| This connects with something I've always wanted to have as a "metadata" signal provided with any text. I'm thinking of some low-key information channel like text background color that would communicate how much time it took me to produce this sentence. Darker text used for passages that are "highly polished" (a lot of research and edits where made to fact-check and fine-tune the content and the wording). Perhaps there might be some "metric" that can be calculated automatically from git commit history, but it would be nicer if the author can manually allocate "weight" to each passage of the text, based on what they perceive is most important (read the dark regions for the the deepest insights). -- Use Case 1: Emphasis in office communications.
When employee A communicates with employee B, they can use the text background to communicate the energy invested by employee A to produce the email/report/memo/doc in question. Example 1: Developer spent 1 month rewriting the login system to a clean, feature-identical, drop-in replacement Auth API. When he announces to the CTO, the text is in solid grey, communicating the number of hours that went into this project and hence it's importance (better read all the details).
dark highlight = I invested a lot of energy in this; I know you're a business person now, but I need you to read this and act on it! (current alternative way to "highlight" actions is to link them to financial benefits for the company, e.g. the new Auth API will save us hours of dev time and allow us to integrate with platforms X, Y, Z, but I think the "number of hours I put into this" would be a good metric to show as well. It's proximal to the developer's emotional investment in the thing) -- Use Case 2: Emphasize key ideas in educational text.
Educators can communicate the relative importance of different parts of the text. Instead of "energy that went into creating this text," the more useful signal would be to tell readers how much mental energy it will take them to understand a given concept. A sentence that explains some key concept can be shown in dark background to say "this is deep" and also "this is worth learning about specifically within this section."
Example 2: An author explains a sequence of 10 complicated steps that are part of some process, and indicates by text background color which steps are important and which are just technical minutiae. * I write math and science textbooks, and I'd love to have such a sidechannel to the reader to communicate "importance" ... I hack by marking some key stences as bold, but it could be better. -- Use Case 3: Ethical labelling of genAI output.
It is now commonplace within the academic world to require disclosure of genAI use when creating scientific publications and other docs. This is a good practice, but it leaves too much degrees of freedom to the author about the level of disclosure they make. A word-for-word provenance metadata "channel" in parallel with the final text of the document could be a very useful thing to have (in an ideal world). In the real world, few academic would admit to heavily leaning on genAI, but at least we can shame them for not providing the "detailed provenance" track along with their text. In contrast, people who are using genAI unashamedly (half the population) could prove how un-ashamed of their genAI usage they are by specifying "All genAI" in the "provenance channel" for all the posts they publish. If you like the SLOP or you think you can control the SLOP, I won't judge you, but please let me know so I read the text differently... Example 3: Author A asks editor E to review a book draft. The manuscript clearly shows which parts of the book were written by the author and which parts are genAI. The editor knows which parts to focus their attention on (what the author is saying), and which parts are just filler. For bonus points, the author could also disclose the harness+context+prompt they used to produce the text (like a view source affordance that comes with any genAI text passage). |