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Notes -
There's a difficult question in the difference between "your product" and "my thinking or perspective".
For a toy problem, I threw together a short story today, about 1200 words in the original draft, zero AI. Wrote it in FeatherPad (a notepad-like), so not even spellcheck.
Except no, that's a bit of a lie. I Googled a well-known phrase about birds in gilded cages, because I wanted to play on the original text, and Google's awful built-in LLM did give me some interpretations, even if not the one I actually went with. Still, I can't say I completely avoided influence from it. In this case, I am doing the thing and the thinking, the AI's just helping save time doing it. Am I outsourcing my product to Google? To a song from the 1900s?
After finishing the draft, I shoved the full text as a file upload into Grok with a request to check for spelling errors, overall coherence, typographical errors, and clarity. It caught a dropped fragment I didn't, and had a few suggestions. I took some, and didn't take others, but every keystroke going into the final product I wrote by keyboard, no copy-paste. In this case, these fixes are something I could do, but some parts probably not as reliably as the AI, while other parts, the AI is doing stuff I don't want.
Okay, what if I wrote the original really badly: a rough outline that hit all the same story beats and general concepts, but without any of the stylistic techniques, writing quality, or many specific segments I wanted in the story. That'd clearly be against the rules for where I submitted the story, and probably not result in anything nearly as good. And since I'm not a good writer, that's really damning it with faint praise.
Actually, let's try it: Grok (story) and ChatGPT (story).
For a tl;dr, not great, not terrible. Definitely didn't get the themes down, and the humor's not great, but ChatGPT's tone is mostly on the right tack, and I could probably inject a lot more dry comedy if I pushed it harder or feed it back in on itself with instructions to crank those aspects up. I'm not exactly a prompt expert. They did a good enough job on the 'enrichment' lists that I'm pretty glad I didn't try them before writing my own version, because I'd have probably gotten stuck on them and not moved to the ones I did use. And even if those were 'worse' from a realism perspective they were imo 'better' from a thematic writing one.
These LLMs clearly produce a better product than the outlines I put into the prompts. Whether it's better as a product than the short story I actually wrote is pretty dependent on what you're measuring; I'd argue I went quality over quantity, but writers get paid on the latter. The only real ideas the LLMs shove out are the enrichment concepts, and I could demonstrably come up with different ones. Indeed, a lot of the token cost for the LLMs is poking it into even moderately-good ideas. Does that outsource my ability to do things that way?
... except ironically, a guest-mode story prompt came up with an additional good theme to introduce: spelling out the main character's lack of trust in himself. It's a theme that works great for most horror fans that this story archetype is built around, but it's not really one I could see without being prompted. I don't think it's necessary for the product, but it's definitely a different idea.
I dunno where on that line Ademonera's post falls. I'd be less happy with it if they were using ChatGPT to source names and events, and then just using the names and events without reflecting on what they actually meant (or if they even meant anything). I wouldn't really care if it were glorified spellcheck, since at least it's not another Grammerly user. And if it's that messy spot where they had an outline of all the material they wanted to hit, but let the LLM reshuffle it into a narrative... well, I guess I wouldn't really see the point.
But the problems are separate ones.
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