Embracing weirdness: What it means to use AI as a (writing) tool

Large Language Models are weird, as anyone who has worked with AI for any period of time will tell you. They don’t act like we expect software to act. This creates issues because we don’t always like weird things, especially weird things that promise a wave of disruption (or worse). So it is completely understandable that we have trouble with the weirdness inherent in working with AI, and either shy away from it or else try and make it into something more normal. But to truly understand what AI can do, good and bad, we must recognize the weirdness of LLMs. Rather unexpectedly, we created software that does a seemingly good job thinking and acting like a human (even though that is mostly an illusion). And this strange software has strange capabilities that are undocumented and not fully explored. Thus, to really get how to use AI, and to understand how it might be dangerous, we need to embrace the weirdness and explore it ourselves. What does embracing the weirdness mean? It means break

Large Language Models are weird, as anyone who has worked with AI for any period of time will tell you. They don’t act like we expect software to act. This creates issues because we don’t always like weird things, especially weird things that promise a wave of disruption (or worse). So it is completely understandable that we have trouble with the weirdness inherent in working with AI, and either shy away from it or else try and make it into something more normal. But to truly understand what AI can do, good and bad, we must recognize the weirdness of LLMs. Rather unexpectedly, we created softw