Why would you struggle to define what's wrong? It's overly verbose and weirdly flowery.
I wish LLMs were better. But currently, when I read that drivel, I feel repulsed.
I wish LLMs were better. But currently, when I read that drivel, I feel repulsed.
It sounds good on a surface level, but it's empty linguistic calories. It's Instagram writing. Lord Dorwin would write like that.
It's also tricky to prompt an LLM as you would an (engaged) human copywriter, because the human has extra cues like "why am I being asked to do this anyway", "who asked me" and "what about this coffeeshop is special but isn't in or isn't emphasised by the prompt/original copy". Plus extra research they may do. By the time you've prompted it carefully enough, and verified the emphasis is where you want it, you're basically just writing it.
Of course what the LLM will do here is the same crap job that you can get from a guy of Fiverr that they bang out in a few minutes. Because that's where most copy comes from in the first place and that's the training data. And the LLM and the Fiverr guy have the same lack of investment in the job. And, as the Internet, full of the breathless writing about pasionate, committed experience packages proves, that's good enough for most people.
It's a bit like smartphone cameras wrecking the low-end camera market. If you want to sell standalone cameras now, you have to sell very good cameras.
However when I read the overly verbose and weirdly flowery text of the late 19th century, as an example, it feels different than the weirdly flowery press release style LLMs favor.
Perhaps it's a result that writing and reading were both a mark of education and more complex writing was valued over a quick parse by the reader, which is highly valued today. Or, maybe, the use of hand- or type-writing led to train-of-thought subclause-rich writing, because it's hard to recast the sentence without a cursor, and one iteration of fair copying was probably enough for most purposes. Furthermore, much less writing was even done, far fewer people did it and it was expensive and laborious to do, transmit and reproduce. And what was written was often not written by, or intended for reading by, people without expensive educations.
Most people probably read a lot more text now than most people did back then, and the do it faster and more disposably. Things these days are often written to be quickly scanned, perhaps only by automatic search crawlers, have keywords recognised and pulled out then the chaff is discarded. Which works better with short, simple sentences. And prominent keywords are important, leading to self-reinforcement of both a set of shibboleth words that "all good copy" should have and how and when those special words are to be used.
If you have one normal sentence and one overly verbose, the latter will have more tokens and therefore more weight.