What LLMs can and can't do for writers, with Clara Collier of Asterisk Magazine

**Clara Collier** (0:00)
So I've talked to people I know who are somewhat more open to LLM use in various contexts, who have said like, literally like, I live a double life. Like I can't tell my colleagues, I can't tell my friends.

**Patrick McKenzie** (0:11)
The writing process is the thinking process. And I think we now have empirical demonstration of this because you make a machine that does writing and thinking just pops out as a side effect.

**Clara Collier** (0:19)
The version of my writing that an LLM could produce is always going to be missing something that I could add.

**Patrick McKenzie** (0:28)
I reviewed hundreds of publicly published documents in the course of a approximately two week reporting cycle. Even if you had given me the entire packet on day one, without any search cost at all, I don't think I could have possibly like physically read through all of the documents in that timeline but for the use of LLMs.
Hi to you everybody. My name is Patrick McKenzie, better known as patio11 on the Internet. I'm here with Clara Collier, who's the Editor-in-Chief of Asterisk. Hi. Great to have you back again on the program.

**Clara Collier** (1:01)
Great to be back. I was observing earlier, we have a real set this time, which is fun.

**Patrick McKenzie** (1:05)
We have a real set with real set design.
We're recording this at Lighthaven shortly before the Manifest Conference kicks off, and I think we did one at Manifest last year as well. So LLMs. The two of us are broadly engaged in the life of the mind in writing things for publication to discerning readers, hopefully.

**Clara Collier** (1:27)
We try.

**Patrick McKenzie** (1:27)
We try our best.
There seems to be something of a mimetic condition going around in many places where similar people do similar things. I think they have a very different perspective on LLMs than what we do. Do you want to talk about what you've heard from other people in, say, high status publications in the publishing world and similar with regards to where they think LLMs are at right now?

**Clara Collier** (1:53)
Sure. I should say with the caveat that, of course, there are many people you could talk to who are much better networked in the world of traditional news media than I am. But I know a fair number of journalists and really, there's a range from this is a tool that I use every day and is now essential to my workflow to not only do I not use it, I would advocate for firing any colleague who I caught using it.

**Patrick McKenzie** (2:17)
Indeed, there's been, I think, a policy at the New York Times, they got caught with a non-employee writer who had had some LLM text, which included a hallucination and this resulted in a policy ban on any use of LLMs in any capacity by non-employee writers.

**Clara Collier** (2:35)
I should say, I think that, again, I don't want to weigh in too heavily on the ethnography of all this, but I think that the world that we're talking about, which is people who write for quote unquote legacy media is very big and different areas of it. I think that news media is quite different from say literary magazines, where the literary magazine world is pretty much just hegemonically massively opposed. I've talked to people I know who are somewhat more open to LLM use in various contexts to have said like literally like I live a double life. Like I can't tell my colleagues, I can't tell my friends. News media, it's much more mixed. I think this is in part because a lot of journalists are not journalists because they're great writers, they're journalists because they're great reporters. It's a different skill set. For them, it's just useful in obvious ways. If you're doing, and this is something I'm sure we'll talk about a lot more, if you're doing more analytical non-fiction, there are just ways in which it is obviously useful. There's certain things where it's like, I think using LLMs for, say, interview transcription is extremely non-controversial. Everyone does this, obviously, it's good.
Of course, different publications have different policies.
I think there's also, right now, there's such a panic about being caught using it, and I think this panic is like, I mean, I think I'm going to say right off the bat, and I think we agree on this. I don't think anybody should be using LLMs to produce texts that you're going to publish under your own name.

**Patrick McKenzie** (4:16)
I think this is largely true. Outside of perhaps some, I could imagine there are ways in new media to ask an LLM to extend an analysis that you've done previously to a new fact pattern, but for technical or commercial use versus something that would actually run as a piece in a paper or a magazine.