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You know you do it, make notes into seemingly useful paragraphs of text. You feel very clever, having saved minutes, maybe hours. You know you're spending compute somewhere, and that someone is paying – usually bank consumers, the environment, and democracy, but productivity is the source of a healthy economy, right? It's probably worth it.

But what happens when you distribute the report, or whatever it is, to a bunch of readers? They, of course, do what you would have done: shove it into an LLM, pretty likely the same one you used to write it. Out comes a summary, and if the initial creation prompt was good, very similar to the note initially written.

What we have now is a situation where you generated a bunch of text that nobody wrote, and nobody read.

This effect is even more notable with email. Two email clients, either side, with Ai write and read functionality will do this automatically. The stuff that gets sent is virtually invisible to humans. Just a series of unnecessary characters, bloated by the sender, summarised by the receiver.

“But I summarise before I send”

Ok sure, you never bloat, only condense. Let's say that's true. The way corporate uses AI is still 99%+ redundant and useless, and here's why:

The useless content generation paradox

Let's put content on a sliding scale: Useful to useless. Useless content is useless anyway, so if it's generated by AI, it is, by definition, unnecessary use of resources. Useful content is reshared, recondensed, rebloated, recondensed again, because people share it more and use it more.

This is the useless content generation paradox. The more useful the content, the more times it will be shoved through a bloating and condensing cycle. The more useless it is, well, the more useless the content is to begin with. Anywhere in between: a mix of both.

Just write the damn thing yourself

If you know what you want to convey, just write it. Enable spell checking instead of using generative AI to check you grammar. It's faster anyway.

If you don't your ability to convey knowledge will erode. Not just in writing, but in speech as well. Oh, and you don't make yourself dependent on a technology that can inject whatever it want between the lines to influence whatever Musk, Zuck and let's not forget Trump, Putin, Jinping wants to inject. While building increasingly large data centres on consumer-secured loans, running on diesel, and enriching the oligarchs.

Oh, and you'll end up there anyway, since it's faster, so may as well go back to writing what you mean to a human, instead of mangling it through a machine for no reason at all. That is, if you had anything to say to begin with.

//A

These are random thoughts. For more thought-through content, check https://journal.lindegard.xyz