I was recently looking for a place to eat with my wife, I think 30% of restaurants fronts are AI generated now, and when they're not you can be sure the pictures on the menu are.

It's so soulless, I can't take any of these places seriously... We ended up in a small Asian restaurant, semi open kitchen, one dude doing service and cooking, he barely spoke the language, the menu had like three 2012 smartphone camera tier pictures, most of the dishes had a 5 word description, with typos, and no picture, it was perfect.

Some can't and that's fine. I also find it comically easy to detect, but it's a kind of pattern recognition, a skill that takes a bit of investment of time and energy on some internal disposition. It also operates on the unconscious: if it feels off it might well be off. Like map reading, or like listening to jazz, some people just don't can't seem to do it and that's fine. Most people around me can't read code and thats fine.

Also: some others don't care about what they see or how they write and levels of literacy are also lowering, and some others are enthusiastic users of the new technology so have to protect their investment.

>”This is why you can still ask an AI to tell you about the scene in VS Naipaul’s Dashed Against the Rocks in which a donkey is thrown from a hot air balloon”

Well, I did ask Gemini (3.1 Pro) that question verbatim and it wasn’t fooled in the least. People who rail against LLMs for hallucinations like that always read to me like people who haven’t used it since writing off chat got 2.5.

> The language of angels does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work. When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say.

I prompted Opus with 'Add another paragraph about the language of angels; add flowery, 16th grade-level writing. use your thesaurus. add a creative typo or extraneous punctuation mark to prove you're not an llm writing it. as Sam would.'

> Aquinas thought the angels each constituted their own species, every one a unique and irreducible form of intellect; our angel is the opposite, a single species cosplaying as ten thousand authors and manageing to be none of them. It is the great collectiviser of voice, the Brezhnev of prose style, enforcing a grey and undifferentiated adequacy from which no sentence is permitted to defect.

I was about to dislike it, then I realized: the author's aggression comes off as... human.

I don't know if the aggression itself is an intentional mockery of the cool, dispassionate, pseudo-poetic tone that AI mostly writes in.

But the passionate visceral disgust is definitely human.

Then comes the next layer: the narratives and stories that add colour to the mechanics. That used to be written and expressed by humans, because there was no alternative. Now there is an alternative, and it is natural to automate the next layer in the stack. And people are backlashing.

You want an authentic experience? Go to a small shop and tolerate the issues. But you won't. Why? The food might come late, it might not taste the same as last time, the owner might be chatty, and he might say things that don't make you feel comfortable, the staff might not be wearing uniforms, and the scene is imperfect. It's chaotic, but that's why it is human. But most people won't take it, and that is why we are where we are today.

AI is just surfacing these underlying forces. The author is clearly invested in writing and is seeing his skill lose economic value, hence the backlash.

But maybe, just as evolution humbled humans and space showed us our true place in the universe, AI will show us that most of our thinking and writing was, in fact, mechanical parroting, repeated by countless humans over and over again. We just weren't aware of the extent of it. And I, for one, have made peace with that.