Using LLMs at Oxide / RFD / Oxide

While LLMs are adept at reading and can be terrific at editing, their writing
is much more mixed. At best, writing from LLMs is hackneyed and cliché-ridden;
at worst, it brims with tells that reveal that the prose is in fact
automatically generated.

What’s so bad about this? First, to those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals
(an expanding demographic!), it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is
walking around with their
intellectual
fly open. But there are deeper problems: LLM-generated writing undermines
the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as
well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? The
reader can’t be sure — and increasingly, the hallmarks of LLM generation cause
readers to turn off (or worse).

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent
LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that
has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to
write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle
with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands
it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up:
a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they
might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it.
If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly
discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced
cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in
fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they
spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing
is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly
eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice. For us at Oxide, there
is a more mechanical reason to be jaundiced about using LLMs to write:
because our hiring process very much selects for writers, we know that
everyone at Oxide can write — and we have the luxury of demanding of
ourselves the kind of writing that we know that we are all capable of.

So our guideline is to generally not use LLMs to write, but this shouldn’t
be thought of as an absolute — and it doesn’t mean that an LLM can’t be
used as part of the writing process. Just please: consider your
responsibility to yourself, to your own ideas — and to the reader.