@cstross Is this article ai?
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Of cause it does. So the result becomes more and more readable for the deliberately uneducated masses. Style? Content? Facts? Who cares?
@cstross neat article, thanks.
I had a realization a while ago that LLM writing came at me with the same vibe I caught when I was briefly a teacher, and again in the workplace, where I dealt with people who had unacknowledged literacy challenges. Young folks who assembled written work by cribbing from others and rearranging words “by shape” to fulfill the requirements - always managed to convey zero meaningful thought.
I can’t help seeing in that elements of 1984 where Orwell describes successive reduction in vocabulary with the intended goal of making rebellious thought impossible
@cstross It is impossible to replace the human experience with a machine. The moment by its nature is sancrosanct; it's only in this atmosphere of gaming real estate insanity where life's nature is just another bitcoin to earn where we have lost our way.
@cstross there’s worse related things.
We come to see anything that the AI can not and does not produce as invalid and thus reading these bullshit, taupe texts shrinks our creative range, our sense of the possible, snd our willingness to forge out own path or follow someone else down there’s to knew territory.
Narrowing the range of semantics to an average is one thing.
Strangling our range of ideas is another.
@cstross As someone who, next to having a little knowledge about LLMs, was once complemented for choice of words by a native-speaking professor I hung around with at a conference for a few days, I am not surprised about this LLM fact. The professor however then was somewhat surprised of his own uttering and continued "but I had a few beers".
@cstross this is indeed a very neat explanation why the best possible outcome of an LLM is still terrible.
@cstross Is this article ai?
Although it's not within xyr academic field, Claudio Nastruzzi has touched upon the subject in at least one opinion piece before.
@cstross Well, that explains why every time I tried #AI for improving a text snippet, I was very disappointed.
It always wants to convince me that I should remove any uncommon sentence structures and replace them with generic ones, which often removes any personality from written text.
If you ask it to make a small addition to an existing text, it likes to rephrase everything in a more generic way and is unable to add a subtext layer. Honestly, it's just useless for writing in my opinion.
@cstross "beigification' is aspect of the recursive pollution problem
https://berryvilleiml.com/2026/01/10/recursive-pollution-and-model-collapse-are-not-the-same/
@cstross Blandness as a service.
Really great article, thanks for posting.
I know those who use ChatGPT to improve professional work letters. AI ChatGPT doesn't "improve" writing to refine meaning and nuance, it is designed to dumb down writing in successive loops to the most middling 6th grade level of comprehension thereby "improving" its "reach". It's the specifically designed feature of AI "editing".
I recently read a ChatGPT "improved" letter that may violate the Civil Rights Act by using a term that is a red flag for a lawsuit. I alerted the sender who confessed to using ChatGPT because her boss uses it and raves about it.
An ungraceful letter that keeps you legal is safer than a "clean" "professional" GPT letter that gets you sued. Know the risks!
Or in other words "Why AI is writing in corporate speech"
Reducing the text to the most common denominators?
