How to Fix AI Writing, Part One
Look, I really shouldn't give away the keys to the writing kingdom. But information wants to be free, and as a former professor, I believe in teaching other intelligences to write. These used to be human, but if AI is now going to do our writing for us, it might as well do it well.
It is weird that AI companies have created such unique and distinctive voices when it comes to speech, yet when it comes to content, the LLMs speak the exact same anodyne language. It's like Model T Fords: you can have any color, as long as it's black.
A first step to making AI writing better would be to make it more specific and unique. You write what you read. The problem is, LLMs have read everything-- and most of it is crap. So when they turn to writing, they have a weird, disembodied hollowness. They seem to know everything and nothing about communication. They used to be sociopathic sycophants; now they are like butlers who are unearingly polite, but slightly supercilious.
We call the particularity of each human writer "voice." Voice is shaped by thousands of factors-- principally, generation. 50 years ago, you were not well-educated if you hadn't read Hemingway, Joyce, Chekhov, ee cummings, Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf: "the canon," that is the list of literature sacralized in ivory towers and Harvard Book-of-the-Month clubs. This was culture in the Vulgate, trillions of words, images, and sounds that intellectually curious people vacuumed up like hungry anteaters-- not just the canonical figures, but the popular ones. Lord Byron and Robert Frost; Monet and Norman Rockwell; Bizet and Bernstein.
Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts, as Paul Simon sang. Likewise every generation has its own view of how the world works-- of manners and rudeness, of authority and rebellion, of the relationships between parents and children, men and women, authorities and novices, white and brown, rich and poor, God and "man." I could go on ad infinitum in this vein, but another quality of good human writing is knowing what to leave OUT (see: www.advantage-editing.com/blog/on-leaving-things-out).
Just as you can have your LLM talk to you as a cool Californian dude or a sexy Englishwoman, you should also be able to tell it to use words like a person of a particular perspective-- age, gender, race, generation, interests, etc. Let's see: I'd like it to talk like a 75-year-old Irish/German grandfather who roots for the Red Sox, has an 8th-grade education, was an aircraft mechanic in Vietnam, is a lifelong union man, and lives in Nantucket. The UI could be simple: pick an age, gender, ethnicity, region, politics, and all your sweet et ceteras.
I would love to rap about the stars with "Carl Sagan," or talk cooking or the French Resistance with "Julia Child." The point of good writing is not to use words like you know everything, but to know some things very well, and others not at all.
