My guess is that tokenization is typically not (strictly) syllabic.
OP’s linked article mentions the importance for them of reading their writing aloud. Humans construct sentences with a (mostly unconscious) sonic influence. How things sound really matters.
My theory is that LLM prose sounds slop-like because the base unit for an LLM is not a single sound.
Thus, perhaps, you get the uncanny, meandering, hollow-feeling outputs, which feel vapid to human readers, without the reader really knowing quite why.
I think this is also part of the reason why LLMs are rewarded for and thus more strongly exhibit their faux-punchy constructions, such as the infamous “it’s not [X], it’s [Y].” The transformer model can, with current tokenization, articulate some features of “good writing”, but not quite all.
I think there are a number of fairly simple SOLNs to this (or ways to test this hypothesis) without making tokenizers purely syllabic across the board, which would probably be a mistake.
Whether prose output quality even matters for models which are not explicitly trained for creative writing is highly debatable, though.
OP’s linked article mentions the importance for them of reading their writing aloud. Humans construct sentences with a (mostly unconscious) sonic influence. How things sound really matters.
My theory is that LLM prose sounds slop-like because the base unit for an LLM is not a single sound.
Thus, perhaps, you get the uncanny, meandering, hollow-feeling outputs, which feel vapid to human readers, without the reader really knowing quite why.
I think this is also part of the reason why LLMs are rewarded for and thus more strongly exhibit their faux-punchy constructions, such as the infamous “it’s not [X], it’s [Y].” The transformer model can, with current tokenization, articulate some features of “good writing”, but not quite all.
I think there are a number of fairly simple SOLNs to this (or ways to test this hypothesis) without making tokenizers purely syllabic across the board, which would probably be a mistake.
Whether prose output quality even matters for models which are not explicitly trained for creative writing is highly debatable, though.