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For my medical notes assistant I had to set a global "write in a telegraphic, minimal style" because it was fluffing up every aspect of the notes. Nobody wants to read that BS and it's impossible to find information in a series of walls of text.

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I wonder if reading cooking recipe sites in training contributed to this.

9 pages about how it felt to be a kid eating the dish, for 7 ingredients and a one line recipe.

It can also go the other way. It outputs a paragraph so full of telegraphic technobabble that it’s just unreadable, inventing new jargon every other sentence, using terminology invented in its thinking stream and never explained. And when it combines the two issues and it outputs 4 pages of technobabble, it gets just exhausting to read. Paradoxically, given that 2 years ago everyone was using LLMs to summarize web pages, their ability to condense text (including their own thought stream) is still lackluster. I dream of some post-processing diffusion optimizer just condensing all of their slop away. Until then, I just tell it to _avoid_ telegraphic and newspaper-title speech and to output one or two paragraphs of prose only.

In medical notes you definitely want the telegraphic. It's both easier to find the keywords, and easier to manually prune extraneous notes.

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