Why LLMs Are Bad Writers But Good Editors - by Jasmine Sun

my new Atlantic essay + Claude editor setup

🌻 why LLMs are bad writers but good editors my new Atlantic essay + Claude editor setup Jasmine Sun Mar 23, 2026 ∙ Paid 248 8 28 Share source: The Atlantic / Alicia Tatone There’s a weird asymmetry between how tech people talk about AI’s incredible technical prowess and its attenuated capacity for art. Sam Altman has predicted that large language models will soon be capable of “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics,” yet in an October interview with Tyler Cowen, guessed that even GPT-7 might be able to extrude only something equivalent to “a real

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