LLMs are making inroads into just about every industry on the planet, they’re everywhere now. AI for X, AI for Y, if there’s a thing that somebody is willing to pay for, there’s another person looking for a way to use LLMs to do it. But no human activity is becoming as dominated by LLMs as writing. It’s not that I can’t see the attraction of it as an author, especially where you feel a pressure to produce a lot of content. They’re very good at that, volume. I’ve experimented with LLM assisted writing in the past (nowadays I don’t even use them for spell-checking).

People use LLMs to assist them in writing on blogs, social media, newspapers, books, and they use them for spell checking, grammar, fact checking, and unfortunately, in way too many cases, to just write the whole thing outright. Once you learn to recognize the idioms and idiosyncrasies of LLM writing, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s everywhere. And it’s exhausting.

Even worse, it’s boring. All writing is homogenizing, slowly turning into the same slop. You see the same patterns everywhere, “it’s not x, it’s why”, em-dashes, or why not: “you’re not imagining it, the problem is real”. That last one actually drives me over the wall, I don’t know why, I just can’t stand it.

Increasingly everyone is having a strong negative reaction to this mass produced slop. It’s infuriating to invest time into reading something only to realize the author didn’t invest the corresponding amount of time into writing it. What’s interesting is that this is true even where the content itself might actually be fine. Correct, properly researched, it doesn’t matter.

Oxide RFD 576

This was the first thing I read that I felt like really articulated the problem. Oxide Computers have this wonderful convention of writing long form documents for enabling discussions and establishing conventions, Request for Discussion(s), and many of them are public. RFD 576 deals with the use of LLMs. The part specifically that’s relevant here is section 2.4, LLMs as writers.

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

So in fact it doesn’t matter whether the content is good, or even that the writing is fine, it’s the action of using an LLM to write instead of writing yourself. The very fact that the author reduced the effort they made to product the content is a violation of the social contract.

You can’t avoid it

Even if you’re avoiding using LLMs to write, you’re likely still being affected by the torrent of generated text. Apart from using LLM language to make fun of LLMs, like the ubiquitous “you’re absolutely right”, these tools are changing how we speak in subtle ways. A study at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development showed ChatGPT’s penchant for specific words increased their prevalence even in spoken human language, increasing the frequency of words like delve, realm, meticulous, adept, boast, swift, and comprehend. Even if you’re not directly using it, the products of generative AI are everywhere.

Low-background steel is the name for steel produced before the detonation of the first atomic bombs, and is increasingly sought after. The many nuclear tests during the 1940s and 50s filled the atmosphere with enough radioactive materials to taint the entire surface of the planet and steel produced after that point is not “clean” enough for certain applications, like particle detectors. Okay, turns out, that’s not quite true anymore. Global anthropogenic background radiation has apparently dropped low enough that recently produced steel can be used for most of these things now. But let’s not let that get in the way of a good metaphor.

Anything written after November 30, 2022 is to some degree affected by the proliferation of LLMs. You can’t get around that, other than by exclusively reading old content.

Writing in the post-LLM world

Subtle taint aside, there will only be an increasing demand for original thought and expression, both from individual humans, and from the model companies to use as training material. The ability to write original content, without LLMs, will just become more valuable as the generated content takes over more and more of the internet. I guess the hard part will be finding it in the constant onslaught of LinkedIn thought leadership posts and AI generated cat pictures.

One of the most interesting consequences of this is how it’s affecting what we consider good writing. For as long as humanity has had grammar, and writing, we’ve cared about it being done well. We’ve put a premier on good grammar, vast vocabulary, good use of expressions and metaphors, and general text composition. LLMs do all of that just fine. Sure, they just won’t stop repeating the same patterns, the expressions are tired, the metaphors are a bit out there, and they’ve given the em-dash a bad name. But the reality is that students today in school have the option of either working hard and get an average grade, or do no work at all, have ChatGPT write the paper, and get a top score. Take the writing of Claude today and show it to someone 10 years ago, I doubt they’d have that much to complain about. It’s repetitive over time, when you’ve read enough of it, but it does match a lot of the traditional criteria of “proper” writing. Not Nobel prize winning, but fine.

But today what I crave is original expression. I don’t care if the grammar is wrong, as long as it’s different. I don’t care if the vocabulary is limited, just don’t use the word “delve”, please. Instead of looking down on an author for typos, I’ll cherish every single one. I don’t want anymore of the bland generic average of humanity that is AI-generated text, I want quirky and different. I want human writing.

I commit to not using LLMs to write

You took the time to read my writing, I appreciate that. I fulfilled my half of the contract too, I spent much of a day writing this, while watching old movies on the TV. I enjoy writing and I’ve been doing it all my life, although with varying levels of consistency. I’m going to try to make this more of a routine thing now. It feels meaningful. Worth doing.