11h ago

Critic Explains Why LLMs Generate Ungrounded Metaphors In Writing

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LLMs write like this because they aren't embodied, and their entire understanding of language is the statistical relationships between words. So, you get the nonsensical metaphors & descriptors of the kind you see below. What does it mean that "her dress caught and released light"? Did it glitter, did it glow? Was it very colorful? These sentences are written via statistical probability, and not anchored to the observation that one thing in the world is like another, and that can take you strange places. Unfortunately, this can read as a kind of dime-store Arundhati Roy; as "good" writing. It's the kind of thing you fight a lot teaching writing to humans.

12:41 PM · May 19, 2026 View on X