what I want when I read

I am indifferent to the debate about what LLMs can or cannot do. I only know what interests me: writing good English and reading the well-considered words of other human beings. (Human beings have certain shared experiences on which I place great value. YMMV.) But the increased power of LLMs has had the, to me unexpected, effect of showing me how much of the contemporary writing that I’ve been reading, especially online, over the past few years may as well have been written by LLMs.

To take just one example among thousands, when I look at the online journal Aeon — something I stopped doing a couple of years ago — I see essay after essay after essay that looks like it’s been run through Language Optimizer 3.5: Okay, now let’s put the Provocation Slider at just the point where the argument is slightly unexpected but could not possibly offend. Every essay seems to have been written by the same person (or bot) under a variety of names. The Style options are always set to

21st Century Standard

American Standard

Longform journalism

Science Bias: Mostly affirmative, occasional mild skepticism

Political Bias: Technocratic centrism, occasional mild skepticism

Nothing could be easier than to ask Claude to read Aeon and then write an essay in the Aeon style on any given topic. And so (inevitably) I suspect that every essay published in Aeon has been run through an LLM during the editorial process, even if it wasn’t actually written by one. Every edge, every rough spot, has been sanded down to a featureless and characterless smoothness.

When I read, I want to be instructed, enlightened, pleased — but these days especially I want to be surprised, puzzled, even offended. I’ve been reading (and writing about) Ezra Pound lately not in spite of but explicitly because of his extreme eccentricity and crankiness. Here’s a guy who writes a book called Jefferson and/or Mussolini and, if that’s not weird enough, at one point (seemingly chosen at random) he throws in a chapter on Confucius.

I am on the verge of making a vow to read only eccentrics and weirdos for the rest of my life.