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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Rovo has my favorite example of AI misfeature. Just checked, it's still there in Cloud Confluence. In Edit mode for a page, you can select a range of text and a menu will pop up, with Ask Rovo being a drop down on it. There's a few good options... Improve Formatting, translation options, Make Shorter...

... but it also has Make Longer. Yes, a built-in feature to type some text in, and the use the mighty power of AI to bloat it.

Naturally, you can repeat this process several times on the same text, for your own little personal demonstration of what model collapse looks like in real time.

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Don't worry, you can use Rovo to summarize the document! That way you can get the information your coworker wanted to share but filtered through a game of teLLMephone.

We’ve gone from proof-of-work to proof-of-no-work.

I've tried the "Make Longer" and "Make Shorter".

When you go "Make longer" the text gets longer.

When you go "Make shorter", the text gets longer still.

You'd think that the original text would be the oracle for shorter(longer(original))?

> You'd think

I'm going to have to stop you right there

What's even worse is that, when you do this on the description of a story or task, everytime it comes up with a slightly different format of how it's going to layout the "enhanced" description.

That's some hillarious misnaming, I love it. It probably was meant to be something like "make more comprehensible, use simpler language but more words" and we got this.

But for their target market, corporate office drones writing crap that nobody will ever read more than once (if even that), this is actually perfect and makes AI usage numbers go up. "Make longer" is amazing for someone who just wants to pretend they put more effort than they actually did.

(of course, everyone else can do that too, and the length/literacy of prose is no longer a good proxy for effort. In nature, "honest signalling" only works if the signal is costly. Removing the cost from the signal makes the signal worthless)

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