I think it’s better to talk about my experiments with local LLMs here. I’ll be playing around with Gemma 3 quite a bit since it’s the first time a local LLM can probably help me with my writing. As an assistant, not as the writer. I still want my texts to be my works.

@volpi Gemma 3 was the first time an LLM impressed me. It feels like what I had hoped local LLMs would become back in 2020 when AI was still cool and AI Dungeon was about the only way for a mortal to try out a language model.

Using an LLM for learning to improve my writing works well with my learning process. I never followed tutorials or advice directly because it doesn’t feel like I gain a true understanding of whatever it is I want to learn. Instead, I just play around with the possibilities I have, copy what other people have done and adapt them to my own ideas. I gradually learn how to do things on my own.
That’s how I learned programming and drawing vector art.

@volpi how do you use an LLM for this purpose? Do you ask it for tips with what you've written as context or something else?

@lukadjo I’m trying different things.

One of them was having it generate full essays in one go after supplying a shitload of background info, and modify the request to get different writing styles or structures. I thought it would give me ideas on how to approach my post, but the pacing tends to be very off and focuses on the wrong things.

My current method is providing less background info and having it write just an opener. The quality with this method is way better, and it’s easier to observe how the writing changes depending on how I change my request. This helps me see how I could improve my structure and phrasing to be more varied and interesting, and it also gives me new ideas I hadn’t considered before.

@volpi Whenever I've asked an LLM to try and write anything it always ended up sounding very distinctly LLM-ish, like it's trying too hard to be mediocre. I don't know how you're managing to do this without completely rewriting everything it gives you, but great it's working out for you!

@lukadjo I don’t rewrite anything because I simply don’t take any of its outputs for my post. I just generate and observe and draw lessons from it (the parts that don’t suck, because they certainly exist). I’m still going to write my post myself.

@volpi Yes, I got that. What model(s) do you use?

@volpi @lukadjo Gemma 3

@volpi @breadcat oops,

I really hate my elementary school teacher for ruining writing for me. I read a lot of books and the essays I wrote back then were so good that I couldn’t believe I wrote them when i found them a few years ago. But because my teacher didn’t like me and gave me bad grades regardless, I stopped putting in effort. Fucking asshole.

@volpi wow that sounds so sad

Should be encouraging people not turning them down.

I was never really a good with writing like stories or something. But I do like putting thoughts "on paper". Helps sorting them as well as helps venting a bit and I get to write about stuff I like. I do like doing blogging I guess. Even time is kinda tight like always. So I don't do as much writing recently.

But starting again recently. There is stuff I wanna tell tell the world about. Like my Cosplay-Project or that new racing Wheel I bought. Cool shit.

I guess you are more into writing stories?

@stefan Telling the world about the things I care about is my motivation as well. I want to learn how to write well so I gain another venue for expressing my thoughts in a way that’s different (and would be impossible) through my art. I don’t plant to write full-fledged stories, though.

@volpi I get this, school ruined writing for me with how it always needed to fit in one of two or three strict structures and the topics were really uninteresting, often requiring me to make things up in a very unenjoyable way (I.e. topics where you’re effectively making up a lie about having done something, just let me make up a character)

same for reading books, the schools dictating what you have to read just lead me to only read detailed summaries online. and back in primary school I used to devour sci-fi/fantasy/adventure books.

uni has been somewhat less bad (though the English class still had to have the kind of writing I hate , and writing introductions/summaries for reports is something I hate)

but recently I’ve been getting back to it a little, writing a blog and dipping my toes into creative writing

technical writing sort of comes naturally to me but with creative writing, well, I think I should pay more attention to what specifically I like in works I enjoy reading so I could use those elements myself, I guess similar to what you’re describing

@lunareclipse God yeah, the curriculum didn’t help either. It always felt like we were doing the same thing over and over again: read a book I wasn’t interested in, then write essays analyzing a character which felt like bullshitting. It didn’t suit me at all, so I always got (this time deservedly) bad grades.

@volpi The most Introvert-Trait ever to exist: Loving to tell about stuff you like in (unasked?) detail. Gotta love it.

I do get the "wanting to write well part" that can be kinda hard. I would atleast like to think that writing my (Light Novel focused) Blog maybe helped me with that a bit. Though I guess my reviews of stuff have a certain structure nowadays...

Like I am not writing the well versed stuff and my sentences can be a bit weird sometimes (like missing words or just the sentence structure being out of whack)

So I had a friend which helped me with that part ( and I would in turn tell him waaaay to often to split overly long sentences). Nowadays he sadly is doing a lot of stuff for work and college so he doesn't have the time for that.

So nowadays I only can really rely on my common sense, reading the text out loud and use stuff like LanguageTool which tends to help well in my cases, since I tend to miss punctuation and words a lot. (Or just misspell stuff)

I do really hope you can find something that works out for you. I think the post written with passion are the best. I do tend to struggle to write on stuff which is just "there" in terms of a book. Not offense but not super great. But I could likely talk your ear off about books I really live and die for.

PS: This thread is really interesting read. Again Volpeon Bonus Content delievering nice discussions

@volpi I learned (sadly much later) that school grades didn't matter one bit. 15 years after graduating I'm finding myself having retained a lot more knowledge and skills from the school days than the vast majority of people who had far better grades than I.
School grading systems are mostly bullshit.

@volpi @coffee Their obsession with ticking boxes instead of actual teaching is just horrible. When a measurement becomes a goal it stops being a good measurement. While this is mostly said in relation to things like giving people bonuses for number of sales only for them to then start splitting what could be one sale into multiple, increasing paperwork for no reason, it still applies here.

By making a good grade a goal and something one wishes to attain past just the bragging rights we have automatically made grades a horrible measurement of what they were supposed to measure. There is nuance and additional reasons why they are bad and seemingly unable to measure anything actually useful, but it is completely apparent that they are a bad measurement either way.