My AI writing assistant hit 10,000 words in a single session and I almost deleted it

I was letting it draft a blog post about machine learning benchmarks and it pumped out 10,000 words on its own before I stopped it. That moment made me realize how easy it is to lose control of output quality if you don't set hard limits. Has anyone else had a tool generate way more than you needed and had to scrap the whole thing?

3 comments

3 Comments

ellis.faith15d ago

My buddy let an AI write his grocery list and ended up with a 20 page essay on tomatoes.

jamie94015d agoProlific Poster

The babysitting comparison is PERFECT because you literally have to tell it "STOP after three sentences" and it still tries to add one more. It's like the thing has zero sense of when the point is made. Gotta treat prompts like you're talking to an enthusiastic golden retriever that just keeps bringing you the same ball.

bennett.evan15d ago

pumped out 10,000 words on its own" - that's the part that gets me lol. It's like handing the wheel to someone who just floors it with no map. I've had the same thing happen where I'd ask for a quick intro paragraph and it'd spit out a whole essay about the history of widgets. Now I literally put a hard limit in the prompt like "max 3 paragraphs" and it still tries to sneak in extra sentences sometimes. Feels like you gotta babysit these things more than a toddler with a crayon.