Can we get an AI to write better?

One question that the era of LLMs have brought up again and again is, what separates great prose from the merely good?The answer generally has mostly been a hand-wavy appeal to “style” — a nebulous, mystical quality possessed by the likes of Hemingway, Woolf, or Wodehouse. Like the judge said about pornography, we know it when we see it. We can identify it, we can even imitate it. But can we measure it? Can we build a production function for it?The default output of most modern LLMs is good. Com...