Can A.I. produce writing that we want to read?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I think there’s lots of stuff where the LLM is translating information that is poorly represented into readable English where it’s fine. Though that does require someone with taste but not ability and usually someone who has taste and cares about their taste would have eventually cultivated their ability.
1. The default LLM behavior (at least what I’ve used as a consumer with ChatGPT Claude etc.) is to be excessively verbose, presumably because costs are tied to usage and therefore the assumption is that more text = better.
I’ve spent over a decade working as a copywriter, and IME the most important part of writing is the edit - what to cut out.
So I think it’s probably possible that an AI could write stuff we’d want to read, the default behavior of the AIs most people are using works against it.
2. A lot of the writing that actually gets read today is either a description of a lived experience and/or involves slang. Neither of those things are interesting if done by an AI - I don’t care about the imagined experience of an LLM.
On a recent weeklong trip to the Philippines, I generated over a 500 page novel's worth of content from AI around various aspects of Filipino history, culture, social dynamics etc. and actually went over it at least 3 times to fully absorb the material.
But if someone handed me even a 3000 word essay on the Philippines clearly written by AI, I would not be able to get to the end of it.
The issue with any AI writing is that it all sounds the same.
Once that stops being true, maybe it will be acceptable. But until then, you are left with repetitive crap. That you must wade through. Not good.
The average person is not good at spotting AI-generated content. They accept it and want to read it just as long as they don’t realise it’s not real.
I don't think you have to head over to anywhere else to see this.
But you don't need to "head over to Reddit", this is happening on HN too, with both content and comments.
I wouldn't say that most Reddit or Hacker News comments rise to the level of something that I "want to read", though.
This is true, but there’s a huge amount of real engagement as well.
> But you don't need to "head over to Reddit", this is happening on HN too, with both content and comments.
True, but it seems to get a lot less traction here.
openclaw is wildly popular in some regions of the world. jay caspian kang should write about why. it could involve some much needed introspection.
You: Do you? even if the chef is covered in bleeding pustules and cooking with rotten food?
No? That's clearly not what they were saying.
> even if it’s filled with mistakes
I find ai generated deep code wikis very valuable. They provide clear walk path to read the code. Reading code raw is always painful, trying to trace the right start points, especially with lots of legacy code.
https://deepwiki.com/ArroyoSystems/arroyo.
One really valuable thing i'm seeing in open source though is everything is being localized. Most before it was just not available. In a way, that's really good because it helps to bring the chinese and english speaking communities.
I however loath ai code comments, wikis, or anything where information density is prime. I never can understand why people like it. Each there own i guess
Strangely I have yet to get such a compelling result with my own prompts. I think for myself it is tainted with the expectation of what I really wanted and would have written had I taken the time to write the words of the story instead of the prompt.
This is a situation where the work to write the prompt is equivalent to the work to just write the story.
they both suffer from the same lack of dimension and intent.
Even after handing the agent a validator and iterating the validation, even after the validator get really good at telling the model what to do and what not to do, there’s still an emptiness.
This gives the author strong ground to rightly assert that both now and after new models render 2026 model writing’s emptiness old news, there’ll remain reasons to write, to communicate, to share understanding.
It’s nice to read something not proclaiming doom and not lamenting career death.
No matter how smart our tools become, the human condition still has plenty ahead.
Just missing some em-dashes.
Slop is a misapplication issue. Just because today’s models can pump out a lot of text doesn’t mean they’re good for it. And just because letting them run wild produces slop, doesn’t mean they don’t work well for appropriately scoped applications.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I feel like people expect Claude to just 1 shot a good story from their 2 sentence prompt.
But even a human needs to sit down and apply a structured or semi structured process over a non trivial amount of time/turns/iterations.
If you asked most people to write a short story out of nowhere with no context and 1hr. Most of them are gonna write some generic stuff.
For opinion pieces, I'd rather the human work through an opinion and read about that personal journey!
The other thing I’ve discovered is the people using AI to write and do not edit are the people who don’t do one thing…Read. So they don’t know the a paragraph becomes cringe after a bizarre metaphor. What is does isn’t wrong, but that doesn’t make it right. I agree with Mr. Kang, but I believe the future of the publishing industry will include human edited AI stories. We just haven’t gotten there yet.