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.
I’m not sure the 300-bit → 1,000-bit framing applies in all instances. The 300 bits may be a compressed cue to a much fuller idea. The AI can combine that cue with its prior knowledge to help reconstruct what the prompter was trying to express, with the prompter then verifying whether it’s right. Without the relevant prior knowledge for reconstruction, or the prompter for verification, it becomes much harder to know whether you’ve reconstructed the intended idea.
Unless that 700 bit was transferred on a separate occasion the inferred 700 bits is not true information, anyone could have reconstructed it from the 300 bits.
Not anyone, no. From an information theory standpoint, that it's possible at all to complete these 700 bits, only implies that anyone logically omniscient could. It's entirely possible that an LLM is capable enough to infer these 700 bits, and the human reader isn't.
Right but where is this information coming from, it can't come from the sender because an idea that can be conveyed in 300 bits cannot contain 1000 bits of information. You're just using the LLM to translate the idea into something more legible.
Alternatively those 700 bits are information the LLM added, but where is that information coming from? Is it noise? Random facts? Random lies? And who is the receiver even talking with if most of what they read is something the sender didn't know?
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.
zefalt · · focus · HN ↗
shiandow · · focus · HN ↗
stratos123 · · focus · HN ↗
shiandow · · focus · HN ↗
Alternatively those 700 bits are information the LLM added, but where is that information coming from? Is it noise? Random facts? Random lies? And who is the receiver even talking with if most of what they read is something the sender didn't know?