another reason why I think it's important to talk about gen ai prose that I haven't really seen brought up is... it's a media literacy thing to me. just as we are in an era where you should develop the skill of looking critically at an image and making an educated guess about whether or not it's machine-generated, I think the same mindset can and should be applied to text.
for one thing that can be vitally important when you're dealing with nonfiction and you're evaluating whether or not the information is reliable. with fiction, the stakes are lower, but I think there's still a lot to be learned. I don't know about y'all but I'm finding it fascinating to compare similar passages where one is (for certain) human-authored and the other is (for certain) machine-generated, and thinking about what conclusions you can and can't draw about how they are different. because LLMs are constantly evolving it's a skill that's going to look different as time goes on and we shouldn't be complacent and think that generated text is always going to look a certain way. (for a while I thought it would steadily get better but now it's kind of ouroborosing and it might get worse before it gets better actually lmao)
it's making me a more conscious reader and writer, basically, and I think that's a good thing.
