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.
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 ↗
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.