A rubric and workflow for rewriting LLM-drafted essays to match my voice. I build this with Codex in a Ralph Wiggum loop.
First to make the rubric:
- Pull a bunch of blogs I've written and a couple I haven't
- Make a rubric that would uniquely identify my writing
- Score all the posts by the rubric.
- Based on those scorings, update the rubric accordingly (backprop?)
- Repeat until the rubric reliably can tell the difference between me and others
The best part of this process was when I came back after a while and the rubric had gotten nerfed. It removed this rule that I had added manually:
- Em-dashes (—) or n-dashes without spaces on both sides in the author's own prose. Steve ONLY uses spaced n-dashes:
word – aside – word. Any other dash style is not Steve. Dashes in direct quotations or poem attributions are excluded.
If you think about it, this rule kinda represents a watermark for my writing. Up until recently, I didn't realize that I was typing n-dashes instead of m-dashes! I don't even know how to type an m-dash and now I don't want to know. If you ever see writing with an m-dash or with the dashes touching the works on either side of it – unlike this – then you know it definitively wasn't me.
But after a couple hours of my Ralph Wiggum loop, this rule had disappared! I asked the AI why and it linked me to this passage that I had supposedly written:
This tool—and others like it—are stops on our way toward end-programmer programming.
I created this to see if I could get LLMs to write non-slop in my voice that I'd enjoy reading, and maybe even put my name on (only if it was good enough).