Not the author’s main point, but I still want to nitpick on this.
For plain prose, humanity seems to be converging on the opinion that AI prose is bland at best and an insult at worst.
Is it? It could be, but I have two concerns before I can accept this conclusion.
Usually the problem is that the human using the LLM output has poor understanding of the sociolinguistic layer.
For example, imagine my friend is mad at me, and I ask the clanker to write an apology for him, and paste it and send it to him. Of course, the prose is going to be off. Presumably, I didn’t give the LLM enough context to figure out what tone or phrasing to use in the apology message. The LLM will use a cookie cutter response, but that doesn’t mean it was bad prose.
Em dashes, parallel constructions, rule of threes, etc are not bad prose. They are just the default kind of prose LLMs output unless you prompt them to do so otherwise.
Em dashes, parallel constructions, rule of threes, etc are not bad prose.
The first by itself, I agree — I’ve seen plenty of effective prose that uses em dashes well (LLMs are not great at using them, though, seemingly because they don’t really have the notion of catching a breath). The latter two are powerful and meant to be used sparingly; anything more and they certainly become bad prose.
I started replaying Final Fantasy XII (2006) & that game’s text dialog is full of em dashes—as written text should be to break up the monotony & convey different pause lengths.
Sure, you can coax better prose out of the machine. However it seems like your argument boils down to “defaults don’t matter.” Are you intending to argue more than that?
Not the author’s main point, but I still want to nitpick on this.
Is it? It could be, but I have two concerns before I can accept this conclusion.
For example, imagine my friend is mad at me, and I ask the clanker to write an apology for him, and paste it and send it to him. Of course, the prose is going to be off. Presumably, I didn’t give the LLM enough context to figure out what tone or phrasing to use in the apology message. The LLM will use a cookie cutter response, but that doesn’t mean it was bad prose.
score 1 · canonical
The first by itself, I agree — I’ve seen plenty of effective prose that uses em dashes well (LLMs are not great at using them, though, seemingly because they don’t really have the notion of catching a breath). The latter two are powerful and meant to be used sparingly; anything more and they certainly become bad prose.
score 1 · canonical
I started replaying Final Fantasy XII (2006) & that game’s text dialog is full of em dashes—as written text should be to break up the monotony & convey different pause lengths.
score 1 · canonical
Sure, you can coax better prose out of the machine. However it seems like your argument boils down to “defaults don’t matter.” Are you intending to argue more than that?
score 1 · canonical