Robert KingettLLM critics should start talking about the psychological harms LLM’s are doing to creatives. I have a writer friend. She's a really fantastic writer. I don't know what happened, but she started becoming very insecure about her own writing, and started asking LLM’s like Claude and such to revamp her writing. Help her brush up on the stuff she was lacking. Her writing isn't amateurish at all. It really isn't. Her descriptions are clear. She does a lot of telling when it comes to actions but I actually honestly get tired of writers showing everything all the time. I truly think telling can work better in some cases.
But what started happening was she started spiraling. She's losing confidence in her own writing. When she'd attend writing group with me, she said she doesn’t have anything this week because she has writers block. She sends me forwarded emails of *other* people saying that the LLM writing is better because it prints stuff like, the moon hung in the sky like a polished fingernail. She would write something such as the moon glistened in the pitch darkness. Give or take. That was just off the top of my head.
But she's losing her own confidence. She truly believes LLM’s are a better writer than her because they produce, well, sentences trained on billions and billions of text with fine tuned metaphors, etc. She feeds everything into an LLM. She hates her own writing now when she legit wasn't a bad writer in the first place.
I suggested she write something for herself for a while. Don't publish it. I also suggested writing some Fanfiction for fun. This is helping some but it isn't fully curing her of her newfound insecurity of her own writing, especially when she reads those emails that say things like oh the LLM did a better job at X Y and Z.
It honestly is heartbreaking to watch. I don't know how we can combat this, but for one, I wish readers would honestly quit saying something is badly written. Your bad writing is someone else’s masterpiece.
Another thing I wish readers would do is maybe understand that writing changes with our mood. Someone's voice may change after a terrible event. Someone may want to try a new voice. Someone may revert back to an old voice. None is worse than the other.
And honestly, the longer I edit people's works, the more I come to realize that bad writing simply doesn't exist. There's just different writing styles and styles you hate. That's it.
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