[mkleczek]

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

[funcDropShadow]

> In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated ...

Wow, do you really equate long prose with "generated content"? Long prose is novels, deep non-fiction books, long letters, and much more. You can like them or not. In comparison "generated content" is sugar-coated garbage, like way too many social media posts. There was never any point in reading such "generated content".

[mkleczek]

I wasn't clear enough and I agree: art cannot be replaced by LLM (although this is heavy disputed by AI believers). Consuming art also precludes reading summaries generated by LLMs.

My comment was about "utility" texts (this is a context of this discussion, I suppose) - my prediction is that we are going to write shorter and more condensed texts to avoid overhead of LLMs use in generating and summarising text.

[ssivark]

But why should there be two polar opposites: utility & art? Even when reading comments on HN I appreciate a a well written narrative with clarity and cohesion, instead of an assorted stack of bullet points.

The idea is that good writing actually makes you think clearer (both writer & reader); it’s not just a nice to have.

[mkleczek]

If that was the case people wouldn't use LLMs to generate long text only to use the same LLMs to generate short summaries of it.

What I am saying is not that good writing is useless - rather that good writing is _hard_ and people are lazy. There is way more bad writing than good in the world. Bad writing will be replaced by LLMs which does not make sense because it is still bad - and useless.

Good writing is going to stay but since it is hard it is (still) going to be rare.

In the end my hope is that bad (and useless) writing is going to be replaced by short, dense and useful format.

Of course - this begs the question: what constitutes good writing? Pretty good estimation is that a good writing is the one that is - generally speaking - as information dense as possible (ie. there is nothing you can take away from it without loosing some important information). And we are back to square one - it does not make sense to write anything longer than necessary :)

[OldGuyInTheClub]

cf. Doonesbury on Californian/Mellow-Speak:

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16

[vibrio]

Thank you. It’s been a while since I read some Doonesbury. Now, I might go on a bender.

[copperx]

What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?

[nativeit]

> What has a higher information density than text?

Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video

Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.

[Angostura]

Now draw a picture that conveys everything just said in 24 words.

[TeamDman]

It took much more than 24 words to achieve the final result, and also had to use emojis to convey what I wanted lol

Even still I couldn't quite get the result I wanted

Image link

https://chatgpt.com/share/67769bef-537c-800f-90ac-35a44747f0...

[ahartmetz]

Many things can only be said in text, though. Video can work as a replacement for the so inclined because they can have narration.

[MonkeyClub]

To add to that, text has more of "authorial intent" (debates on the demise of which notwithstanding) than other media.

Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon.

Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument.

Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap.

I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest).

It's pretty bourgie IMO.

[mkleczek]

I meant evolution of writing.

[CRConrad]

Upvote for the Affleck quote. Damn, that guy is (providing he came up with it himself) not so stupid after all.