Comment by dofm
18 hours ago
My main problem — which I am sure being middle-aged compounds — is that I struggle to retain information that an LLM has written or produced. I cannot explain why but it is a consistent problem.
In a week’s time I might remember the substance of your comment and some of its shape as a matter of course. Nothing LLM-written that I see today will stick, no matter how curated it was.
This is a complaint I hear others voice and one I have myself. I think it comes down to the text being poorly written. Sure, LLMs are good at a lot of the surface indicators of good writing: they have a wide vocabulary, they use grammatical sentences, they break up the text into paragraphs, sections, and lists. But they're terrible at organizing the text and marshalling a concept to get it across to a specific audience. The section and paragraph breaks are meaningless, the metaphors are unenlightening, the rhythm is exhaustingly uniform. Pre-LLM, you'd find this kind of text in marketing materials, corporate PR, and heavily padded sophomore essays.
Possibly an inevitability, since LLM text is specifically generated to be low entropy. It’s smooth, optimized for minimal perplexity.
And if you don’t find any of the word choices a little bit perplexing, your brain can just gloss over it. There is no meaning here. It’s like smalltalk.
Interesting — do you happen to have any suggestions for something I could read about this?
It really bugs me, this aspect of LLMs, and yet I find myself sounding like a lunatic when I describe it, until others chime in and say they have the same experience.
The weird, sort of sub-surface uniformity is what I notice. It appears to be doing all the right things, but you can't feel the writer.
It is like a rollercoaster that doesn't have any jerk or jounce.
And reading my own comment it has the same kinds of problems (lookit all those 3-example lists!). I wouldn't hire me for an editing job.
Perhaps it's just a bias? You are already negatively biased against LLM writing so you disregard stuff you read when you suspect it's an LLM. This could also be a selection bias. It may be that you generally struggled to retain information but you are more aware of it when LLMs are involved.
I don't think so, no, because it extends to LLM-generated text I want to recall.
I use LLMs to generate starter/tutorial material. I may hate the way Claude writes but I absolutely don't hate the way Gemma 4 writes. But I have to continuously consult it in a way that I do not with human-written text, which gets its message across in a more persistent way I find less troubling.
(This non-memorability extends to AI images and video.)
You are right that there are some confounding factors in my life but while I was worried about middle age affecting recall, I find actually I am still remembering stuff humans wrote pretty much fine.
ETA: there is one thing that I have noticed that does affect recall that is specific to LLMs: watching text roll out word-by-word in LLM chat, I think, damages recall. It's engaging the wrong kind of memory and focus.
So I now let it generate and I'm trying to find decent ways to format it e.g. as PDF, to give it the best chance.
This could be generational; there were many studies twenty years ago that suggest that people a decade or so younger than me who grew up with full colour books and magazines and multimedia can read less-linear text layouts more comfortably, for example, so it's not out of the question that there's something generational going on here too.