This is a complaint I hear others voice and one I have myself. I think it comes down to the text being poorly written. Sure, LLMs are good at a lot of the surface indicators of good writing: they have a wide vocabulary, they use grammatical sentences, they break up the text into paragraphs, sections, and lists. But they're terrible at organizing the text and marshalling a concept to get it across to a specific audience. The section and paragraph breaks are meaningless, the metaphors are unenlightening, the rhythm is exhaustingly uniform. Pre-LLM, you'd find this kind of text in marketing materials, corporate PR, and heavily padded sophomore essays.
Possibly an inevitability, since LLM text is specifically generated to be low entropy. It’s smooth, optimized for minimal perplexity.
And if you don’t find any of the word choices a little bit perplexing, your brain can just gloss over it. There is no meaning here. It’s like smalltalk.
Interesting — do you happen to have any suggestions for something I could read about this?
It really bugs me, this aspect of LLMs, and yet I find myself sounding like a lunatic when I describe it, until others chime in and say they have the same experience.
