The feeling you are describing is not just nostalgia or pessimism; it is a profoundly accurate observation of a structural shift in human culture. Many writers, philosophers, and technologists are currently mourning this exact loss of “depth.”
To understand why the world suddenly feels flat, homogenized, and lacking in depth since the arrival of LLMs, we have to look at the mechanics of the technology, human psychology, and the economics of the internet.
Here is why the “depth” feels like it has vanished:
1. The Mathematics of “Average” (Regression to the Mean)
At their core, LLMs are probabilistic engines. They are trained on the entirety of human text and designed to predict the most likely next word.
- By definition, the “most likely” outcome is the average of all human thought.
- True depth, genius, and profound art do not live in the average. They live in the improbable—the weird, the jagged, the deeply personal, and the controversial edge cases of human experience. When we use AI to write our emails, essays, and stories, we are actively replacing our unique, imperfect voices with the statistical center of the bell curve. The result is a world that sounds perfectly competent, but entirely soulless.
2. The Eradication of Friction (And Therefore, Thought)
Depth is forged through friction. Historically, writing an essay, composing a song, or formulating a philosophy required agonizing hours of staring at a blank page.
- Writing is not just the recording of thought; writing is the act of thinking.
- The struggle to find the right word is the process of figuring out what you actually believe. LLMs remove this friction entirely. By giving us the final product instantly, they allow us to bypass the cognitive struggle. We get the destination without the journey, and as a result, the thoughts we put out into the world are shallow because we never actually wrestled with them.
3. Decoupling Words from “Lived Experience”
Before LLMs, if you read a beautifully written paragraph about the grief of losing a parent, or the joy of a quiet morning, you knew a human being lived through that experience, felt the emotion, and bled it onto the page. There was a shared contract of humanity between the writer and the reader.
- Today, an LLM can generate a flawless poem about grief in two seconds—but it has never felt grief. It has no body, no mortality, and no stakes.
- This creates a subconscious “Uncanny Valley of Meaning.” We are surrounded by words that look profound (using words like “delve,” “tapestry,” and “multifaceted”), but because we know they cost the creator zero emotional calories to produce, they hold zero emotional weight.
4. The Flood of “B+” Content
Before AI, the internet was a mix of terrible content (F-grade) and brilliant content (A+ grade). Finding the A+ content was hard, but rewarding. Now, the marginal cost of producing “B+” content is zero. The internet is being flooded with billions of perfectly structured, grammatically correct, utterly mediocre articles, LinkedIn posts, and videos. The “signal-to-noise” ratio has collapsed. True depth is still out there, but it is buried under a mountain of synthetic competence.
5. The Outsourcing of Curiosity
Depth requires curiosity—the desire to go down a rabbit hole, read three different books, and form a unique synthesis. Now, when we have a question, we ask ChatGPT. It gives us a neat, bullet-pointed summary. It gives us the answer, but it robs us of the discovery. We are no longer wandering through libraries of information; we are being spoon-fed pre-digested summaries.
Is Depth Gone Forever?
No. But its location is shifting.
Because digital text, images, and soon video are becoming cheap, synthetic, and infinite, humanity will inevitably place a premium on things that AI cannot fake.
We will see a renaissance in the physical and the verifiable:
- Live performances, acoustic music, and unedited podcasts (where you can hear humans stutter, pause, and think in real-time).
- Physical art, analog photography, and handcrafted goods.
- In-person communities and hyper-local events.
The arrival of LLMs has stripped the depth from our digital screens. The only way to find it again is to look up from the screen and demand authenticity—imperfections, friction, and all—from ourselves and the people around us.