I won't read LLM authored fiction
The author explains why they have stopped reading fiction, attributing it to the statistical uniformity of LLM‑generated text. They argue that reading human‑written fiction influences a writer’s own statistical profile, making it more creative. Consequently, they prefer fiction that reflects a distinct human voice rather than the median style produced by language models.
- ▪The author notes that reading fiction improves their own writing by exposing them to varied statistical word patterns.
- ▪They claim each writer has a unique statistical profile that can be altered by absorbing others' writing styles.
- ▪The author feels that LLM‑generated fiction has a statistically normal profile, which they find unappealing for creative reading.
- ▪They prefer fiction from the 2020s onward to be clearly authored by a human to avoid being nudged toward the median style.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,938 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Mccormick |
| Canonical URL | https://mccormick.cx/news/entries/why-i-won-t-read-llm-authored-fiction |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:45:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T07:50:42.669Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T07:50:42.669Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nZ4rfw53HHQJ · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
There have been periods of my life where I stopped reading. I don't mean that I stopped reading entirely - I still read articles and blogs and journals, but I could not find the time to read fiction novels. Fiction makes you think and feel in a way that other writing doesn't. I've noticed that my own writing comes much easier and fresher when I'm reading fiction regularly. I think I've figured out why this is. When you read something that's written by somebody else it has a certain statistical profile. They will choose certain words over a certain other words. This is well established fact and can even be used to a degree for fingerprinting who wrote a piece of text. Every writer at a given point in time has their own unique profile.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Mccormick.
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