Raw LLM Responses

this hit way too close to home. the phrase "the voice is right by every efficiency metric" is exactly it. i noticed the same thing with thinking through problems. before heavy ai use, i would scribble out rough thoughts on paper, see connections, cross things out, refine. now when i try to do that same process without ai, there is this friction where my brain skips straight to asking the model and the messy thinking phase never happens. your comparison to calculators is interesting but i think the difference is that calculators automated computation, not the thinking itself. when i use a calculator, i still have to figure out what to calculate and why. with ai writing, the model does the figuring out what to say part through its first draft. that is the part that was actually the thinking exercise all along. i think the solution is not to stop using ai. it is to create friction intentionally. sometimes i force myself to write the bad first draft before opening ai. the key insight from your post is that the bad draft is not just a stepping stone to the good one. the process of writing badly is how you discover what you actually want to say. ai skips that discovery step entirely. voice dictation like what Sircuttlesmash mentioned is actually brilliant for this. it forces you to produce raw thoughts without the self-editing paralysis.