Don't take this as a defense of LLMs, because it absolutely isn't, but:

>Or maybe I am just not used to reading novel.

If you're not even used to reading novels, how can you judge the results of writing one? That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction.

▲

thelucent 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for sharing your perspective.

The quote you referenced is about “the weird” feelings. Maybe its weird because I didn’t read too many novels. So its totally something personal to me. Not that weird for me = bad writing.

However, I do read a lot of LLM generated output. I spent weeks tinkering with LLM while I was asking it to ghostwrite my novels. So I was exposed to a lot of text that has this weird feelings. Which I eventually felt when I read this article.

Its like hearing a song that has the same chords so many times, and then you listen to another song that had the same chords, you might be able to know that they are kinda the same, even when you don’t listen to a lot of songs.

▲

KineticLensman 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction.

Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.

	▲	moritzwarhier 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		An important part of writing is also to write as the reader, eschewing meaningless fluff and sentences that use bombastic emotional language without really communicating. The latter is prevalent in LLM writing. Imitating "poetry" without the feelings is something that the default, "aligned" chat models with reinforcement all do in one way or another. It's hard to get even a technical essay without empty emotional language. And I'm only speaking for myself, I like reading novels, but it's perfectly possible to have a slop-meter without doing so. My own signal-to-noise ratio in writing is also often bad, but with today's "frontier" LLM output I feel there's a specific tendency towards this harmless, emtpy, flowery language full of false dichotomies and rhetorical devices devoid of any purpose to communicate. A model trained and fine-tuned to generate divisive Reddit threads sure has different tendencies. But for the friendly assistants, there's often this solipsism and pseudo-poetic aspect. Related, although just tangentially: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor And, regardless of the generation aspect: An essay that starts with > On bronze pirates, cloudy days, and the roads we do not know we are walking just sounds pretentious to me and doesn't spark my interest.