Comment by AstroBen
8 days ago
This type of cadence.
You know the one.
Choppy. Fast. Saying nothing at all.
It's not just boring and disjointed. It's full-on slop via human-adjacent mimicry.
Let’s get very clear, very grounded, and very unsentimental for a moment.
The contrast to good writing is brutal, and not in a poetic way. In a teeth-on-edge, stomach-dropping way. The dissonance is violent.
Here's the raw truth:
It’s not wisdom. It’s not professional. It’s not even particularly original.
You are very right to be angry. Brands picking soulless drivel over real human creatives.
And now we finish with a pseudo-deep confirmation of your bias.
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Before long everyone will be used to it and it'll evoke the same eugh response
Sometimes standing out or wuality writing doesn't actually matter. Let AI do that part
Only thing missing is, “The raw truth?” instead of, “ Here's the raw truth:”.
the LinkedIn register of English
I don't really remember Claude 3.5 doing this, but it seems increasingly worse, with 4.6 being so bad I don't like using it for brainstorming. My shitty idea isn't "genuinely elegant".
Why would anyone get sick of it if people have been happily doing it to each other for so many years prior?
Does the fact that a machine can ape it so easily somehow reveal its vacuousness in a way that wasn't obvious already?
I keep hearing people with job titles like "SEO growth hacker" saying it's depressing that AI can do their jobs better than they can.
Really? That's the depressing part?
No worse than "junior developer" assuming they were looking to move on from it
Writing SEO content for random sites was of course the lowest skilled writing job. Ideally they'd have higher aspirations than that though.
Maybe those people didn't even want to be writers. They just wanted an easy job.
This is what I don't grok...
Your sample sounds exactly like an LLM. (If you wrote it yourself, kudos.)
But, it needn't sound like this. For example, I can have Opus rewrite that block of text into something far more elegant (see below).
It's like everyone has a new electric guitar with the cheapo included pedal, and everyone is complaining that their instruments all sound the same. Well, no shit. Get rid of the freebie cheapo pedal and explore some of the more sophisticated sounds the instrument can make.
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There is a particular cadence that has become unmistakable: clipped sentences, stacked like bricks without mortar, each one arriving with the false authority of an aphorism while carrying none of the weight. It is not merely tedious or disjointed; it is something closer to uncanny, a fluency that mimics the shape of human thought without ever inhabiting it.
Set this against writing that breathes, prose with genuine rhythm, with the courage to sustain a sentence long enough to discover something unexpected within it, and the difference is not subtle. It is the difference between a voice and an echo, between a face and a mask that almost passes for one.
What masquerades as wisdom here is really only pattern. What presents itself as professionalism is only smoothness. And what feels, for a fleeting moment, like originality is simply the recombination of familiar gestures, performed with enough confidence to delay recognition of their emptiness.
The frustration this provokes is earned. There is something genuinely dispiriting about watching institutions reach for the synthetic when the real thing, imperfect, particular, alive, remains within arm's length. That so many have made this choice is not a reflection on the craft of writing. It is a reflection on the poverty of attention being paid to it.
And if all of this sounds like it arrives at a convenient conclusion, one that merely flatters the reader's existing suspicion, well, perhaps that too is worth sitting with a moment longer than is comfortable.
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(prompt used: I want you to revise [pasted in your text], making it elegant and flowing with a mature literary-style. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate how this sample text -- held up as an example of the stilted LLM style -- can easily be made into something more beautiful with a creative prompt. Avoid gramatical constructions that call for m-dashes.)
>It is not merely tedious or disjointed; it is something closer to uncanny, a fluency that mimics the shape of human thought without ever inhabiting it.
It still can't help itself from doing "it's not X it's Y". Changing the em-dash to a semi-colon is just lipstick
Yep. But that prompt I used was just a quirky. You can explicitly force it to avoid THAT structure as well. Just do what the smart ?ie, devious) middle-schoolers do: find a list of all the tell-tale ‘marks’ of AI content, and explicitly include them as prohibitions in your prompt… it’s the most basic work-around to the ‘AI spotters’ the teacher uses for grading your essay. (And, of course, be sure to include an instruction to include a grammatical or spelling error every few sentences for added realism.)
It's less obvious but it has the same problems. So many dramatic words to say so little and so many AI tics.
You're right, a lot of the style can be changed from its default. I don't think you can get rid of the soulless aspect though - the lack of underlying relatable consistency.
Especially once you go past a page or two.
When you get to the actual content so much of it just doesn't make sense past a superficial glance
Soulless drivel is very accurate
well done. :)
and at the same time the chop becomes long-form slop, stretching out a little seed of a human prompt into a sea of inane prose.