We need to stomp out this immediately: yes the style and patterns of your writing matter, not just the content. That would be true even if we weren't drowning in a flood of low effort crap, which we are. Writing is not just a set of facts devoid of any context in a vacuum. If your writing style sucks that absolutely takes away from any point you might wish to make.<p>But the specific problem with LLMs is that they waste your time: they appear to have substance and effort put in in a way that a bullshitting human could simply never accomplish because it would take too much effort to do so, defeating the point of not just putting in effort. For example, using an LLM to triage a production issue, it chugs through logs and stacktraces and outputs a completely wrong explanation, which gets copied and pasted into an issue. It's got everything that would indicate effort was put in: an explanation of exactly what is happening and why, with plenty of supporting information. The only problem is, it's made up and full of assertions that are false. Claude Fable just told me moments ago that a problem I was debugging was due to virtio-GPU giving back bad timestamps, confidently with an explanation of why. It wasn't and it isn't known to. Fine: I knew what I was getting. If someone copies and pastes an LLM explanation without context, I <i>don't</i> know what I'm getting, and LLM writing tells are the only way I can avoid shortening my lifespan spending time on things I should have been more skeptical about but my human senses failed to flag as suspicious.<p>When someone posts an article or github issue or PR and it's undisclosed LLM slop, then we have a problem. Again. These PRs, issues, articles <i>look completely legit</i>. Like this one:<p><a href="https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/pull/2724" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/pull/2724</a><p>No bad intentions involved: the person just simply couldn't tell when the LLM was bullshitting it, and his PR passed the sniff test just enough to get merged and cause regressions.<p>So if something outright smells like LLM slop from the writing style, that's a bad sign. The author has probably not written most of the sentences as they are presented, which is hard to distinguish from them not having written them at all. If they had proofread the article, they would have hopefully also noticed the repetitive, annoying LLM writing style and fixed it. When they don't, it tells me one of two things:<p>1. They didn't really put that much effort in, OR<p>2. They seriously lack taste.<p>Neither option is really super good.<p>It's not good that we're allowing people to think this isn't an issue. It definitely <i>is</i> an issue. It will become a worse issue once someone figures out how to fix the LLM slop writing style in post training, because then we will no longer have any good signal that human effort was put in to any prose at all.<p>I'll leave my opinion about this specific article out of it because it's really not specifically about this article. I can only think of one reason for people to make these bad faith arguments in favor of ignoring the glowing red "I DID NOT PUT ANY EFFORT INTO THIS" signs LLMs currently leave all over your work, and that is hoping that the pathway stays open for yourself to use.