Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
What already happens:
- People give an LLM a bulleted list of points that they want expanded into a professional sounding document.
- The receiver doesn't wanna read all that. They put the full document into an LLM and ask it to summarize it into succinct bullet points.
I first noticed this a year ago when I read a gmail AI summary, then glanced at the main text and saw it was AI generated. I feel like there's good fodder in there for a dystopian sci-fi story about a future where nobody communicates directly with one another, it's all AIs translating, but the AIs slowly start to drift.
I feel like a lot of this is a problem when someone technical is attempting to communicate a complicated technical subject to a less-technical audience.
I can only dumb a thing down so much before the description is useless (when you zoom out too much you lose the details). Even technical people who could understand it but are lazy / "in a hurry" use the summary, without thinking about what detail they are losing.
Even more infuriating is when they then reply to my email, having only read the AI summary, and ask a question that was already answered by my message.
This is the exact same thing that happened pre-AI, with the added step of wasting energy/resources on the AI summary in the middle.
It's essentially the tower of babel. Each person will devolve to speak their own internal language only they understand. Each language will need to be encoded down to its meaning to be reinterpreted. None of us will know if the transformers are accurately decoding, or if the other person is accurately interpreting the decoding (which is arguably already a feature of human language without the computers in-between.)
It was in a gmail promotional video years ago already. Person A would use AI to turn their summary into email and person B would ask the AI to go back to the summary.
They knew it was going to be like that from the beginning.
I’ve been saying the same thing. I’m not saying all, but a significant amount of comms could be bullet points to the benefit of both sender and receiver.
This is exactly what I want: To communicate with me, have your LLM expand your message to include relevant parts of _your_ context, then I will have my LLM summarize it as briefly as possible with respect to _my_ context.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
whycome · · focus · HN ↗
steveBK123 · · focus · HN ↗
copperx · · focus · HN ↗
steveBK123 · · focus · HN ↗
intrasight · · focus · HN ↗
erwincoumans · · focus · HN ↗
steveBK123 · · focus · HN ↗
lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗
account42 · · focus · HN ↗
KineticLensman · · focus · HN ↗
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
ZPrimed · · focus · HN ↗
I feel like a lot of this is a problem when someone technical is attempting to communicate a complicated technical subject to a less-technical audience.
I can only dumb a thing down so much before the description is useless (when you zoom out too much you lose the details). Even technical people who could understand it but are lazy / "in a hurry" use the summary, without thinking about what detail they are losing.
Even more infuriating is when they then reply to my email, having only read the AI summary, and ask a question that was already answered by my message.
This is the exact same thing that happened pre-AI, with the added step of wasting energy/resources on the AI summary in the middle.
xenophonf · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/the%20machine%20stops.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...
jkestner · · focus · HN ↗
basch · · focus · HN ↗
It's essentially the tower of babel. Each person will devolve to speak their own internal language only they understand. Each language will need to be encoded down to its meaning to be reinterpreted. None of us will know if the transformers are accurately decoding, or if the other person is accurately interpreting the decoding (which is arguably already a feature of human language without the computers in-between.)
LtWorf · · focus · HN ↗
They knew it was going to be like that from the beginning.
asp_hornet · · focus · HN ↗
goosejuice · · focus · HN ↗
japanuspus · · focus · HN ↗
feoren · · focus · HN ↗