Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive
I’ll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings.As you may know, I’m not anti-AI. I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts. I also think using AI for line and copy editing, or for rewriting a passage to make it clearer or tighter, is fine, as long as all the edits are deliberately accepted or rejected by a human.
- ▪I’ll explain these points in more detail below, but first, a few throat clearings.As you may know, I’m not anti-AI.
- ▪I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts.
- ▪I also think using AI for line and copy editing, or for rewriting a passage to make it clearer or tighter, is fine, as long as all the edits are deliberately accepted or rejected by a human.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://erichgrunewald.substack.com/p/why-you-should-almost-never-use-ai |
| Publication time | Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:35:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-19T16:48:46.938Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-19T16:48:46.938Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | N7-6lpdjdn8p · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything SubstantiveA plea.Erich GrunewaldAug 06, 2026801720ShareI think you should almost never use AI to write -- that is, to do the thing you’re doing when you type words on a page -- whether for a blog post, a research report, a memo, a thoughtful email, a novel, or any other text aimed at conveying an idea, an argument, an analysis, or other substantive1 thoughts. I think this is the case even when you give the AI very detailed bullet points, dictated thoughts, or other context, and even when you edit the AI-written text.2I think so because (1) the writing process is an essential part of the thinking process, (2) AI writing is vague and wrong in hard-to-notice ways, and (3) writing with AI (and not labeling it as such) is rude and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (AI / LLM).
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