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This is a complaint I hear others voice and one I have myself. I think it comes down to the text being poorly written. Sure, LLMs are good at a lot of the surface indicators of good writing: they have a wide vocabulary, they use grammatical sentences, they break up the text into paragraphs, sections, and lists. But they're terrible at organizing the text and marshalling a concept to get it across to a specific audience. The section and paragraph breaks are meaningless, the metaphors are unenlightening, the rhythm is exhaustingly uniform. Pre-LLM, you'd find this kind of text in marketing materials, corporate PR, and heavily padded sophomore essays.
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Possibly an inevitability, since LLM text is specifically generated to be low entropy. It’s smooth, optimized for minimal perplexity.

And if you don’t find any of the word choices a little bit perplexing, your brain can just gloss over it. There is no meaning here. It’s like smalltalk.

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Interesting — do you happen to have any suggestions for something I could read about this?

It really bugs me, this aspect of LLMs, and yet I find myself sounding like a lunatic when I describe it, until others chime in and say they have the same experience.

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The weird, sort of sub-surface uniformity is what I notice. It appears to be doing all the right things, but you can't feel the writer.

It is like a rollercoaster that doesn't have any jerk or jounce.

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And reading my own comment it has the same kinds of problems (lookit all those 3-example lists!). I wouldn't hire me for an editing job.
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Perhaps it's just a bias? You are already negatively biased against LLM writing so you disregard stuff you read when you suspect it's an LLM. This could also be a selection bias. It may be that you generally struggled to retain information but you are more aware of it when LLMs are involved.
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I don't think so, no, because it extends to LLM-generated text I want to recall.

I use LLMs to generate starter/tutorial material. I may hate the way Claude writes but I absolutely don't hate the way Gemma 4 writes. But I have to continuously consult it in a way that I do not with human-written text, which gets its message across in a more persistent way I find less troubling.

(This non-memorability extends to AI images and video.)

You are right that there are some confounding factors in my life but while I was worried about middle age affecting recall, I find actually I am still remembering stuff humans wrote pretty much fine.

ETA: there is one thing that I have noticed that does affect recall that is specific to LLMs: watching text roll out word-by-word in LLM chat, I think, damages recall. It's engaging the wrong kind of memory and focus.

So I now let it generate and I'm trying to find decent ways to format it e.g. as PDF, to give it the best chance.

This could be generational; there were many studies twenty years ago that suggest that people a decade or so younger than me who grew up with full colour books and magazines and multimedia can read less-linear text layouts more comfortably, for example, so it's not out of the question that there's something generational going on here too.

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