About 6 months ago you strongly recommended that I make use of the integrated AI plugin for Overleaf (Writefull). I did try it. Its recommended edits seem quite useless to me; they always seem to flow from a desire to make the wording more normal/standard/expected in contrast to more correct (which makes some sense given the way generatie pre-training works). This is obviously useful to people with worse English, but for me, the tails come apart massively between “better” and “more normal/standard/expected”, such that all the AI suggestions are either worse or totally neutral rephrasing.
It also was surprisingly bad at helping me write LaTeX; I had a much better time asking Claude instead.
It’s not that I didnt use AI daily before for mundane tasks or writing emails,
I haven’t found AI at all useful for writing emails, because the AI doesn’t know what I want to say, and taking the time to tell the AI isn’t any easier than writing it myself. AI can only help me write the boring boilerplate stuff that email recipients would skim over anyway (which I don’t want to add to my emails). AI can’t help me get info out of my head this way—it can only help me in so far as emails have a lot of low-entropy cruft. I can see how this could be useful for someone who has to write a lot of low-entropy emails, but I’m not in that situation. To some degree this could be mitigated if the LLMs had a ton of context (EG recording everything that happens on my computer), but again, only the more boring cases I think.
I’d love to restore the Abram ability to crank out several multi-page emails a day on intellectual topics, but I don’t think AI is helpful towards that end yet. I haven’t tried fine-tuning on my own writing, however. (I haven’t tried fine-tuning at all.)
Similarly, LLMs can be very useful for well-established mathematics which had many examples in the training data, but get worse the more esoteric the mathematics becomes. The moment I ask for something innovative, the math becomes phony.
Across the board, LLMs seem very useful for helping people who are at the lower end of a skill ladder, but not yet very useful for people at the upper end.
So I’m curious, how did you refactor your workflow to make better use of AI?
I’m still quite curious what you have found useful and how you’ve refactored your workflow to leverage AI more (such that you wish you did it a year ago).
I do use Perplexity, exa.ai and elicit as parts of my search strategy.