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From a post on "tells." Both of these can be useful devices, but they're best as seasoning, not main ingredients. AI doesn't get that, of course. Sadly, neither do a number of human writers who have started using a more robotic style.

In fairness, I will note that it's possible to go too far in the other direction with trying for variety in sentence and paragraph structure, and human writers often do. This is to grammar what "hey guys, I just learned about this cool thing called a thesaurus" is to vocabulary. But right now, I think mind-numbing repetition is by far a bigger problem.

Another addendum. (Does that make it an addaddendum?) I don't automatically dismiss all as "slop," because I think that with proper training, AI models can produce useful writing under circumstances where repetition is the goal.

Right now I'm cranking out a bunch of documentation files on a string of data sets where the analysis is almost exactly the same, with just a few little differences between them. I want the files to look and sound like each other, because my goal is not to surprise the reader. My main frustration has been training the AI *not* to try to get "creative." But I wouldn't do that in a paper or full-scale tech report, and I really wouldn't do it in a story.

Of course a lot of was repetitive slop long before et al. came along. There is such a thing as good ad copy, though, and I suspect it's going to have to come from human brains for quite a while yet.

@medigoth I am past arguing with people about this stuff. It's like arguing with conservatives about global warming, and it's a place that I never thought I'd be with liberals.

And I *agree* with liberals on AI about 80% of this stuff. But boy, that remaining 20% is holy war territory.

I'm only surprised that the people explicitly endorsing the Butlerian Jihad haven't written the Orange Catholic Bible yet.

@fatsam Guess I'll start brushing up on my slow knife-fighting skills. The good news is, that shouldn't be difficult.

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