Given that social media posts are not free, in the sense that someone or something has to put some effort in to format the message for that particular site, I can see how a simple cost calculation would show that it is no longer worth it.

The real killer feature is the prompt compilation; it's also the hardest to get to an effective place and I frequently found myself needing more control over the context than it would allow. This was a while ago, so things may have improved. But good evals are hard and the really fancy algorithms will burn a lot of tokens to optimize your prompts.

In the hands of Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut it could be spun into a whole recurring motif.

In this case it's merely...adequate. Almost captures the density of ideas packed into something like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" but doesn't quite manage the same effect.

You are correct that a previous era would have included a bunch of Fiverr images that would be in sort of that style, but it's not the style that's the problem. None of the images say more than the text that they're illustrating. It's subtle, but once you notice the lack of information density it becomes starkly apparent.

Reading LLM slop without warning makes me see their point of view.

I think there's useful ways to engage with LLM writing, but they are often very different than human writing.

A human writer, a good one, often has ideas that are denser than the words on the page, and close reading is rewarded by helping you unpack the many implications.

With AI writing, there's usually fewer ideas than words, and so it requires a different kind of engagement. Either the human prompter behind it didn't supply enough ideas, or they were noncommittal enough that their very indecision got baked in.

LLMs are very prone to hedging and circling around a point while not saying much of anything. Maybe it is the easiest way to respond to RLHF incentives and corporate-speak training data. Or maybe they're just intrinsically stuck on being unable to find the right next token so they just endlessly spiral around via all of the wrong ones. Either way, there's often a whole lot of cotton candy text that dissolves when you try to look at it more closely.

In general, though, I think part of the mistake people keep making is that they try to imitate what would be value to engage with if a human wrote it, in an attempt to claim the role of an author of a book or whatever. There's likely artforms that are unique to what an LLM can facilitate, but trying to imitate human artforms is going to give you stunted results. The AI is very good at imitating the form but not the substance.

Once we stop trying to generate and pass off AI essays, novels, choose your own adventure stories, and all the other human genres as being human writing, we'll have a chance to figure out actually interesting artistic forms.

It's kind of an abandonment of having a worldview, outsourcing it to the AI.

I worry that we're returning to an era of renting core development tools. After the huge benefits from free and open source tools, that's a bitter pill to swallow.