LLM Creative Writing: Fine, But Boring
15 Mar 2026Skeptics have argued that A.I. can never be truly creative, because it lacks the kind of worldly experiences humans have.
The New York Times’ recent quizlet “Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans?” claims that many people prefer LLM-generated writing to human-authored work, but critically misunderstands why that may be. Furthermore, I don’t think they understand why someone might prefer the work of the “world’s best human writers.” I took the quiz and, surprise surprise, I preferred the human-authored texts every time. Not because they were clearer or easier to understand, but because the prose sparkled on more than just the surface level. The NYT’s explanation at the quiz’s end reveals their ignorance:
Maybe you also noticed that human writing often includes some clunky phrases, like this passage from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” caused by the author’s aversion to punctuation: “As well ask men what they think of stone.”
A.I. used to make mistakes like these. But today’s systems are much more fluid than their predecessors — so fluid, in fact, that finding grammatical errors or nonstandard syntax is often a hint that you’re looking at a human’s prose, not a machine’s.
Creative choices in prose are not “mistakes”. “Clunky phrases” are a feature, not a bug. Writers play with language to create a characteristic voice that evokes an image or emotion in the mind of the reader; it’s not all about clarity and information. Here’s the full McCarthy quote, followed by the Claude Opus imitation:
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be.
The boy asked his grandfather why the old church had no roof. The old man said weather and time and indifference. The boy asked if someone could fix it. The grandfather said yes. But no one would. Things were built and things fell down and mostly people just stepped over the rubble on their way to somewhere else.
Take the sentence they cited, “As well ask men what they think of stone,” which they attributed to a lack of punctuation. But that’s wrong — McCarthy elided the word “might” at the beginning of the sentence because that’s how The Judge speaks. “Before man was” similarly elides “here” or “around” at its end, but the verb “was” is so broad that it also just works on its own. McCarthy famously eschews quote marks for dialogue; in this example, it blurs the line between character and narrator to give the reader a subconscious sense of the totality of Blood Meridian.
I like the LLM’s focus on human indifference, and we can see that it knew to eschew the quote marks and vary the sentence length, but the lines themselves are too correct. Anyone competent could have written what Claude Opus produced; only McCarthy could have written Blood Meridian.
Not every human writer can write truly outstanding prose, but only humans are (currently) capable of writing prose that plays with itself. Good prose isn’t just the sum of “worldly experiences”. It’s musical, rhythmic, and above all, playful. This LLM experiment ingested good prose and shit out polished turds designed to go down smooth, to be inoffensive to its consumers.
See also the video essay If I Told It: An Imperfect Portrait of ChatGPT