My best writing and thinking happens when I think I am an utter failure, irredeemably stupid, and incapable of stringing a single sentence together. The NYT came out with a great article on the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. It turned my mind to the writers who think they are “optimizing” by using an LLMs. It is also possible their writing—and thinking—is atrocious but their LLM collaborators have convinced them it is exceptional.