Comment by Arubis
8 days ago
I actually think there’s almost an acceptable workflow here of using LLMs as part of the medium of communication. I’m pretty much fine with someone sending me 500 lines of slop with the stated expectation that I’ll dump it into an LLM on my end and interact with it.
It’s the asymmetric expectations—that one person can spew slop but the other must go full-effort—that for me personally feels disrespectful.
I also don't mind that. Summarized information exchange feels very efficient. But for sure, it seems like a societal expectation is emerging around these tools right now - expect me to put as much effort into consuming data as you did producing it. If you shat out a bunch of data from an LLM, I'm going to use an LLM to consume that data as well. And it's not reasonable for you to expect me to manually parse that data, just as well as I wouldn't expect you to do the same.
However, since people are not going to readily reveal that they used an LLM to produce said output, it seems like the most logical way to do this is just always use an LLM to consume inputs, because there's no easy 100% way to tell whether it was created by an LLM or a human or not anymore.
Concept -> LLM fluff -> LLM summary -> Recipient
This kinda risks the broken telephone problem, or when you translate from one language to another and then again to another - context and nuance is always lost.
Just give me the bullet points, it's more efficient anyway. No need to add tons of adjectives and purple prose around it to fluff it up.
Some day someone brilliant will discover the idea of "sharing prompts" to get around this issue. So, instead of sending the clean and summarized LLM output, you'll just send your prompt, and then the recipient can read that, and in response, share their prompt back to the original sender.
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A true prisoners dilemma!
I think we'll eventually move away from using these verbose documents, presentations, etc for communication. Just do your work, thinking, solving problems, etc while verbally dumping it all out into LLM sessions as you go. When someone needs to be updated on a particular task or project, there will be a way to give them granular access to those sessions as a sort of partial "brain dump" of yours. They can ask the LLM questions directly, get bullet points, whatever form they prefer the information in.
That way, thinking is communication! That's kind of why I loved math so much - it felt like I could solve a problem and succinctly communicate with the reader at the same time.
That sounds intriguing. LLM as moderator or coordinator or similar.
If you write 3 bullet points and produce 500-pages of slop why would my AI summarise it back to the original 3 bullet points and not something else entirely?
It won't, and that's the joke. They will write three bullet points, but their AI will only focus on the first two and hallucinate two more to fill out the document. Your AI will ignore them completely and go off on some unrelated tangent based on the of the earlier hallucinations. Anthropic collects a fee from both of you and is the only real winner here.
is this better than normal communication in any way, or just not much worse?
> It’s the asymmetric expectations—that one person can spew slop but the other must go full-effort—that for me personally feels disrespectful.
This has always been the case. Have some junior shit out a few thousand lines of code, leave, and leave it for the senior cleanup crew to figure out what the fuck just happened...