logoalt Hacker News

wimlyesterday at 7:42 PM3 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

jameshartyesterday at 8:58 PM

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.

show 1 reply
dofmyesterday at 8:35 PM

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.

wimlyesterday at 7:56 PM

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.