Comment by einpoklum
5 hours ago
> Personally, I feel that I am at least a third slower reading AI-generated text, even if the length is the same.
I've been reading an AI-generated technical proposition. It was even slower for me.
> Beyond this, most models are extremely verbose, which makes total reading time much higher.
Painfully true. When I took a semster of law studies and got my first homework assignment, I was flabbergasted by how short the submission length limits were. I could barely write an introduction to my mini-paper with that number of pages! And I was expecteds to cover everything, and have an explicit conclusion, and a complete and meticulous bibliography. I struggled sooo much to be more concise and to let go of less-critical points I wanted to make! But it was a great intellectual and rhetorical exercise.
Earlier this year I got asked to take over on leading a project where all the planning artifacts were AI generated.
They were mostly incomprehensible, mutually contradictory, and only tenuously related to the problem we were trying to solve. The poor engineering team had wasted god-only-knows-how-many person-hours building the tool, only for beta users to be completely unable to figure out how to actually use it. Getting things back on track was quite the process. I would estimate that using AI cost the company about 100 times as many person-hours as the original project lead saved themself by avoiding doing any of their own thinking and writing.
AI always seems to add extra words as if it’s trying to prevent being misunderstood. human writing leaves stuff unsaid because it’s assumed people can infer.