Why do we treat writing as a particular sacred cow, even among us LLM users? Plenty of us (myself included) embrace LLMs for any number of applications, but we (myself included) often spit on AI generated writing and get annoyed when people try to pass it off as their own, explicitly or implicitly. It really bugs me when someone replies to an email of mine with transparently Claude-generated emails, or when blog posts have AI smell.
I don’t really get the epistemics of this. Why writing, which is arguably the most basic function of an LLM?
My main guesses are:
1) There’s no way to present a piece of writing as a distinct encapsulated artifact. You can human-write a post and say “hey, here’s some code I had Claude generate” but a blogpost has no top-level context framing, if that makes sense?
2) It feels like it’s some violation of trust in our relationship if you give me a 1000 word post or document to read, but you generated it in 20 seconds with a prompt.
There might be better reasons, or better phrasings of my reasons. But I just find it strange that in 2026, where Fable 5 actually writes pretty decent prose a lot of the time, us in-the-know AI users tend to frown on LLM-smelling text.
EDIT: I should clarify that I am very happy that I have this reflexive allergy to LLM text. I just don’t know why I feel that way.
I don’t get the downvotes, I think it’s an important question to ask when I arises.
To me, finding undisclosed LLM text just is a very strong indicator the person publishing it wants to get away with sloppy work and doesn’t respect (the time and epistemic environment of) their readers very much. Clearly this doesn’t apply to every case, it’s just by far the most common occurrence, so by posting LLM text, you’re moving into a different reference class. The most likely scenario behind someone posting LLM text, purely on very general priors, is that they wrote a short prompt and got a slop response. If the person invested more effort into the interaction and has reason to believe their LLM text is of high quality and worth reading, then they should point out why (which involves being transparent about LLM usage in the first place).
I think I’d still have this preference if there was only a single LLM in existence which was both aligned and superintelligent. Text is supposed to have effects on readers, so being transparent about the nature of a text just seems like the right move.
To me, finding undisclosed LLM text just is a very strong indicator the person publishing it wants to get away with sloppy work and doesn’t respect (the time and epistemic environment of) their readers very much.
Yeah, that is exactly how I perceive it.
Even if you let the LLM generate the answer, the least you can do is tell it “be concise” or “give me a summary” or quote the relevant part instead of dumping the entire wall of text. If you don’t bother doing even that, that signals you clearly do not value my time.
Another thing: prompts matter. If you don’t share the prompt, I have no idea whether you asked your AI to “compare X and Y, evaluate pros and cons from various perspectives, and then make a conclusion” or “give me 7 reasons why X is better than Y”. The former is potentially helpful, the lattes is not. And the more AI-psychotic the person seems, the more likely I think it was the latter.
IIRC GPT-5.5 has a chess rating of ~1600 Elo. Suppose that you asked it to write a story about two grandmasters of chess and to describe the entire game. Then the game would either be written by a chess bot or reveal GPT-5.5′s lack of the skill. If we replace chess with forecasting or writing the scenarios,[1] then you are likely to get shitty results like METR’s failed attempt to have an unrevealed model write out a report on autonomous replication.
Or doing philosophy, but AI-generated philosophy is harder to evaluate and could be confounded by the cultural hegemon’s priors, RLHF favoring sycophantic philosophy, etc.
If I ask you a question, and you have your friend answer but pass it off as your own answer, I will lose trust in you. That’s deception even if you agree with your friend’s wording.
If I hire you to do a job, and you subcontract it out without telling me, that’s breach of contract.
Writing isn’t special, writing is first. This will all happen with robots too. If I hire you to fix something, and a robot shows up, that’s going to be a big problem.
I think the subcontractor/robot situation really depends. There are cases where I hire someone purely so that something gets done, without caring about who does it. If they send another person, or a robot, I may be entirely fine with that. But there are cases where this doesn’t apply, say when I hire a person because they specifically have a great reputation or I otherwise think highly of their work and I care a lot about details and quality.
Why do we treat writing as a particular sacred cow, even among us LLM users? Plenty of us (myself included) embrace LLMs for any number of applications, but we (myself included) often spit on AI generated writing and get annoyed when people try to pass it off as their own, explicitly or implicitly. It really bugs me when someone replies to an email of mine with transparently Claude-generated emails, or when blog posts have AI smell.
I don’t really get the epistemics of this. Why writing, which is arguably the most basic function of an LLM?
My main guesses are:
1) There’s no way to present a piece of writing as a distinct encapsulated artifact. You can human-write a post and say “hey, here’s some code I had Claude generate” but a blogpost has no top-level context framing, if that makes sense?
2) It feels like it’s some violation of trust in our relationship if you give me a 1000 word post or document to read, but you generated it in 20 seconds with a prompt.
There might be better reasons, or better phrasings of my reasons. But I just find it strange that in 2026, where Fable 5 actually writes pretty decent prose a lot of the time, us in-the-know AI users tend to frown on LLM-smelling text.
EDIT: I should clarify that I am very happy that I have this reflexive allergy to LLM text. I just don’t know why I feel that way.
I don’t get the downvotes, I think it’s an important question to ask when I arises.
To me, finding undisclosed LLM text just is a very strong indicator the person publishing it wants to get away with sloppy work and doesn’t respect (the time and epistemic environment of) their readers very much. Clearly this doesn’t apply to every case, it’s just by far the most common occurrence, so by posting LLM text, you’re moving into a different reference class. The most likely scenario behind someone posting LLM text, purely on very general priors, is that they wrote a short prompt and got a slop response. If the person invested more effort into the interaction and has reason to believe their LLM text is of high quality and worth reading, then they should point out why (which involves being transparent about LLM usage in the first place).
I think I’d still have this preference if there was only a single LLM in existence which was both aligned and superintelligent. Text is supposed to have effects on readers, so being transparent about the nature of a text just seems like the right move.
Yeah, that is exactly how I perceive it.
Even if you let the LLM generate the answer, the least you can do is tell it “be concise” or “give me a summary” or quote the relevant part instead of dumping the entire wall of text. If you don’t bother doing even that, that signals you clearly do not value my time.
Another thing: prompts matter. If you don’t share the prompt, I have no idea whether you asked your AI to “compare X and Y, evaluate pros and cons from various perspectives, and then make a conclusion” or “give me 7 reasons why X is better than Y”. The former is potentially helpful, the lattes is not. And the more AI-psychotic the person seems, the more likely I think it was the latter.
Suppose that you hired an editor to write a paragraph in your post. Doesn’t this require you to disclose who actually wrote the paragraph?
IIRC GPT-5.5 has a chess rating of ~1600 Elo. Suppose that you asked it to write a story about two grandmasters of chess and to describe the entire game. Then the game would either be written by a chess bot or reveal GPT-5.5′s lack of the skill. If we replace chess with forecasting or writing the scenarios,[1] then you are likely to get shitty results like METR’s failed attempt to have an unrevealed model write out a report on autonomous replication.
Or doing philosophy, but AI-generated philosophy is harder to evaluate and could be confounded by the cultural hegemon’s priors, RLHF favoring sycophantic philosophy, etc.
If I ask you a question, and you have your friend answer but pass it off as your own answer, I will lose trust in you. That’s deception even if you agree with your friend’s wording.
If I hire you to do a job, and you subcontract it out without telling me, that’s breach of contract.
Writing isn’t special, writing is first. This will all happen with robots too. If I hire you to fix something, and a robot shows up, that’s going to be a big problem.
I think the subcontractor/robot situation really depends. There are cases where I hire someone purely so that something gets done, without caring about who does it. If they send another person, or a robot, I may be entirely fine with that. But there are cases where this doesn’t apply, say when I hire a person because they specifically have a great reputation or I otherwise think highly of their work and I care a lot about details and quality.