In Peter Watt's Blindsight, the aliens understand language as spam, a hostile intent to waste their time, and respond by opening fire.

Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view.

I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing.

A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications.

With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in.

LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.