alt Hacker NewsI wonder why AI labs have not worked on improving the quality of the text outputs. Is this as the author claims a property of the LLMs themselves? Or is there simply not much incentive to create the best writing LLM?
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I remember an article a few weeks back[1] which mentioned the current focus is improving the technical abilities of LLMs. I can imagine many (if not most) of their current subscribers are paying for the technical ability as opposed to creative writing.
This also reminded me that on OpenRouter, you can sort models by category. The ones tagged "Roleplay" and "Marketing" are probably going to have better writing compared to models like Opus 4 or ChatGPT 5.2.
[1]: https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/sam-altman...
I mean there's tons of better-writing tools that use AI like Grammarly etc. For actual general-purpose LLMs, I don't think there's much incentive in making it write "better" in the artistic sense of the world... if the idea is to make the model good at tasks in general and communicate via language, that language should sound generic and boring. If it's too artistic or poetic or novel-like, the communication would appear a bit unhinged.
"Update the dependencies in this repo"
"Of course, I will. It will be an honor, and may I say, a beautiful privilege for me to do so. Oh how I wonder if..." vrs "Okay, I'll be updating dependencies..."
That's like asking why McDonald's doesn't improve the quality of their hamburger. They can, but only within the bounds of mass produced cheap crap that maximizes profit. Otherwise they'd be a fundamentally different kind of company.
The argument is that the best writing is the unexpected, while an LLM's function is to deliver the expected next token.