I don’t want to read your LLM-infected prose!

I’ve written before about “AI”, and while the substance of my opinions is largely the same, I have gotten a lot more experience with it. I may write a follow-up post someday.

This is not that post. This is purely a manifestation of my seething hatred for “writing” in the modern era.

I will say this as simply and tersely as possible: I do not want to read prose you’ve sucked the life out of by plugging it into ChatGPT! I would seriously prefer reading something you came up with entirely by yourself, spelling errors and grammatical errors et al. It would actually be less painful.

I’m sick to death of it. I’m especially sick of reading “guerrilla LLM prose”, where the author makes no mention of the fact that they used an LLM to “improve” their writing. Usually, it starts off alright, but a few paragraphs deep, suddenly the text is waxing poetic about a concept that is really not that profound. You do not need that many words! Please, I’m begging you, stop using the rule of three!

I’m tired of stupid metaphors. I’m especially sick of metaphors clustered closely together. Nobody with a pulse writes like this! Are metaphors the only language construct LLMs have yet been able to grasp? Or is it the humans using it who think it makes their prose more clever? Perhaps you’ve heard this cliché before: less is more. The phrase itself is overused, but the idea isn’t. I don’t want writing to not contain any metaphors; I want them to only contain metaphors when it materially adds something!

Every time I see a sentence composed purely of nouns for “emphasis”, it stokes a primal rage within me.

I do not ever want to read, "It's not [X]. It's [Y]." or "It's not just [A]—it's [B]!" again.

If your writing reads like this and you've never heard of ChatGPT before, all this criticism applies just as harshly, but I will be the first to say you lack the cardinal sin of Sloth.

And all of this shit together? It’s too much. It’s just too much. This new brand of purple prose is very frustrating to read.

Enough already!

By the way, if you're interested in reading a book that wasn't infected by LLM-derived prose, check out my book at getmybook.store