Comment by gizajob

Hmmm I was using Claude Opus for the most part. I didn’t notice any particular shortness in the length of the sentences, but that’s also an issue in itself – the whole thing is just average fine-ness: the sentences are fine, the paragraphs are fine, everything is generic and inoffensive and fine. But at the same time it was giving huge amounts of pushback when I was getting it to interrogate logical faults of certain domains, to the point where I was having to argue with and even convince an AI using data and even its own analysis that there was cause to talk about certain things from a certain angle (can appreciate I’m being vague about which things). It can’t write complex, deeply-claused sentences (or won’t). And it also wants to write snappy little concluding sentences that make a fairly well-argued piece of sociological analysis read like Sex and the City or something.

And just like that, the book got abandoned.

N.b. some of its analysis and laying out of faults in arguments was actually pellucid and brilliant, it can’t be denied. Just it comes with prose that can’t really be used for anything. And even on another occasion when I got it to help me redraft and extend a different book of mine, then it randomly and consistently started stripping out all the stylistic flourishes out of my sentences, to the point where it couldn’t notice that word choices were very deliberate and actually set up little punchlines and logical payoffs paragraphs or chapters hence. And even when I explained and showed it what it was doing, it was like “ahh that’s so clever and brilliant” but just continued to do the same thing.