I guess it depends on the alternative. The writing of many inexperienced writers will surely get better in all kinds of ways. But the writing I would want to read almost certainly gets worse in ways that I care about. LLM writing to me almost always feels very thin and “style over substance” (and then even in a style I grew to dislike). Naturally, writing is a very high-dimensional thing, and “things different people value in writing” equally so. So there will be different answers for different writers and readers. To me, the negatives are:
It’s a less accurate representation of the author’s thinking (assuming thinking on side of the author took place)
It tends to be full of “empty sentences”, hedging, shallow examples
Writing all over the world gets heavily correlated
I subjectively find the style annoying
It potentially robs us of a useful signal of who expands actual effort in their work
The “Not X—Y” pattern in particular often seems quite useless. The “not”-part could usually just be omitted without making things worse. It’s rarely something that people would have thought that needs to be corrected. And in the rare cases that it is: why not write in a way to avoid such misconceptions to begin with instead of repeatedly creating and then correcting them? Occasionally, it can be useful to get people to a certain notion and then correct it, as a rhetorical or pedagogical move, but certainly not 5x within any given text.
LLMisms (LLM editorializing) serves to slow down reading, in my experience. Long long ago my writing had been meandering, but ever since Steven Pinker’s “The Sense Of Style” I write directly. Short and medium sentences, just the information I want to convey. But with Claude’s writing of our articles, one of my two followers still complains they are dense. So I’m not sure if removing the slow-downs would be objectively better even though I wouldn’t put them in myself.
I guess it depends on the alternative. The writing of many inexperienced writers will surely get better in all kinds of ways. But the writing I would want to read almost certainly gets worse in ways that I care about. LLM writing to me almost always feels very thin and “style over substance” (and then even in a style I grew to dislike). Naturally, writing is a very high-dimensional thing, and “things different people value in writing” equally so. So there will be different answers for different writers and readers. To me, the negatives are:
It’s a less accurate representation of the author’s thinking (assuming thinking on side of the author took place)
It tends to be full of “empty sentences”, hedging, shallow examples
Writing all over the world gets heavily correlated
I subjectively find the style annoying
It potentially robs us of a useful signal of who expands actual effort in their work
The “Not X—Y” pattern in particular often seems quite useless. The “not”-part could usually just be omitted without making things worse. It’s rarely something that people would have thought that needs to be corrected. And in the rare cases that it is: why not write in a way to avoid such misconceptions to begin with instead of repeatedly creating and then correcting them? Occasionally, it can be useful to get people to a certain notion and then correct it, as a rhetorical or pedagogical move, but certainly not 5x within any given text.
LLMisms (LLM editorializing) serves to slow down reading, in my experience. Long long ago my writing had been meandering, but ever since Steven Pinker’s “The Sense Of Style” I write directly. Short and medium sentences, just the information I want to convey. But with Claude’s writing of our articles, one of my two followers still complains they are dense. So I’m not sure if removing the slow-downs would be objectively better even though I wouldn’t put them in myself.