I'd rather read the prompt

When I was kid in school I would write original essays, and I mean truly original creative ideas. But of course any new idea has a chance of failure, so these essays were mostly bad and got bad grades. At a loss for what to do I quickly stopped reading the books I was assigned basing my essays on Wikipedia summaries and other people’s reviews. I saw my first few As and even A+s and I realized if I write something original of even just average intelligence roughly 50% of people will be too dumb to understand it. For an idea to truly be considered intelligent in literature it has to be appealing to people have no actual memory of the things they’ve read. Even for a knowledgeable intelligent person they have a sea of similar information clouding their view.

> They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style.

No, this is just the de-facto "house style" of ChatGPT / GPT models, in much the same way that that that particular Thomas Kinkade-like style is the de-facto "house style" of Stable Diffusion models.

You can very easily tell an LLM in your prompt to respond using a different style. (Or you can set it up to do so by telling it that it "is" or "is roleplaying" a specific type-of-person — e.g. an OP-ED writer for the New York Times, a textbook author, etc.)

People just don't ever bother to do this.

You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game your metric.

Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever.

Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree.

And since most people are only interested in the job, not the learning that underpins the degree, well, you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate at the end.

When people are only there to play the game, then you can't expect them to learn.

However, while 90% will miss the opportunity right there in front of them, 10% will grab it and suck the marrow. If you are in college I recommend you take advantage of the chance to interact with the knowledge on offer. College may be offered to all, but only a lucky few see the gold on offer, and really learn.

That's the thing about the game. It's not just about the final score. There's so much more on offer.

I tried changing the house style.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6817c9f4-ed48-8010-bc3e-58299140c8...

In the real world I would at least remove the em dashes. It’s a dead give away for LLM generated text.

> Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent job

Then fail to actually learn anything and apply for jobs and try to cheat the interviewers using the same AI that helped them graduate. I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of developers who cannot function without it. I don't even mind that you use an LLM for parts of your job, but you need to be able to function without it. Not all data is allowed to go into an AI prompt, some problems aren't solvable with the LLMs and you're not building your own skills if you rely on generated code/configuration for the simpler issues.