One construction I'm surprised the paper doesn't mention (although, to be fair, I'm sure they had plenty of options to choose from... and you have to draw the line somewhere :P) is that LLMs love to use transitive verbs intransitively[0], in a way I almost never see in human writing. At best it makes sentences weirdly ambiguous, at worst it makes them borderline incomprehensible, and it's especially annoying in technical contexts where precise language should be non-negotiable. Like, yes, I can make an educated guess about what it's trying to say, but if your so-called documentation requires readers/users to make educated guesses then something has gone terribly wrong.
[0] An example would be something like:
"The user presses a button, and the form submits."
There are valid intransitive uses of "submit," but none that make sense in this context. In this case "submit" either requires an object (like "the form submits data"--plus maybe an indirect object, like "the form submits data to the server") or should be swapped for "the form is submitted" if you absolutely don't want to supply an object.
I sort of agree but I think the issue is more subtle.
Languages change over time, and one of the well-documented "laws" of language change (using that term very fuzzily) is that people like to take irregular features of a language and generalize them to make them more regular. And there are many English verbs (particularly verbs expressing a change of state) which can be used transitively or intransitively, with equal validity:
> "I opened the door" -- "the door was opened" -- "the door opened"
> "the heat melted the ice" -- "the ice was melted" -- "the ice melted"
> "the impact cracked the glass" -- "the glass was cracked" -- "the glass cracked"
This generalization has been common, especially in jargon-y contexts, long before the rise of LLMs. A pedant might insist on saying "wait for the compiler to compile the code", and Merriam-Webster thinks "compile" can only be used transitively. But I think most developers would say "wait for the code to compile [i.e. be compiled]" is fine too. (see e.g. this XKCD comic from 2007: https://xkcd.com/303/)
In my view, this usage is completely fine as an occasional thing, especially when the social process of language change has normalized it over time for a particular verb. The issue is that LLMs drastically overuse it and pepper it everywhere. Just like "it's not X, it's Y", which is fine occasionally in human writing, but has become a dreadful cliche through overuse.
It's definitely context-dependent; it actually took me a minute to come up with a plausible example where I didn't immediately think of a counterexample of why it was a perfectly valid usage, lol.
Even as a grammar weirdo I'm not wholesale against dropping objects from verbs, especially when the object is strongly implied, or the original object becomes the new subject, like in "the heat melted the ice" > "the ice melted". But if you're writing for precision (and I'm a technical writer, so when I'm on the clock I certainly I am :P) there are times where those constructions can obscure useful details, even if they're not grammatically necessary. And there are other examples that I'd struggle to defend in any context, and frankly just give me the ick.
I was trying not to single out any actual sources I've seen, but here's one I saw the other day that made me irrationally mad, and that I think goes beyond the organic changes you mentioned:
> Talking also costs.
It costs? Costs what? Five dollars a word??
The rest of the passage made it obvious that the cost in question had to do with tokens (blatant LLMisms? in a blog post about LLMs? it's more likely than you think) (also ironic considering TFA's conclusion about this writing style being a way to reduce token usage), and maybe one day this will become a perfectly accepted usage and I'll be the old fogie moaning about how it should really say "has a cost" or whatever. But fuck, I hate it, and not just because it's an obvious tell that humans aren't steering the ship.
Yes, absolutely, that one drives me crazy too.
I think LLM-speak is heavily biased towards using as few words as possible, and as basic words as possible, even when that hurts overall clarity. To use another XKCD example, it often reminds me of "Up Goer Five": https://xkcd.com/1133/
Maybe a hot take, but I think that example is fine. Less verbose than “the form is submitted” and there’s no ambiguity, it’s the English analogue to `form.submit()`.
In your other comment, “Talking also costs.”, it’s clarified through context that talking costs tokens.
I think it’s a side-effect of the AI companies trying to reduce verbosity and redundancy, which were my personal main complaints with LLM writing. Though I believe LLMs are still verbose, and I suspect it’s because they don’t know what to remove, and these are cheap gains where the LLM removes verbosity that is obvious but expected because everyone does it.
No, it is not more clear.
What is happening is this: the AI does not know when to be a more verbose in service of clarity, and when to be brief, again in service of clarity. There is no simple relationship between expression length and clarity; it all depends. And when they are verbose, it is usually a lot of words that actually say little.
That's the problem; there is some higher level reasoning they are incapable of when it comes to language usage.
I’ve noticed this pattern a lot too, it’s awful. No human would ever write like that.