Bear with me on this quote. ”One color a day, traced to the people who made it and what it cost them.“ is a sentence that I find unreasonably repulsive. It makes my stomach turn. I’m sure it makes you feel queasy as well. It has all the markers of having been written by a machine. Not a single human on the planet would write this.
For months now I’ve been pondering the question: why? Why does it make me feel so uneasy to read a sentence like this? Why isn’t it simply a slight annoyance like a fly in your soup or a mosquito you can’t quite catch?
And then my brain made this wonderful, random connection. I had to think of the Uncanny Valley. Perhaps most of this sloppy writing lives in the uncanny valley of language; where real language is by definition a living thing; where the only constant is change, and LLMs generate text that is by definition dead as a corpse.