In a conversation with a colleague yesterday I finally figured out how to explain something:

so I've talked before about how LLMs can be thought of as a linguistic reflection of what Husserl called the natural attitude: the patterns of how language is used, things are described, all the shorthands in meaning we use

that's why they work as "cliche" generators, able to produce text that fulfills the patterns of various kinds of text: you can produce language that has the form of a research paper, a YA dystopia, a book for kindergartners

and this isn't even a negative judgment, I do think the tech has uses, but this is just literally what it does

so again I've written about all of that in more detail elsewhere

so what's the new insight?

that it's the opposite of poetry

it specifically hit me that poetry is all about getting around the natural attitude, it's non-literal use of language in unexpected ways to convey phenomenal experience as directly as possible