my parents were essentially... antisocial. And that most of the social skill lessons I took from them, if any, were probably wrong and unproductive. I spent a lot of time (and money) trying to learn to overcome that, but never made any progress.