Here’s your paragraph as one cogent sentence:
“AI prose is dense and meandering at once, so word count no longer signals information content and the reader does the work the writer should have.”
Did I lose anything? If not, the technique isn’t diagnostic of anything except that most writing is longer than it needs to be, including yours. Oh by the way, an LLM did that summarization.
Except that your LLM generated summary is actually not really faithful at all to what I said. My point wasn’t that AI writing is too long, it’s that the information in it is poorly organised and lacking a hierarchy, it overemphasises details and underemphasises the central ideas. It almost feels like it doesn’t have a notion of what is actually important in an argument. Which makes it very very exhausting to read.
I also struggle with this when I use AI agents for coding, no matter how I prompt them I always have to skim over fluff and ask them to expand on the actual substance which they’ve somehow managed to summarise into one obtuse word. It would have been so much easier if they had just presented things the right way from the get go. For coding this will always be a necessary evil but I don’t really think we need to have that in documentation or on a forum.
That might be what you intended, but IMO you failed to put it into words in your initial post. The LLM consequently couldn’t read your mind when writing the abstract.
That said - my “bulleted” post was surely not written, as the German say, “mit dem vollen tierischen Ernst”, and I’d say it’s not kind of literature really worth that much discussion.
I agree with this 100%. To prove this point, if you really want to torture yourself, try getting Claude to come up with a concise, to the point issue report for something technical and non-trivial. Even after several rounds of back and forth it’s still full of fluff. It’s just incapable of being concise. Same problem for docstrings, documentation, any text intended to be read by a human really.
And it shows. It fails to capture an important point, and misuses the idiom “at once”. And there are other defects.
You have not shown that most writing is longer than it has to be. You have shown that LLMs have trouble producing even a single normal-sounding sentence that could pass as something written by a human.
I would argue that the idiom “at once” is used correctly according to Webster.
You’re right that I was less than precise, I wasn’t completely sure where I was going with my argument in the original comment. But you could tell that it wasn’t strictly about verbosity from the fact that I mentioned “incredibly dense” as one of the issues. Hope my second comment makes it more clear.
I always add “You need to be token efficient and only respond to me in asd-ste100” to any prompt when using ai to do my work. asd-ste100 forces the AI to respond in a very concise way.
I know this is not what this topic about, but after 80 posts I am lost at what the topic was other than blowing off steam on both ends of the spectrum (or did i miss something of importance?)…
