Why LLMs Suck at Writing
Why do LLMs suck at writing? I’d like to do some research and get semi-technical on why it sucks, but then also explain how some technical advances could make it quite good.
Here’s how I’d summarize the 2 core limitations:
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It doesn’t have the ability to edit or delete. It thinks really hard for a second, and then just rams forward without thinking. It takes every word in your prompt, shoots that into the black-box cube of the LLM, and builds something like a snapshot of your problem at hand, and then just spits out words. New “reasoning models,” extend this thinking process. o1 will think up to a minute, and Deep Research for 10s of minutes. This still isn’t how humans write. Ideally, after each sentence, it’s able to re-read what it wrote, and then redefine the whole problem, and perhaps, start over.
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LLMs don’t have an embedded theory on what makes good writing. It uses probability to figure out the most likely next word, making it something like the Internet’s auto-complete. We’re only bottlenecked here by our ability to convert taste into something that is machine readable.