[zbentley]

Another commenter above this proposed a pretty compelling theory for the source of this style: SEO-inflated prose online. If the models were trained on the internet, "higher quality" content needed to be indicated to them during RL somehow. Search engine ranking is an easy-to-obtain metric that's kind of like "quality" if you squint, turn around, and lobotomize yourself. So the AIs have a high likelihood of producing the kinds of content that is rewarded by Google SEO.

[mike_hearn]

That's circular though. Why does that content get ranked highly? Because it gets a lot of backlinks, long clicks, etc. So people seem to like it.

[skydhash]

> Why does that content get ranked highly?

Search engines only show a snippet of the content and that always looks convincing. It's the whole content that is off and, unfortunately, a few seconds/minutes can pass before you realize it (If you ever do).

[mike_hearn]

Search engines track that. It's what a "long click" means. If you click a result, then return fairly fast and keep searching or clicking other links, they infer low quality (for that query at least).

[tyingq]

Well, and Google's proxy read of "quality" might have flawed assumptions. A concise page where you get what you need and leave quickly might read as "high bounce rate".

[rustystump]

Bingo but i also think it is just the nature of the technology. It is going to be wordy but not usefully so.