Also via Kottke comes this article by Claudio Nastruzzi at The Register, where he talks of ‘semantic ablation’ in text generated by ‘AI’:

When an author uses AI for “polishing” a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation. The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and “blood” reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks “clean” to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its “ciccia” – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic.

It’s about how LLMs — probability-based machines, after all — tend to push text in a generic direction, away from a writer’s unique voice, towards a common mean.

So let’s all not do that.

The irony is, I was trying to look up an unfamiliar word in that quote — ‘ciccia’. The dictionaries installed on my Mac had nothing useful, and nor did Wikipedia. DuckDuckGo’s search only came up with uses of the word as a family or brand name. I used the ‘!g’ syntax to send the query to Google.

It must be the first time I’ve had to do that in quite a while. I’ve heard people mention — complain about — the ‘AI Overview’ the Big G provides, but I’m not sure I’ve every seen it before now. But it was what had the answer:

informal Italian term for meat or, idiomatically, body fat (flab).

Clearly Nastruzzi is using it as we might say ’the meat of an argument’, or similar.

Google’s AI thing does not cite its source, though, and none of the next few search results give a reference for that use in English, though one is to the meaning of the Italian word.

Anyway, my recommendation to all fellow writers, would-be writers, and people who want to or have to communicate by writing: express yourself. Don’t let American machines do it for you (and use as many em-dashes as you need, as I have done here).