Why do posts written by AI stand out so badly and say so little?
It’s obvious if you look at what an LLM does. It takes a training set and encodes the probability of words occuring in certain orders relative to the context provided to it (all the other words). It then regenerates text that fits that probability matrix.
Now, what is most likely to occur in human written texts in the widest variety of contexts? Clichés of course. That’s why they’re clichés. People insert them into their writing because they like how they sound and they’re the first thing that comes to mind.
A good writer thinks for a few moments, when confronted with a cliché, then finds a better way to say the same thing. A way that hopefully conveys the specific meaning they’re trying to communicate. This means the writing is more interesting, more stimulating and more likely to convey the intended meaning.
What the LLM does is pumps out each word based on a randomisation process. The words with the highest probability in the current context aren’t definitely going to come out, but they are far more likely to come out than anything else. Meanwhile, the interesting, the novel and the unique will hardly ever get reproduced.
In essence, if you ask an LLM to generate new text based on brief prompts, rather than condense down much longer existing text, what you get is cliche soup with a side of word salad. You don’t get meaning or information because there was no information in the prompt.
The irony of using LLMs as a low effort way to produce textual output is that to get it to do anything useful you have to write at least twice as much text as you actually want, and ask the LLM to say it more concisely. Then you have to proof read to make sure it still says what you meant to say (because LLMs have no concept of intent or meaning).
Ultimately, if you actually want to say anything, or have anyone actually read what you say, it’s quicker to write it yourself. Then, if it’s not that great, that’s okay. You still said what you meant and people understood your message. You don’t have to be a great writer to do that. You just need to have something to say.
LLMs have nothing new to say. That’s the point. That’s what they were designed to do.