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Comment by mlsu | Hacker News Reader

No, the prompt, no matter the amount of detail, is always strictly better than the model output. It has to be, because the whole point of reading and writing is _communication_. Communication between TWO people.

This AI interlocutor is like a permanent cataract. It always makes it harder to see, never easier.

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I don't think this is a great analogy. These things can pull in preexisting explanations and such. It doesn't just use the prompt so it's not a strict ceiling.

My butler is an excellent researcher but I think there's something wrong with him

He might be a murderer, many such cases.

It's a translator. Very useful when the message needs to be in a specific format or if you're talking to a computer, or if you need help with "grammar" or "protocol" (in all its forms).

I get people writing comments on photos I post to social in languages that I have partial comprehension of such as Japanese and Portuguese. I use Copilot to translate their messages, ask specific questions about particular words, get explanations about idioms and supply context and ask it to translate my replies which I always translate back through another LLM to try to catch problems, sometimes I ask it to make an edit, sometimes I make an edit myself.

Often I use LLMs to "have a conversation with a language" such as researching the cognate between the phrase "woo" to describe the supernatural in English and the similarly pronounced character 巫 (wu) in Chinese which is used in words like 女巫 (witch -- that first character means "woman") but it is not the "wu" in 武侠 (wǔxiá -- martial arts)

I am sure one of these days I am going to embarrass myself but with partial comprehension I could do that without the help of an LLM.

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