Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation.

Charlie Stross

(We can measure semantic ablation through entropy decay. By running a text through successive AI "refinement" loops, the vocabulary diversity (type-token ratio) collapses.)

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/

Graydon

@cstross I find it hard not to wonder if the attraction of AI doesn't include so much forcible normalization of text that there is never anything unfamiliar, and thus never any reason to question a self-assessment of "smart".

(So much gets so messed up by mistaking responses for properties.)

Jon

@cstross on my rare exposure to the FB algo. feed, I see a long stream of heart-wrenching pleas for cats needing adoption, all matching a very standard and repetitive structure. I suspect the Cats are real and need help, but the pleas are "AI".

ActBlue (Former US Democratic political donation platform) suffered this even pre-LLM with its endless torrent of nearly identical begs for more money.

Chris Turnbow

@cstross

Reducing the text to the most common denominators?

Klaus Frank

@cstross

Or in other words "Why AI is writing in corporate speech"

Duckbilled Plattypus.

@cstross

Really great article, thanks for posting.

I know those who use ChatGPT to improve professional work letters. AI ChatGPT doesn't "improve" writing to refine meaning and nuance, it is designed to dumb down writing in successive loops to the most middling 6th grade level of comprehension thereby "improving" its "reach". It's the specifically designed feature of AI "editing".

I recently read a ChatGPT "improved" letter that may violate the Civil Rights Act by using a term that is a red flag for a lawsuit. I alerted the sender who confessed to using ChatGPT because her boss uses it and raves about it.

An ungraceful letter that keeps you legal is safer than a "clean" "professional" GPT letter that gets you sued. Know the risks!

Kat S

@cstross Blandness as a service.

Peter

@cstross This gives some formal insight into the feeling I have when reading AI extrusion, which is that my eyes slide right off it. It's like eating one of the varieties of apple that having been excessively bred for appearance and not taste, the promise of substance so at odds with reality that my brain revolts.

Annelies Kamran, Ph.D.

@cstross that explains why everything ends up sounding like a middle management wannabe on LinkedIn

Gary McGraw

@cstross "beigification' is aspect of the recursive pollution problem

https://berryvilleiml.com/2026/01/10/recursive-pollution-and-model-collapse-are-not-the-same/

FOSStastic

@cstross Well, that explains why every time I tried #AI for improving a text snippet, I was very disappointed.

It always wants to convince me that I should remove any uncommon sentence structures and replace them with generic ones, which often removes any personality from written text.

If you ask it to make a small addition to an existing text, it likes to rephrase everything in a more generic way and is unable to add a subtext layer. Honestly, it's just useless for writing in my opinion.

malice

@cstross Is this article ai?

Renke Meuwese

@cstross this is indeed a very neat explanation why the best possible outcome of an LLM is still terrible.

Ruud Steltenpool

@cstross As someone who, next to having a little knowledge about LLMs, was once complemented for choice of words by a native-speaking professor I hung around with at a conference for a few days, I am not surprised about this LLM fact. The professor however then was somewhat surprised of his own uttering and continued "but I had a few beers".

Nu Modular

@cstross Seaticks skewed row:bots metrics

AI, Captain!

#BoycottAI

Awk & sha

@cstross “semantic ablation” is a concise way to describe that feeling of “I just read all the words but I can’t tell what they are trying to convey” that I have gotten after reading certain generated snippets of text.

JdeBP

@malice

Although it's not within xyr academic field, Claudio Nastruzzi has touched upon the subject in at least one opinion piece before.

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/05/09/how-the-push-for-quantity-is-unraveling-university-teaching-and-student-culture/

@cstross
#AIs #LLMs

malice

@JdeBP @cstross At a glance, that article looks like much saner writing than the register one at least

Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧

@agowa338 @cstross

Depends what level of the corporation you''re speaking to. Management and marketing hype is in some ways the opposite, with a heavy use of "signaling" words that serve little informational purpose, rather they are meant to leave an impression. Think "disruptive", or "leverage" used as a verb...

Charlie Stross

@malice @JdeBP The Register is a news site: everything has to be flensed and filed down to fit in a standard format and voice. That piece is probably all that's left of an original that was three times the length.