I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I've been writing for decades.)

I was immediately impressed by how "personable" the things are and able to interpret your writing and it's able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping "join" passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.

Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate "Averaging Machine."

By definition LLM's are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn't use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It's so plain and unexciting to read it's actually impressive.

All of this is fine, it's still something new we didn't have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this "averaging" tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we've ever seen.

And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it's what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It's why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90's. And what's coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can't even predict.