Yeah, this has been one of my biggest takeaways from this whole LLM thing, just how many people are completely unaware of what constitutes good writing. A good chunk of human communication was apparently upheld by people simply being too lazy to type out many word when few do trick.

And now that laziness isn’t the problem anymore, now that they just have to provide two sentences of information to get a full page of text, they think that’s good. That lots of words mean you put in lots of effort. And lots of effort signifies that what you say is important.

I do expect societal norms to change. That the association of lots of words with lots of effort will fall by the wayside. That people get tired of the noise that LLMs add. But unfortunately, it is going to take a while, because people are so unaware of why writing is good or not.

One thought I’ve had about AI and programing is that you’ll run in to a similar problem. Code is a bit special because it’s a language that’s understandable by both humans and computers, and when you’re programing you’re essentially writing for both audiences at once.

Voice is maybe not as important when writing code (although you still want to keep the coding style consistent) but even so I think that writing code by hand has the advantage of you being able to express your thoughts in a more coherent way than the output of a handful prompts will. The problem isn’t just with however powerful the AI model is, but that prompting is a kind of vague and indirect way of interacting with the system and it necessarily introduces another layer between the author and whoever ends up reading it.