More thoughts about AI and writing

It goes without saying GPT lags at writing. Even a pro subscription of Astra produces prose that is predictably AI, and easily identified by readers and software like Pangram as such. It has usual “failure modes” such as wordiness and lack of affect. Why can’t it do writing as well as it does math or coding? That is the million dollar question. I think this needs to be reframed; it writes well…for an audience of other agents. Agents have no concept of wordiness or overuse of hedging language. If anything, it’s a positive, because it minimizes the risk of being misunderstood, which is good, but when overdone, leads to bad writing. A lot of what goes into writing is what is unsaid. With coding or math, the output is what matters, so the code being bloated or bad math notation is not fatal. End users cannot see it or will just work around it, albeit frustratingly . AI math papers are sometimes described as confusing but the results are correct most of the time. Writers tend to have…