I have actually had AI write pretty great content, in a tone far away from it's usual "In the fast moving world of..." bollocks. I just needed to give it decent directions to avoid averageness.
I think your complaints will fade as models get better at breaking away at formulaic writing, provided people don't use them lazily.
Garbage in, garbage out, etc.
No, not at all. Humans turned out all kinds of mediocre and bland writing too. I wouldn't want to read the office memo on keeping the fridges clean as an exercise either. Even before the rise of LLM, we've had hundreds, probably thousands, maybe millions of link farm sites that are just endless bland meh content stuffed full of hyperlinks to increase SEO scores on other websites, and humans wrote all that shit too.
What LLM brings to the party that's new is it drastically lowers the cost of creating that type of crap. Like, there's a baseline cost to having a human or you yourself generating a link-sites worth of garbage. An LLM can do that in an afternoon, for the cost of some tokens or even just the cost of electricity if you run it locally. That means there's more mediocre garbage now than there ever was, and even respectable publications are looking to fill the gaps in their schedules with LLM generated trash.
I think when people are complaining about "there's AI slop now" that would be better stated as "there is so much MORE slop content now," and the fact that a huge amount of it sounds the same because it's generated by the same models in use by different places, is why it signals very strongly as AI.
> I have actually had AI write pretty great content, in a tone far away from it's usual "In the fast moving world of..." bollocks. I just needed to give it decent directions to avoid averageness.
Show me some, I'm genuinely curious if it still sounds the same to me.
That said, it's also worth noting: you put in effort to make the LLM make text that didn't read like LLM text, and I keep repeating this point where I discuss this but: these technologies are being developed directly to be appealing to people who don't wanna put in the effort. And maybe you could argue well learning how to prompt LLMs correctly so they make better stuff isn't nearly as hard as learning to write better yourself or paint better or whatever, and that's probably true at least to some degree? But again: these tools are made for and are marketed heavily towards people who don't want to put in the work to learn skills, and I can't imagine for most of them that prompt engineering will be so much more appealing than learning to write in order to change that.
Similarly, I think it's a mistake to say that "the output can only ever be average". Clearly that's not the case - ChatGPT already writes and answers questions to a well above average standard. The insight is that you can tailor the distribution from which your "average" is taken. Average what? Average web page? Average HN comment? Average essay by a once-in-century deep thinker? Crudely speaking, that is what "prompting" is all about. If all you ever got was "the average text", then you would have no control at all.
It's still almost-always obviously AI generated. If not in style in the way the logic flows. AI has a place in the creative process. And it's perfect for filling content. (A lot of communications, including by important people, is content filling.) But if you're writing to persuade or explain, an AI finish undercuts the "writer's" bona fides. (Unless they're making a point about AI.)