A coworker asked me if I had found a way to get LLMs to generate good writing because he was not satisfied with what he was getting. Like pretty much everyone, we're under pressure to "leverage AI."[1] I looked around, saw most people were gone for the day, and said no, it's always second rate.
If you have the taste to know LLM output is not good enough, you can do better. If, on the other hand, you think synthetic text is as good as what skilled writers can produce, you have no taste and are a bad writer. Furthermore, if you think what the LLM produces is better than anything you could write, you are correct. And a bad writer.
If you are a bad writer or not fluent in the language, LLMs will help you produce second rate, formulaic writing. That might have its place[2]. But if you need to express original ideas clearly, give a precise judgement, or persuade people, synthetic text is not useful.
It is possible that some people who make their living as writers are in fact bad writers. I think they would do much better to put in the time to get good instead of using "AI" to generate synthetic text for them. Synthetic text can't express your ideas for you clearly because synthetic text generators don't have ideas, and they definitely don't have your ideas. And if you don't get good, you won't even have the taste to know the synthetic text is ineffective. You will waste your time and your editors'[3] time iterating second rate synthetic text variations instead of realizing that you unclear prose is a hint that your understanding is incomplete and thus hone both the ideas and their expression.
LLMs were trained on what's on the internet, and most writing online is just filler and fluff between ads, so that's what the synthetic text generators predict as the most likely next token. It's the pointless intro before a stolen recipe on an ad farming site. It's the waffle around reporting on reporting on reporting on a press release.
That stuff is of no use to a professional writer who needs to inform or persuade. It's no use in business writing, either, whether you are a professional writer or not. A skimming reader might be taken in by the surface gloss and the generally right vibe of it all. But if they look closely, it crumbles. Even though much business writing is formulaic, it still needs to be precise to accomplish its goals. If you bring a product requirements document, a design document, a business case for an initiative, or an analysis to a, let's face it, unfriendly or at least critical audience, that surface gloss will not last more than a minute, and your edifice of strange synthetics will serve you poorly.
You will have wasted your time and other people's time. Even setting aside aesthetic and ethics, which is setting aside quite a lot, the output is not useful. And no, a better, longer prompt with more examples or a better model won't help.
Like apparently every technical writer, I'm constantly pressured to "leverage AI" or perhaps "utilize AI." And yes, it's always "leverage" or "utilize" and never plain old "use" in these you better use this solution in search of a problem or else situation because the people making these demands are philistines. ↩︎
Like, for example, if you need to write a condolence card in a language in which you are reading fluent but not fully writing fluent and want to show through the act of having sent a grammatically correct card that you care. ↩︎
I know, funny joke, who has editors these days; I sure don't. Just look at all these sentence fragments and run on sentences and absolute wasteland of totally self indulgent polemic. You'd think I just read PJ O'Rourke's How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink and I will say, you've got me there, though it's been a few weeks and I've read several thousand pages of Robert Jordan so you should be glad it's the O'Rourke that stuck. ↩︎