I thought the writing was banal but fine. The stars of the show are the images, not the text. Assuming it's largely LLM written, this seems like a good use of that technology.
The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone: they were painted on flour sacks, used at mobile cinemas, now exhibited at galleries in the West, etc. And it provides citations and artists' names for those who want to learn more.
The art criticism is unsophisticated, the images don't completely match the descriptions, and some of the facts might well be hallucinated or at least taken out of context. But you got that with traditional media and human writers/editors too.
For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, though his personality is more interesting, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.
> For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.
Sure. But if the author doesn't notice the nonsense that the LLM is introducing, it harms as well as helping.
"Primed for colour" is a strangely uninteresting thing to be saying about the sacks. If this requires any non-trivial effort, it would make more sense to describe the process. If the author actually wanted to talk about that, chances are the LLM removed useful information.
And putting aside that "These weren’t just any flour sacks either — they were durable, easy to roll up, and ready for reuse." is three "classic LLM tropes" in a row ("not just any"; a gratuitous emdash where any dash at all only becomes necessary because of that introduction; an ascending tricolon), it's just a bizarre thing to say. First off, if the sacks were sewn together to make a larger banner, then it doesn't make sense to talk about rolling up the individual sacks. Second, the phrasing suggests something exceptional, but these are all totally ordinary and trivial properties of pretty much any sort of flour sack. Many different materials are used, but all of them would be "easy to roll up" when empty, and making them durable and reusable is just common sense in that environment. The artists were clearly just using a fairly obvious material they had at hand, so this sudden bit of marketing-speak is entirely out of place. Third, the features highlighted all have to do with the sacks, but not with either each other nor the banners. In particular, a sack being "ready for reuse" is ready for reuse as a sack, not for its material being repurposed for something completely different (we typically call that "recycling", not "reuse").
The bit about "the designs" may well even be true, but it's a complete non-sequitur here, a point that doesn't really merit deeper explanation.
The writing isn't just "banal" but nonsensical in context, veering off into free-association. There's more potentially being hallucinated here than just the "facts". Never mind the accuracy or truth of what's written; this sort of thing makes it hard to accept that the prose even reflects the author's intent.
> The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone
But this is exactly where being AI-written bothers me! I don't really mind the style (the LLMs have learned to write a particular way because 1. people write that way and 2. other people like it) and I don't have the "boooo stochastic parrot plagiarism machines booooooooo" sense of disgust at AI that some people have, but I do know that when LLMs write things those things are ... not always true.
(Of course when people write things they aren't always true either, but the LLMs get things wrong more than humans do.)
Which means that when the article tells me something interesting -- flour sacks! mobile cinemas! exhibited in galleries! -- I can't trust it. And that, for me, is the main damage that outsourcing your writing to an LLM does: it destroys trust.
The text adds some pieces of information you wouldn't get from the images alone: they were painted on flour sacks, used at mobile cinemas, now exhibited at galleries in the West, etc. And it provides citations and artists' names for those who want to learn more.
The art criticism is unsophisticated, the images don't completely match the descriptions, and some of the facts might well be hallucinated or at least taken out of context. But you got that with traditional media and human writers/editors too.
For what it's worth, I'd guess there is a real author, whose command of the English language is worse than ChatGPT, though his personality is more interesting, and who asked the LLM to rewrite his work in the right style for the website.