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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, another LLM-voice article.

I'm getting to the point that I almost have a physical feeling of revulsion/nausea when I read something outside an open Claude Code session that is written in an AI voice.

I'm so sick of that voice -- word choice, phrasing, style... it's hard to define and frustrating because it's both pervasive, influential on human writers including myself (I found myself using the phrase "doing a lot of work" in a Slack message about a word someone chose to use :grimace:), and presumably compounding on future LLMs.

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Same here. I started describing it as the “uncanny valley” of text. It’s like a gut reaction that something is off with the text even if you can’t pinpoint it immediately.

I concur. It's interesting that this seems so difficult to get rid of; despite actively trying to overlook the taste of LLM writing, it still grates, and this does not happen to me in the same way even with communication from half-illiterate human idiots.

It's kinda fascinating how far LLM coding/problem solving has come without making much progress on the annoyingness of their writing. Any theories?

Not that it's an ideal solution, but you have all the tools you need to do something about it. You can put all your preferred writing style guidelines into an LLM and have it ingest and rewrite any text you dislike.

That's like saying a robot will be a better friend if I use a more skin-like material for its face.

The LLM-voice revulsion isn't just about particular idiosyncrasies. Another commenter put it well - the "uncanny valley of text".

Only if the problem is ideological, ie. you don't like the "idea" of llm's. But if in fact your actual dislike is the style of writing, then you can simply change the defaults. It's pretty easy to make a llm conform to your preferred style, avoid the use of em-dashes, or reduce verbosity, etc.