One of my favourite rules: perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. This is invaluable to writing. So much text from an LLM feels superfluous, like I could've said the same wall of text with just a few sentences. Writing is tightly coupled with thinking: refining thoughts, arguments, ideas, discarding them, mulling over them. LLM text always raises this nagging question in my mind: am I reading what you think, or what your agent parroted back and you accepted?

I can imagine that one of the aspects of being social creatures is that we are drawn to the entropy/surprise factor of natural language produced by a brain that isn't our own. Deriving a shared understanding without being able to precisely model the language output of someone else is like, the fundamental substance of conversation.

Maybe that's the key ingredient that's missing from LLM-generated text. Even when there is actual content there, there's this lack of surprise / uncertainty in its delivery that we require to stay engaged. We may not know what will be communicated, but knowing exactly how it will be communicated just kills our innate interest.

"I just can't seem to stay interested and read LLM text."

For foreign text, sure. But I never was never able to read New York Times articles about some invention that started with Lucy leaving her home at seven o'clock.

If you have a specific question, reading LLM text can be more interesting than anything in the world. Even Wikipedia.

I know what you mean. The latest models are _better_, but there's still something off about the prose they generate. Obvious tells are mostly gone now, but some internal spider-sense still makes me narrow my eyes.

I also started to just abandon writeups obviously written by LLMs. They feel (and usually are) just cheap marketing/selling posts. Not to mention why would I read stuff nobody wrote and likely never read themselves? There's little value in such content. I don't even point LLMs to such websites to get a TLDR. Part of why reading is interesting is the author, their history, beliefs and style. In the world of LLMs content, the author is some undefined diffuse alien with a made up personality.

Sorry to single you out, but it’s surprising that this is such a consensus opinion around here. If an LLM isn’t giving me exactly what I need in the format I want, I tweak skills or system prompts until it does.

These aren’t deep AI hustle bro hacks, it’s literally just editing some text. If a big part of your day is reading AI-generated words, slap something together to make it do words gooder.

>its information density is often really low

I find that it often isn't just too low, but also too high at the same time. It has a lot of information that is irrelevant, burying far too little relevant information for the work needed to extract it. I wonder if this is a side effect of attention mechanism, where the AI's ability to track information in a document is far less hampered by other information, leading to it organizing information to be both dense per word but any specific concept to be sparsely spread throughout the writing. I also wonder if this is why the order feels off, because the AI doesn't need for the information to be well ordered to the same extent that a human does, so the order of storing information is often overlooked when storing it into a document (and even information that needs to be ordered might have the ordering information separate from how it is ordered in the document).