alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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’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...
is this better than normal communication in any way, or just not much worse?
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.