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Notes -
This portends an interesting future where essayists, novelists, poets, and other professional writers intentionally make an LLM generate recognizable LLM-isms as a way to spruce up their writings, like how a rock guitarist might intentionally hold up his guitar to the speaker to generate feedback as an intentional part of the music they're making. Imagine an entire genre of writing where it's not surprising for the writer to paste in LLM generations without notifying the reader, but intentionally produced to appear overtly LLM-generated, communicating to the reader that it's LLM-generated without explicitly saying as such, in order for the reader to enjoy the text for its obviously LLM-generated qualities that the author intentionally wanted to add to his writing, like how, again, feedback is used in some musical performances.
That's the point.
We saw an early version of this in that short lived trend of AI generated images that are structurally identical to another, well known image, but only structurally such that someone who doesn't know the reference could not decode it.
We'll yet see the same for LLMs I'm sure. The great novel of this century has surely to reckon with the biggest change to writing since the invention of the personal computer.
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