> write an English paragraph that doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out.
LLMs are very much capable of that. Your belief in the opposite has two causes. Firstly the toupee fallacy. You don't notice LLM written text that doesn't make you claw your eyes out. Second is defaults. The huge majority of people who writes text with LLMs just uses default Claude/GPT models, and put near zero effort in making it sound human. Those models are indeed bad at it by default so they need a lot of effort to overcome it. In cases like Opus 5 it's near impossible to overcome. That doesn't generalize to "LLMs".
Sure, it might take more than a single paragraph for that grating feeling to sink in, but none of the entries from the Un-Slop Fiction Prize[1] impressed me.
LLMs are very much capable of that. Your belief in the opposite has two causes. Firstly the toupee fallacy. You don't notice LLM written text that doesn't make you claw your eyes out. Second is defaults. The huge majority of people who writes text with LLMs just uses default Claude/GPT models, and put near zero effort in making it sound human. Those models are indeed bad at it by default so they need a lot of effort to overcome it. In cases like Opus 5 it's near impossible to overcome. That doesn't generalize to "LLMs".