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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> wonder if long form writing will go the way of code. You and the AI agree on an outline or other high level representation, then the LLM expands it into a document.

What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know.

Who or what is the audience for that sort of long form writing? If it's a human, why would they read it? They'd just give it to an LLM and get the salient points back. If the audience is another LLM, why expand it?

The only use case is an audience of humans who still read and understand, and those people aren't going to be interested in a message when it is not apparent that the sender actually understands the message themselves.

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A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not.

That's why there's so many meetings in white collar companies. Because people can't understand what is going on at those documents so they just need to "align".

LLMs are amazing at generating this useless documentation that goes absolutely nowhere.

> A lot of corporate documentation exists solely to measure if people are working or not.

That's already available today. We don't have to perfect LLM writing.

True, but you underestimate the laziness of a lot of people! Those are the ones benefiting (and depending) the most from LLM advancements.

You can imagine:

1. I have a bunch of data or research that I've gathered with a unique hypothesis

2. Having gotten my arms around that pile of information, I believe I have a compelling thesis to put forth

3. I design the narrative arc and of the thesis. The important parts, the necessary but not sufficient scaffolding.

4. An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible.

Who is this for? Well, quite possibly the human who asked for it. It's pretty informative to read back a research brief in full that you helped do the scaffolding.

Also of very clear use is other AI's who did not have the same unique hypothesis and did not gather the supporting evidence. It's an interesting angle for others to build on.

And of course, other humans! Most human written content gets almost zero readers today as it is. And I suppose LLM content probably pulls the asymptote closer to zero, but some pieces of content may be genuinely interesting or useful.

> An AI helps fill in the story from there. Fact checks each claim, connects the dots, makes it comprehensible.

I think this certainly has some value but this claim in and of itself is stated like your hand-wavy step 3. How do they fact check claims and connect the dots?

Maybe LLMs get there but currently they write in an extremely verbose manner, and things that have gotten into the context window that are no longer relevant continue to stick around (just try having it write some code, then work some of it back to simplify the problem - it will insist on writing comments about code that no longer exists).

Right now using an LLM to write documents is like taking a superhighway to travel 100 meters. Yeah you're doing a lot but is all that really necessary?

I won't deny that LLMs will never have a place in writing. But I personally don't think the current form is "the one that actually lands" (!).

Then the reader can use an LLM to compress it back, and you can then interrogate it for details.

I used to say this was the future of advertising (cr sales person prompts “we have some new EV SUVs on the lot”; GPT generates an ad email with a synthetic video, blinking text etc; then the recipient’s spam processor tells them “that dealer has some new SUVs”. I suppose the same could happen with so-called “long form”.

> What use is that? I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know.

People are terrible at writing. Near universally bad. Even good writers have drafts and editors.

There is a constant refrain here that somehow short messages are more valuable than longer ones. But that assumes it's understandable. Lots of short content is, frankly, awful because the writer cannot put themselves in the position of the reader and explain all the things around the point they're making that the reader really should be told.

You can view writing as translation. From your language to a language your audience speaks. At that level is it so odd if the word count differs from one side to the other?

To turn bad short writing into good long writing you must necessarily change the content of the writing, not just the shape.

But this is the same with coding. The reason that AI can write code from a description that is shorter than the output is in large part because it makes decisions about the behavior that were unspecified in your prompt. We accept this for coding apparently, I guess because those decisions are often unimportant. We might accept it for writing too. I hope not.

wasn't it thoreau who said "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short"

personally, I think there's a time and place for short versus long, just like there's a time and place for a 45mins TV episode versus a 2 hour marathon movie.

Not necessarily. Poorly worded, ambiguous, confusingly ordered writing can be massively improved without changing the core content. Better setups and explanations can be longer without changing the message or meaning.

Look at it the other way, could you take a good longer message you’ve written and make it shorter and less readable for your audience while still making sense to you and containing the key points?

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