My boy Sir Francis Bacon gets a bad rep for his influence on extractive and unethical scientific practices but he is not to blame for his fanbase being awful. Anyway, this is a passage from The Advancement of Learning, which is a very fun, lively, and entertaining book that he wrote that you should definitely read on a weekend holiday while having a matcha oat latte. He is bashing humanist writing that is too concerned with trying to sound like Cicero than actually making a good point, and I think his description sounds like he is describing AI-generated writing:
men began to hunt more after words than matter—more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.
Remember that AI-generated writing is like autocomplete, it can only ever sound boring and unoriginal because it predicts what the most likely word to occur after something is. It can never be innovative or creative in either writing or art.
Also this is unrelated, but I have started a Substack although I have not posted anything there yet. Here it is in case you are interested: https://substack.com/@axolotlslime
This is a picture of Francis Bacon:
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