AI, Algogen, and Anti-Poetry

Baldur explaining why he calls the text generated by LLMs the peak of the mundane:

algogen text is all about generating text as it’s normally used—it’s middling utilitarian as an explicit ideal—that makes it the opposite of poetry. Where poetry de-familiarises, algogen is perfect familiarity. Where poetry casts the unexceptional as exceptional, draws out the unusual beauty in the usual, and reuses language in original ways, algogen aspires to peak mundane. Even when it’s ostensibly creative, it only does so through postmodern mash-ups: mixing up tropes, conventions, and references. It is perfectly mediocre.

Which goes a long way towards explaining why people in tech love it.

Ooooohhh burn.

But seriously, maybe we have lowered the bar of what we expect from humans by declaring LLMs to be on par (or even better) than humans:

I’ve lost count of how many people in tech (and marketing, natch) who say that algogen text is just as good as that written by people. They genuinely don’t see the limited vocabulary, word repetition, incoherence, and simplistic use of sentence structure. They only aspire to perfect, non-threatening mediocrity and algogen text delivers that. They don’t care the role writing has in forming your own thoughts and creativity. They don’t care about how writing improves memory and recall. They don’t value the role of creativity in the text itself.