Comment by andy99
10 hours ago
AI writing is not good. Seeing this post, and another comment on here earlier today to the effect of “we’ve solved prose”, I’m genuinely really confused. I don’t want to be insulting, even if the first place my mind runs is basically people must not read very much or think very hard about what they read. I can’t imagine a world where anyone ingests a material amount of AI writing and things it’s even “acceptable”. But so many people seem completely blind to it. I’m actually horrified by the idea of a world where people are just slinging empty slop back and forth at each other. Probably many of us have already experienced it at work.
So what am I missing? What’s the most charitable explanation for how anyone can think LLMs are good at writing?
I think it's a difference of reading levels.
AI 'writing' makes me ill, but that's happening because I can 'feel' the prose's samey hollowness in every paragraph.
But! If someone is just moving word by word and is focussed on just the gist (the average reading level is '6th grade' here in the states), then it will not repel them the way it does us. Also, AI's grammar is impeccable, if bizarre, and the word choices can be facially erudite, so that might also be mistaken as a signal for competence where none exists.
LLMs have not currently "solved" _anything_. Not coding, not writing, not anything.
As someone who does a lot of writing, I ended up doing a lot of re-writing of what I'll call reference architectures in a previous role. I did use an LLM for some of the missing context up-front. It was essentially boilerplate and I did revise it--took out some things I didn't think important and added some things I thought might be.
But I basically never use them for a blog post except maybe to include some boilerplate explanation of some technology. (Which I'm familiar with but don't want to rewrite or copy and paste.)
Could that change? Perhaps. But I don't really use today.
Perhaps this is a question of ethics. Should we come to a conclusion that human effort makes a text worth reading despite it's objective quality. Literacy is humanities by definition.
Hijacked signals. When they read good writing they get a certain emotional response. This is not triggered by the totality of the writing but certain aspects closer to the surface level. They also get it from reading slop because it hits the same triggers.
It's like how evolution taught humans that sugar indicates a good densely-packed food source, so then corporations just started putting sugar in everything and humans eat it as ravenously as they eat actual food.
I read his take as not that "we've solved prose", but that we've created the McDonald's slop food version of prose, and people who are undiscerning will cause it to succeed and dominate the culture. While the effects of other people eating McDonald's affects us all in indirect ways, the effects of other people accepting lowest common denominator slop art/labor is going to be much more dire.