by ryao | 2025-08-05 04:41:42+00:00
It occurs to me that writing by those in STEM fields and those in the humanities is entirely different and each group dislikes the other’s writing. When I was in college, my professors in technical classes had no problems with my writing. After I graduated and I wrote some technical articles, my writing received praise from readers. However, when I took two semesters of mandatory English writing classes in college, my professors hated my writing and nothing I did made them happy with it.

When LLMs became widely usable, I was one of the people who really liked much of the writing that they did. I found it was relatively close to my writing style, which I consider to be good, despite the disagreement from those in the humanities. It was close enough to my own writing that I have even had people on Discord accuse me of using LLMs to write my messages for me, when I had not.

The linked article was clearly written by an English teacher. He criticizes AI-generated texts as “a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad“. Now, there are many cases where LLMs output nonsense, but in cases where the writing logically flows, does not self-contradict in any way and avoids unnecessary repetition, “bland” and “flavorless” are good. The goal of writing is to convey information across space-time; writing that is “bland” and “flavorless” is the best way of conveying information.

I can see a number of things he did in his writing to avoid being “bland” and “flavorless”, and I consider them to be examples of poor writing:

He used dozens of idioms that make the text difficult for non-native speakers and unpleasant for native readers. He used a number of colloquialisms, including some that are inappropriate in professional contexts (although I will not repeat them since I refuse to write them). He used a word whose only definition is provided by Urban Dictionary and therefore is not even an official word:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyborging

He also brought politics into an apolitical topic. The injection of politics is a great way to derail any form of productive dialogue and should be avoided.

He used a story format of the kind that has infected journalism. It is very rare that the process by which something was learned is useful to readers and presenting it for dramatics wastes their time. That is with the exception of stories on the topic of security, where hearing the process is often genuinely informative. My aversion to this writing style is so severe that I have a standing policy to stop reading a news article the moment that I see that it uses this style for a topic that is not security-related. After reading his article, I will extend my policy to apply to essays by academics in the humanities too.

He made numerous attempts to evoke emotional responses to elicit agreement, rather than to make clear arguments based on facts. This is great for propaganda, but not so great for making points. Every one of these appeals to emotions is poor writing.

Beyond those things, he also did not properly cite sources in multiple places. To name a few, the quotes from Sam Altman and Annalee Newitz are uncited. As an academic, he should know better.

Some of these things might actually have places in certain types of writing. They certainly have places in propaganda. They also have places in fictional literature. However, they do not have places in attempts to argue a point.

I imagine if he corrected all of my criticisms, he would find the result to be “bland” and “flavorless”. That is how an attempt to argue a point should be.