what I want when I read

I am indifferent to the debate about what LLMs can or cannot do. I only know what interests me: writing good English and reading the well-considered words of other human beings. (Human beings have certain shared experiences on which I place great value. YMMV, so you do you.) But the increased power of LLMs has had the, to me unexpected, effect of showing me how much of the contemporary writing that I’ve been reading, especially online, over the past few years may as well have been written by LLMs. For instance, when I look at the online journal Aeon — something I stopped doing a couple of years ago — I see essay after essay after essay that looks like it’s been run through Language Optimizer 3.5: Okay, now let’s put the Provocation Slider at just the point where the argument is slightly unexpected but could not possibly offend. Every essay seems to have been written by the same person (or bot) under a variety of names. The Style options are always set to 21st Century American Longform…