Enjoying reading in the age of LLMs
I used to really value the art of essay writing. There seemed to be such a richness in the different ways people would construct arguments, structure those arguments, then deliver those arguments stylistically, not just from the perspective of being persuaded as a reader but also from the perspective of seeing how a given writer thinks, relates to the living tradition of language, and understands the world conceptually. But it's basically lost most of its meaning to me in this age of LLMs. The reality is, LLMs are capable of writing texts that, if you gave them to a seasoned reader 5 years ago, they'd say it was well written and indicative of a truly thoughtful mind. Even if there currently exist certain tells with LLMs, those styles certainly existed in different ways in real human writing beforehand. Now, those perfectly reasonable set of styles are verboten and we have to dedicate half our deep focus to figuring out whether, or to what extent, an essay or article was written by AI. It's difficult to enjoy, let alone care, about essay writing and the writers behind them now.
I can still find value in books, though, because they were written in the past and I don't mind never reading any non-scientific book published after 2022 if it comes down to it.
I'm been thinking a lot about writing in the age of LLMs.
Well said. I hate the idea that more and more writing will lack those things, and a lot more besides.
This is likely true, provided the prompt was good, it was a top tier model, and with some iteration. But there's a caveat: There's a big difference between the first impression of AI prose and how it lands once you've seen enough of it to catch the repeating patterns. It's hollow... the signal to noise ratio is usually pretty dismal.
The problem is that isn't stopping people from using it, and those people are more likely to be from the demographic that has no particular love of writing.
Personally I don't see AI writing supplanting human writing. At least for now, at the current quality level of AI output. And I'm happy to see that people are still pushing back and rejecting obvious slop. It might be a hopeless fight but it seems totally reasonable to want organic reading material.
It depends on what type of writing you mean. There are certain types of writing that AI already has largely supplanted. Low level copyrighting is completely done by AI now, and the current models are way more capable than they ever needed to be to create that work.
I imagine a lot of technical writing will also be completely taken over by AI as well.
Most summarization, translation, and report writing are in the process of being taken over by AI as well.
If you're talking about writing that people consume for pleasure or enjoyment though, I think some of that may be taken over, but there will always be a market for human written work. The issue is always going to be actually trusting that it really was human written. There's no way to verify that, nor can there ever be, because of the nature of text.
Agreed, I should have said qualified it with "completely". No question that it's already replacing a lot of human writing.
Handwritten and drawn 'zines will probably remain human-made for a decent while.
I was looking for discussion and analysis of a book I recently finished and it was so hard to wade through mountains of SEO optimized crap and AI slop. I feel like I used to be able to find some English professor's personal geocities blog fairly easily and get some actual interesting viewpoints. I wish I could filter out websites based on Alexa rank or something, just remove the top 10% or 20% or even 50% most visited websites on the net from my search results so I could find some good "deep cuts" with real discussion and opinions.
Have you considered trying to find a local writing club or something similar? I’m not even sure those exist since I haven’t looked. But I hear that you cannot trust the world at large not to write using LLMs. Considering the commercial incentive to use LLMs to publish this content at scale, I agree with that mistrust.
Still, if you were able to find a small community with shared values, you might be able to find that joy from reading works by others you personally know and trust.