There’s a term on the internet called “tl;dr” which means “too long, didn’t read”. In this world of LLMs, I propose a new one: tai;dr (too AI, didn’t read).
In both my personal life and work life (but especially at work), I’m flooded with documents, presentations, and emails that are primarily or completely written by AI. It’s fantastic what they can do, but they do not replace humans. I have a lot of problems with this practice but here are a few:
- We talk a lot about losing context on the software we are building. When I have an agent write my accompanying document, I lose an important opportunity to build that context.
- Similarly, the act of writing is a critical step in the learning process. There is a saying that if you want to understand something, you should teach it. Writing a document is like teaching someone else about the topic and you will have a much deeper understanding if you work through the creation of it yourself.
- You shouldn’t ask me to consume any content that you haven’t deeply understood yourself. It should take you much longer to write it than for me to consume it.
- The AI smell is obvious to other people. With some people, you’ll immediately lose credibility. With others it might take longer but as soon as they see a hallucination, you’ve lost credibility. It’s extremely hard to build credibility but very easy to lose it.
I use AI for almost everything I write, but I use it to review my content, tell me where my communication is unclear, or suggest other thoughts I might want to include. I have definitely tried the full AI communication, and it was nice to be done quickly, but ultimately those were bad choices. My content is now certified organic, small batch, and artisinal!