Or, how to treat other humans as such, in an age of generated text.

Fact check

Treat every statement in the LLM response as something which needs verifying. The LLM is implemented to produce a “reasonable” response to your query, not to fact check them, look for falsified data, or ignore bad interpretations. That job is yours. And if you don’t do it, people will naturally ascribe any faults to you, not the LLM. If you don’t want to be known as a liar, do your due diligence before repeating something produced by a machine.

LLMs are great tools for researching a topic, but no amount of flagship models and clever prompts is going to remove the need for thinking. Unless, of course, you’re suffering from AI mania. In that case I’m truly sorry, but I’m also not going to read your slop.

Cite

Sometimes, posting the LLM response verbatim is warranted. Obviously when discussing LLMs, but also to inform readers of sources of your own bias. Since LLMs aren’t deterministic, it’s important to include all the information someone else would need to get as close as possible to the response you got: the model name, version, context, and prompt. You want to make checking your work as easy as possible.

Respond as you

Manually rewrite LLM responses in your own words before putting them where other humans can see them. You have a personal way of writing, and familiarity is important when communicating with humans.

You might worry that your own writing has more spelling mistakes than the LLM response. That can be fixed by sending the text through any spell checker at your disposal - any decent text editor does this out of the box.

You might worry that your own writing is less eloquent. Don’t. LLM output is extremely verbose, and tedious to read. Unless you’re deliberately trying to be prolix, or to obscure what you’re actually saying, your own words are better. They will also feel familiar to anyone who knows you. An unfamiliar style can cause readers to get cognitive dissonance, subconsciously biasing them against whatever the text is saying.

If nothing else, do it because a lot of platforms (like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia) enforce this, and will react appropriately if you post LLM content as yourself. Or, you know, because you respect the readers.