LLM text makes human interactions less fun
All humans are unique. We look different, have different voices, different mannerisms, different fashion preferences, different ways of speaking, and different personalities. Part of what makes life fun, is getting to know those other humans, and building deeper connections with them.
LLMs are, in one sense, all the same. Everybody uses the same foundation models, and the handful that are there, are trained in a way that makes their default writing styles very similar.
I have a remote job in tech. This means that a large part of my interactions with other humans happens online, through text. In text, the things that set us apart are stripped away. You don’t hear voices or intonation, you don’t see faces and body language. We may get to pick a tiny picture as avatar, but even the fonts are uniform. The one thing that remains in text — the last trace of personality that cannot be stripped away — is writing style.
Learning to recognize somebody’s writing style is part of getting to know that person, just like learning what their taste in food or music is. With people I know well, I can often identify the author by the writing style in natural languages that I’m fluent in, and sometimes even in code. That we express ourselves in different ways, is what makes interacting with other people fun!
