LLMs Put Style Over Substance, You Should Put Substance Over Style · Felix Haba LLMs Put Style Over Substance, You Should Put Substance Over Style<br>18 Jun 2026<br>LLMs do not care about facts.

They care about quotability.

I did not have an LLM write that, but I very well might. LLMs like making bold statements upfront, standalone, emphasized. They use the power of three to convey their ideas, like I just did with “upfront, standalone, emphasized” and omit the “and” connecting the last two words for rhythm. They have countless other tricks. All of this conveys conviction, and persuades the reader that they’re reading something valuable, worth changing their mind about.

LLMs put style over substance. And they’re good at it, better than most humans at writing persuasive text, because they’ve seen a lot of it on the internet, and because they’re mildly competent at everything, whereas the median human is completely untrained in copywriting. However, their default style is also distinctive, easy to catch on to and easy to learn to distrust.

My theory is that, as LLM adoption increases, an excessive focus on style will become less persuasive, and simplicity will be seen as more valuable, for the purposes of persuasion in written text. I find myself more skeptical, less sure that a real human has understood the nuance and grappled with a problem, when I see these cheap rhetoric tricks being used. Any artifacts like charts and data, now so easily generated, and so powerful when used correctly, loose value to me when I can see a human has not bothered to craft the text alongside them, although I can still enjoy AI generated artifacts when I know they come from a human candidly grappling with a problem and trying to develop real understanding.

My advice, in this age, is to put substance over style, at least for as long as we humans have some edge over LLMs, which I am optimistic will be a long time. Even if some LLM mis-users catch on to the idea that excessive style gives them away and change the output style of their LLM to be less slick to try and blend in, my advice is to actually grapple with important problems and use your own voice. This will help you find better, truer answers to your questions and develop opinions. It will help your readers trust that your writing put a piece of you at stake, that somebody cared enough about the idea to carefully craft that piece. Use LLMs to enhance you, not to replace you.