The revolt of the reader

Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them. But I am writing this now because — speaking as a reader — we are exasperated: too many people — people we otherwise like and respect! — are writing (or otherwise putting their name to) pieces that are clearly LLM-authored. We readers are left with pointed questions for those promoting LLM-authored pieces: do you think readers can’t tell? Or do you think readers don’t care? To answer the first question, readers can absolutely tell. To those who read broadly, the hand of the LLM is so clear it’s as if the writer’s intellectual fly is open. In fact, it’s so jarring that I…