alt Hacker News> I can't fathom thinking that LLM writing is even remotely passable. People that think this should honestly read more.
This makes me think you're only exposing yourself to high quality writing online and from an intelligent circle of friends and coworkers. The average person's reading and writing abilities are _atrocious_ and only getting worse. We're almost at the point where kids are communicating through abbreviations and emojis exclusively. LLM prose is significantly better than what the average person can produce.
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Are we also saying it's acceptable to feed people junk because it's better than what they would cook?
At some point you're just making bad excuses for false scarcity.
...or read.
At least in the USA: 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. 54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level [1].
1: https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
Someone way more eloquent than me should write a column titled "Why do we read?"
Way back in the past (around 30 years ago) I remember reading an article on "how to read a book" or a similar subject. They argued that, you should not skip the acknowledgments, preface and other "personal" related sections of a book, because it was there where you got a glimpse of the person that was writing the book. The idea being that, you should had in mind that the person writing was explaining something through you.
Carl Sagan even has a video where he argues Books/Writing is some sort of communication through time.
Now, this has been the case historically: A person writes some text (even in botched language like my writing, as English is not my first language) with thinking that someone else in the future will read the ideas and reason about them.
But what about text written by an LLM? Does it have inherent intention? When reading LLM text, it feels like looking at those "this is not a person" photos. Yeah, they are words, yeah they form sentences and paragraphs but... they lack "soul".