Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

I'm a patent attorney. One fantasy that I have is that AI will be a forcing function that will drive all the needless verbosity out of patents.

For example, every patent is 50 or 100 pages of what amounts to bland, unreadable background. The stuff that is actually new in the world is usually a tiny fraction of all the words.

In a world where everyone's AI can generate all those extra words, their value goes down. (Yes, this is bad news for people in my line of work who get paid to write all those words.) So maybe the profession moves in a direction that values conciseness and brevity, to re-add value to what the lawyers and agents do, that the AI can't do.

It's a fantasy. But the same kind of thing applies to academic publishing. Maybe the future of publishing is very short, useful documents with rich, tiered, AI-generated hyperlinks on every word.

View on HN

Dr. Polak raises a good point, as do you. Concerns over the mechanization of research are valid. But there are domains (such as yours) where they are useful. The humanities may suffer.

I don't feel that jargon, legalese and newspeak are going to vanish. On the contrary, the value of these words may actually increase due to the appeal that they possess by way of gesturing toward authority, virtue and the like. There is a likelihood that AI will only contribute to their proliferation, just in the same terse manner that you are describing. Densely packed compositions of inarticulate gobbledygook that serves none, yet is served by many.

We are on the cusp of a fissure in the field of knowledge work led by AI tools. I'm inclined toward the more manual labor that favors a dextrous approach to "information overload" but there are opportunities to leverage these tools as a sort of valve for copious amounts of information as well. The technology isn't going to go anywhere, so hopefully this is Elicit is a useful product that will serve the interest of the conscientious.

I wouldn't expect that to happen. In a world where AI makes it both easier to generate and process all those extra words why would they actually decrease? It seems like the motivation would be stronger to reduce it if it's humans doing the majority of the generation and processing.

I like that scenario. But wouldn't AI just explode the verbosity of patents instead? The value of the humans' word count might go down, so they write less (less billable hours), but what they right is what is fed to the AI to generate a verbose patent, so there the patent is more valuable. This is assuming the value of a patent is in its chances to (a) be granted (it is not missing any relevant background or caveat), (b) stop competitors (it is hard to make sure it is not infringed), and (c) be upheld if challenged (it is complete and correct). This is where society needs to step up and legislate so these new tools are not abused and the value to society takes precedence, so patents are concise and help make inventions known and understood.

> In a world where everyone's AI can generate all those extra words, their value goes down. (Yes, this is bad news for people in my line of work who get paid to write all those words.) So maybe the profession moves in a direction that values conciseness and brevity, to re-add value to what the lawyers and agents do, that the AI can't do.

I don't understand that. If people bother to generate those words when they're expensive to write, why would they stop when they become cheap?

Because the perceived value will go way down when it is common knowledge that AI is being used to generate them.

My contention (that I see some people don't like!) is that they don't have much value, regardless of who writes them.

I'm not saying that text has value, it just seems really unlikely that making something cheaper will lead to less of it. Even if the perceived value is down, I assume people would keep doing it because it costs so much less.

Well, I agree that it won't happen automatically.

My hope is that AI will cause the patent legal community to undergo a paradigm shift and place value on conciseness and brevity.

In the US, this would require Congressional and judicial buy-in. LOL!!!

Notice that I used the word "fantasy" above.

The value dimension of text is not the volume of words but rather the signal-to-noise ratio, aka information density.

It does not matter whether a human or an AI produces a high-signal synthesis from a lower-signal body of work. The signal boost is value creation.

The underlying debate is whether AI is capable of signal-boosting arbitrary works more effectively than humans. I'd say presently, it is not. Even with the most powerful models, consistency and reliability across work types and lengths are far from business-grade.

If that were to change, the fact that an AI boosts the signal does not globally deflate the value of text. The value of text is determined by the signal, not the signal producer.

The main issue right now is that AI is not reliably boosting information signals, and therefore, most serious professionals probably still prefer to read original works.

Unfortunately, AI could lead to more verbose everything, because it also enables us to distil huge amounts of text. Forgot where I read about this, but it has been shown that digitalization has enabled the tax code to go from something one person can read and understand to something completely unmanageable (could be from The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy), because digital tools allows us to deal with more tax code. Similarly, doctors, teachers and many other occupations are drowning in administration duties that were enabled by digital technology.

I hope I'm wrong. Eventually, when only AI produces and consumes text, it could be more brief, but at that point will it matter? Eventually a less ambiguous format could be used, something more like code, that computers and AI can consume and apply.

The opposite happens with technology. As the cost goes down, usage goes up. (Jevons paradox)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com