At first his copies were badly degraded. Eventually, he was considered one of the best writers of his time.

I feel like there's probably some way "the copy is better" could be quantified (at least to the point where it fools most of the people most of the time). If so, then expect LLMs to learn the same trick within a generation or two.

I like the idea that imagining somebody doing something in a way that nobody does it because it makes no sense for a person to do it like that is helpful here. It is like

IF you made a human eat an ENTIRE IHOP™ Chicken Fajita Omelette in one bite they would CHOKE and the OMELETTE would go UNDIGESTED. It would get everywhere and the OMELETTE would be RUINED.

Except that isn't how humans edit documents, and it isn't how LLMs work either.

When a human edits a document, they don't typically "reproduce said document with edits", which I assume you mean read the document and reproduce it from memory. They have the document, either physically printed out, or in a word processor. To make edits they either cross-out and write in the edit, or in a word processor just delete the text and replace it with something better. There's no need to keep the entire document in a human's memory for them to reproduce it from memory.

The same goes for the LLM, it has access to the original document at all times. It can remove sections and replace them.

But the LLM hallucinates.

And if you give a document to a human high on LSD to edit, you might get some weird edits back.