Why is AI writing so bad?

It can one-shot an entire app, but if I ask it to help me write a 1000-word essay, it is riddled with non sequiturs and a lack of coherence. I fed it the outline, key ideas of this post, had a discussion about what I wanted to communicate and then asked Claude to write a post and what came out made me squirm. Every thread we touched got a paragraph, weighted equally. There was a certain blandness to it. So here I am writing this all by myself.

I wrote large chunks of this post while I was running to train for my marathon.

Long runs are the price of wanting to run a marathon. They are essential, but they are also incredibly boring. A full marathon might take 5 to 6 hours. The training runs involve running 1 to 3 hours at a slow pace to build my aerobic base. There is less effort spent pushing the pace or trying to hold on. This is good for the body, but not always for the mind.

When I first started running over a decade ago, I quickly built up to 2-3k. 5k+ was a little harder. I have flat feet, and it became a challenge to overcome the frequent foot pain I had. Then I invested in good shoes, and built up to the occasional 10k over a few years. Soon, I considered anything below 7k to be a “short run”.

I kept pushing into trail runs, 12-13k regular runs and finally I ran my first half marathon in 2018, about 3 years after I started running regularly. I ran 3 more after that, finishing in the 2:20-2:40 range. The first 3 HMs were extremely exhausting. The stretch after 18k was particularly brutal. Blisters on my feet, heart rate rising, my glutes complaining, I had to summon every bit of willpower to trot-walk-drag my way to the finish line.