A rubric and workflow for rewriting LLM-drafted essays to match my voice.
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).
I build this with Codex in a Ralph Wiggum loop:
- 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:
Instant fail — Em-dashes or touching dashes (-14)
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 laughed out loud. That post was ghost-written for me by our new team member Pete Millspaugh! The Steve Eval was correctly identifying text not written by me!
Even before this result, we had stopped the ghost-writing practice. I'm not a fan. I much prefer when the byline is accurate, and posts are written by the people who say they wrote them. We had only done it that time out of a mistaken feeling that people would prefer to hear from me, the founder. But that only works if we're doing it authentically, so it didn't make sense. I just updated the author on that post to Pete, because after all, he did write it.
To write a new post, I would vomit out all my thoughts about the blog by voice and then give AI that transcript. Then I'd tell it to do the following in another Ralph Wiggum loop:
- Write a draft blog post
- Score it with the steve-eval
- Based on the feedback, create a new draft
- Repeat until the score is > 90.
I wrote two blogs with this approach, in part:
The AI-produced results weren't great, so I spent a lot of time editing and in many cases rewriting whole sections by hand.
This was a fun exercise, but mostly not very helpful for me yet, but I'm excited for when AI is good enough to be able to do this well.
I was excited to see that the folks at Every are thinking in similar directions:
But it is fun to learn that I have a fairly unique watermark – long live my en-dash clauses with spaces around it! – and to get a bit clearer about what I think good writing in my voice looks like.