Comment by shahar2k
11 hours ago
The real thing being said here is that the author can tell good writing from bad, and assumes everyone can... I'm a visual artist and at generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me.... But not to many folks around me! Including a few artists and art adjacent folks.
It extends well beyond creative stuff too. It makes me think of Gell-Man amnesia [1].
People can tell when something they are experts in is being done poorly, but others can't, and it frustrates the experts. Then, those same people think something completely different is being done well despite what experts in that respective field say. It's like when someone from your family reads an article about your profession and then proceeds to tell you how your job works. lol
It's a really pervasive issue in society IMO. And a few prompts in someone's favorite LLM just reinforces it to people that don't know (any better|what they don't know).
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
> generative art is blindingly obvious.... To me
Have you tested this systematically, or is it possible that you are experiencing survivorship bias? If there were any generative art pieces that you didn't notice, you would have thought that they were human-made. Therefore, all the pieces you identified were "obvious" to you. Not to mention false positives.
I imagine that they haven't done a peer-reviewed scientific study of their ability to notice generative art.
We can replace their statement by "I'm a visual artist and at generative art is often blindingly obvious.... To me....". In other words, they can notice some or most generative art but other people familiar with art can't, or at least can't as often as they do. I think what they are trying to say isn't too changed by that.
Even if it’s obvious to some at this time, as time passes artificially generated writing will become mainstream and what becomes the normal writing style. If you read IX century literature, it reads differently, the vocab is different, the sentences are built differently. It was totally normal back then. It’s not normal now. In ten years the new artificial style will become commonplace and accepted -I mean unless we artificially always make it deviate.
LLM prose has degraded with each model update, the models are now being RL'd into wall of texts that only makes sense to other agents. I think its going to become more obvious as we move forward that is llm generated because labs seem to only be focused on tool-calling/agentic-coding environments, as that's the only thing that drives revenue.
There may come players who focus on models that are good at writing for technical writing/docs , copyrighting ect but I think people will lean towards not using them and will rather have the "human touch" for the things that directly impact brand perception.
Keep in mind, every single AI company that is selling the idea that you don't need to hire designers and web design is "solved" have $100k retainer designers crafting their landing pages.
Yeah, this tracks with my experiments. About every 6 months or so for the past year-and-a-half I've tried using the "frontier" LLMs to as-near-as-possible autonomously write novel length stories, because I find it fascinating.
When I had Gemini 2.5 write a novel, it wasn't really objectively "good" by any stretch of the imagination, but while the prose was very purple and full of cliches and, well, bad writing I guess, it still felt ... subjectively good, at least for what it was.
Last week I did a run with GPT-5.6, and wow. On the one hand, it managed to produce 110,000 words that were "shockingly" coherent. The model was able to maintain state and plot lines and background details extremely well, much better than older models.
But I just don't like the prose. I haven't really liked _any_ prose that GPT-5.6 produces. It's significantly better at "instruction following" and keeping track of things, but, wow.
> “The sequence is consistent with their voluntary choices.” Mara enlarged the uncertainty field rather than the result. “It does not prove what happened to anyone we can’t observe. It does not prove contact did this. And it does not turn the Shard into treatment.”
GPT-5.6 in particular becomes so fixated on certain ideas like "consent" and epistemology, that by the end of the narrative, the prose and dialogue are all just "agent speech", despite the prompt/harness specifying that it's a _novel_ with narrative prose and such.
Interestingly, the model itself produces an accurate critique of its own output:
> The draft has become a *consent-centered medical, legal, and logistical procedural*. The important drift is therefore not that many events were omitted. It is that the retained events now prove a different thesis.
Which begs the question of if it would do better with a couple rounds of output -> critique -> revision. But I think I've had enough LLM prose for a bit...
The entire output of an LLM is also part of its input. Appending to long stretches of LLM-generated text, it will continue to get more and more robotic as the style of the input gets replicated and enhanced in the output.
It's possible to work around by generating short passages at a time with carefully constructed setup. But it's a real pain.
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I'm curious if you've tried Claude. Subjectively, I've always preferred Claude's writing over ChatGPT and Gemini.
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