7 ms·

LLM Inflation

193 points by ingve 1y ago

jasode 1y ago
>Creating the necessary prose is torturous for most of us, so Bob fires up the LLM du jour, types in “Please create a 4 paragraph long business case for my manager, explaining why I need to replace my old, slow computer” and copies the result into his email. >Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM du jour and types at the start “Please summarise this email for me in one sentence”. The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” Sam Altman actually had a concise tweet about this blog's topic (https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336 https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336) >something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points 2:42 PM · Mar 2, 2023 · 1.2M Views
- unglaublich 1y ago
  It's not really strange, is it? Business and politeness etiquette requires a certain phrasing that is typically more tedious than the core information of a message. Now that decorating any message with such fluff is automated, we can as well drop the requirement and just state clearly what we want without fluff.
  - watwut 1y ago
    I do not know about where these people live, but managers did not read long emails for years already. Not that blame them, but this world where they would actually want those 4 paragraphs essays did not existed for years.
    - simoncion 1y ago
      Because of this, I tend to structure my business communications as "Sentence or five that best conveys what I want from (or want to tell) the reader, followed by the required background and/or supporting information required to understand the problem being described, or justify the request being made.". However, you can't do much of anything to deal with people who stop reading at the first sentence or question. Those folks are hopeless.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
unglaublich 1y ago
An LLM is effectively a compressed model of its input data. Inference is then the decompression stage where it generates text from the input prompt and the compressed model. Now that compressing and decompressing texts is trivial with LLMs, we humans should focus - in business at least - on communicating only the core of what we want to say. If the argument to get a new keyboard is: "i like it", then this should suffice, for inflated versions of this argument can be trivially generated.
- tomrod 1y ago
  The inverse of this is "AI Loopidity" where we burn cycles inflating then deflating information (in emails, say, or in AI code that blows up then gets reduced or summarized). This often also leads to weird comms outcomes, like saving a jpg at 85% a dozen times.
  - nicbou 1y ago
    An early article about LLMs called it "a blurry jpeg of the web" for exactly those reasons. It's a good read.
  - wood_spirit 1y ago
    And each cycle introducing error like a game of telephone
    - tomrod 1y ago
      And with no governance in place (like an engine governor) you get cascade failure.
- AIPedant 1y ago
  What I hate about this is that often a novel and interesting idea truly needs extra space to define and illustrate itself, and by virtue of its novelty LLMs will have substantially more difficulty summarizing it correctly. But it sounds like we are heading to a medium-term where people cynically assume any long email must be LLM-generated fluff, and hence nothing is lost by asking for an LLM summary. What a horrible technology.
stocksinsmocks 1y ago
> One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression Ah, yes. It is an achievement in signals in a way.
watwut 1y ago
> Bob needs a new computer for his job. In order to obtain a new work computer he has to create a 4 paragraph business case explaining why the new computer will improve his productivity. Is this situation in any way realistic one? Because the way companies work in my beck of woods, no one wants your 4 paragraph business case essay about computer. Like, it is funny anecdote. But, in real world, at least in my experience, pretty much everyone preferred short for emails and messages. They would skim the long ones at best, especially in situation that can be boiled down to "Tom wants a new computer and is verbose about it".
- dspillett 1y ago
  You give the concise version to the person who is going to authorise your request. The four paragraph version goes on record for the people that person needs to justfy the descision to, they'll likely declare “I don't see a problem here” without actually reading it which is the intention: they might be more wont to question the shorter version.
  - watwut 1y ago
    My point is, I never encountered this. Literally never. I am not particularly young and it is not even the case that I would work in startups all that much. My friends did not complained about having to write paragraphs essays for stuff like this either. I am open to the idea that there is some bureaucratic workplace where it works like that ... but everywhere I have experience with, they preferred the short version.
    - dspillett 1y ago
      > My point is, I never encountered this. I have, though not directly but seeing it in an onsite visit to a client. It isn't as common as people complaining or joking about it might suggest, but it certainly happens.
- teemur 1y ago
  > Is this situation in any way realistic one? No, it's much worse than that. In real life you talk about pages and pages of documents and power points and meetings after meetings if you happen to need a computer/server/configuration that's not in the pre-approved list. (I really wish I was exaggerating. And of course no, not all employers are like this to state the obligatory obvious.)
roxolotl 1y ago
My PM said they’d written a bunch of tickets for a project yesterday morning that we hadn’t fully scoped yet. I was pleasantly surprised because I can’t complain if they are going to get ahead of things and start scaffolding tickets. Of course when I went to read them they were 100% slop. The funniest requirement were progress bars for actions that don’t have progress. The tickets were, even if you assume the requirements weren’t slop, at least 15 points a piece. But ok maybe with all of these new tools we can respond by implementing these insane requirements. The real problem is what this article is discussing. Each ticket was also 500-700 words. Requirements that boil down to a single if statement were described in prose. While this is hilarious the problem is it makes them harder to understand. I tried to explain this and they just said “ok fine rewrite them then”. Which I did in maybe 15min because there wasn’t actually much to write. At this point I’m at a loss for how to even work with people that are so convinced these things will save time because they look at the volume of the output.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  Ask an llm for a project plan and they’ll happily throw dates around for each step, when they can’t possibly know how long it will take. But project plan dates have always been fiction. Getting there faster is an efficiency win. That said I’ve found that llms are good as interrogators. If used to guide a conversation, research background information and then be explicitly told to tersely outline the steps in something I’ve had very good results.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    The date/week estimations in plans are especially funny when you work with an agent and it spits that out. "Week 1, setting up the structure" - uh, no, we're going to do this in 10 minutes.
- dimitri-vs 1y ago
  The only acceptable response to obvious AI slop - unless it's it's clear it's been heavily reviewed and updated - is to put it back into the AI and ask it for a 1 paragraph summary and work off of that.
dspillett 1y ago
This type of verbiage inflation was happening in business all the time anyway. LLMs are just being used as a method for doing it faster.
- tovej 1y ago
  Was it? I don't remember ever running into anyone preferring long documents. Also, anything added by the LLM is pure noise with the possibility of a hallucination or two. If, for some reason, you might even add some relevant information at times, and you're not going to start making things up. And if an LLM is also used at the other endpoint to parse the longer text, that creates a broken telephone. Congrats, your communication channel is now unreliable.
santiagobasulto 1y ago
> the load on my server is reduced isn't this the opposite? Enabling compression will INCREASE the load on your server as you need more CPU to compress/decompress the data.
- reactordev 1y ago
  It depends on where the bottleneck is. If it’s in network packet size, it would help serve more clients. At the expense of more CPU needed to decode/encode the data. If you’re serving large files and you have headroom in hardware it’s totally normal.
- have_faith 1y ago
  Depends on efficiency of compression I guess. If X bytes of data takes N time to transmit, and each slice of N takes Y CPU cycles during transmission, how many Y must your compression algorithm use, and how low must it lower N, in order to be more efficient from a CPU utilisation perspective? assumedly there's an inflection point from CPU use perspective, maybe a point that's impractical to achieve? I'm just vibe-thinking-out-loud.
  - Koffiepoeder 1y ago
    Or your server can cache the compressed content (since it is a static page anyway).
- ltratt 1y ago
  As Koffiepoeder suggests, since the vast majority of content on my site is static, I only have to compress a file once when I build the site, no matter how many people later download it. [The small amount of dynamic content on my site isn't compressed, for the reason you suggest.]
  - santiagobasulto 1y ago
    That’s a good point, didn’t know it was cached on top.
- 1y ago
PeterStuer 1y ago
I call BS. The 4 paragraphs requirement was not introduced 'because LLM'. It was there all along for what just should have been 'gimme 2 -3 bullet points'. They wanted Bob to hold back on requesting the new machine he needed, not by denying his request openly, but by making the process convoluted. Now Bob can cut through the BS, they want to blame the LMM for wasting their time and resources? BS!
- tharne 1y ago
  Maybe, but another way to look at this is that if someone is going to hold back requesting a new machine because they don't feel like writing a few paragraphs, then they probably don't really need a new computer. On the other hand, if their current machine really is so bad that it's getting in the way of their work they won't hesitate to quickly bang out 4 paragraphs to get a new one. Obviously, this trick does not work with LLMs in the mix.
  - username332211 1y ago
    Or perhaps they desperately need a new computer but keep putting it off because they are busy with other tasks. And they'd be slowed down, at significant cost to the company until they get the free time to fill out the form. Furthermore, the guy who doesn't need a new computer is probably going to be writing the paragraphs on company time, so he'd do it if he has nothing to do and needs to look busy. (I think it's safe to assume that the sort of place where you need 4 paragraphs to justify a new computer would also require for employees to look busy at all times.) Why is everyone trying so hard to find purpose in broken administrative processes? There's usually none and, if there is its usually so hideous that it can't be put into writing.
    - tharne 1y ago
      > Why is everyone trying so hard to find purpose in broken administrative processes? Broken processes persist when they're benefiting someone somehow. If you can't figure out who's benefiting from a crap process, good luck trying to fix it or change it.
deleted 1y ago
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thimabi 1y ago
One of the things that makes me hopeful for the future of LLMs is precisely this: humans are needlessly verbose, and LLMs can cut through the crap. I expect smaller models to become incrementally better at compressing what truly matters in terms of information. Books, reports, blog posts… all kinds of long-form content can be synthesized in just a few words or pages. It’s no wonder that even small LLMs can provide accurate results for many queries.
- tharne 1y ago
  > humans are needlessly verbose What a depressing belief. Human communication is about a whole lot more than just getting your point across as quickly and efficiently as possible.
  - thimabi 1y ago
    Oh, no, I do understand the value of long-form and deep human communication. I’m an avid book reader, for instance, and I actually prefer longer narratives. What I don’t agree with is being needlessly verbose in circumstances in which the opposite is more valuable. Unfortunately, humans have a tendency to use flowery language even when that comes at the expense of message clarity. Think, for example, of the countless self-help books that can be converted to short blog posts. Or think about legal or academic writing, which often stands in the way of readers actually understanding what is being said. There’s so much writing like this out there that even LLMs were notorious for taking this over-elaborate language to a whole new level. And in my opinion that’s the kind of thing that we can (and should) avoid.
    - wood_spirit 1y ago
      You mean that language is a form or bureaucracy and gate keeping?
  - mapmeld 1y ago
    People are not reading and absorbing the longer pieces of writing. I worked at a company which would create information-dense, wordy PowerPoint slides for client updates, and at some point you see it has no point besides trying to impress. If we actually needed something in an email, they told us to put it in the first sentence. I've also noticed it when people post LLM writing on Reddit. Something may give me pause, and then re-reading the content any given paragraph was way off. I had even glossed over the bolded conclusion "it’s a coaching-wheels moment" (?) because as you read it your brain thinks of a way it could make sense.
danielbln 1y ago
This image originally came out just around the time of ChatGPT release and captures it well: https://i.imgur.com/RHGD9Tk.png https://i.imgur.com/RHGD9Tk.png
- deleted 1y ago
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- reginald78 1y ago
  The important part is the GDP is now increased because of the cost of energy and additional hardware needed expand and then compress the original data. Think of the economic growth all these new hassles provide!
  - lubujackson 1y ago
    Next innovation: compress the AI translation layer from both sides. I feel like there might be an unbelievable Weissman score that can be achieved!
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - bogzz 1y ago
      grug brain take
- otterley 1y ago
  This one is my favorite: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
zacksiri 1y ago
The problem described in this post has nothing to do with LLMs. It has everything to do with work culture and bureaucracy. Rules and laws that don't make sense remain because changing it requires time, energy and effort that most people in companies have either tried and failed or don't care enough to make a change. This is one example of the "horseless carriage" AI solutions. I've begun questioning further that actually we're going into a generation where a lot of the things we are doing now are not even necessary. I'll give you one more example. The whole "Office" stack of ["Word", "Excel", "Powerpoint"] can also go away. But we still use it because change is hard. Answer me this question. In the near future if we could have LLMs that can traverse to massive amount of data why do we need to make excel sheets anymore? Will we as a society continue to make excel spreadsheets because we want the insights the sheet provides or do we make excel sheets to make excel sheets. The current generation of LLM products I find are horseless carriages. Why would you need agents to make spreadsheets when you should just be able to ask the agent to give you answers you are looking for from the spreadsheet.
- mmmllm 1y ago
  LLMs are not able to replace Excel in their current state. See this simple accounting test: https://accounting.penrose.com/ https://accounting.penrose.com/ - errors compound over time. This is the case even with small datasets. For massive corporate datasets it's useless (try asking Gemini to summarise a Google Sheet). Until there is a fix for this (not clear there ever will be), Excel will be necessary. Word will probably become a different, more collaborative product. Notion-esque. Powerpoint...I would love if it disappeared but ultimately if you have to present something, you need to have done the work.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  > Why would you need agents to make spreadsheets when you should just be able to ask the agent to give you answers you are looking for from the spreadsheet. Because it seems to be a fundamental property of LLMs that they just make things up all the time. It's better to make the LLM a natural interface to a formal query language which will return hard answers with fidelity from the database.
- pixl97 1y ago
amelius 1y ago
Perhaps we should judge the performance of an LLM by how well it can compress arbitrary information. A higher IQ would mean more compression, after all.
- a_shovel 1y ago
  Which LLMs perform better or worse will be determined entirely by the scoring formula used and how it penalizes errors. It is not in the nature of an LLM to be capable of lossless compression.
- optimalsolver 1y ago
  Lossily or losslessly?
  - amelius 1y ago
    Losslessly, because that's easier to test.
    - optimalsolver 1y ago
      When you're recalling a memory, do you remember the position of every blade of grass, or the exact angle of the Sun? Humans, the only extant example of a general intelligence, don't do lossless compression at all. I don't think you get to AGI by trying to compress noise.
      - amelius 1y ago
        Lossless compression requires the recognition of patterns in the data. And a smart way to use those patterns to perform the actual compression.
- Legend2440 1y ago
  We already do this. Prediction is formally equivalent to compression, so loss is just a measure of how well you can compress the training dataset.
djoldman 1y ago
> Bob needs a new computer for his job.... In order to obtain a new work computer he has to create a 4 paragraph business case explaining why the new computer will improve his productivity. > Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM.... The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” The manager approves the request. "LLM inflation" as a "bad" thing often reflects a "bad" system. In the case described, the bad system is the expectation that one has to write, or is more likely to obtain a favorable result from writing, a 4 paragraph business case. Since Bob inflates his words to fill 4 paragraphs and the manager deflates them to summarise, it's clear that the 4 paragraph expectation/incentive is the "bad" thing here. This phenomenon of assigning the cause of "bad" things to LLMs is pretty rife. In fact, one could say that the LLM is optimizing given the system requirement: it's a lot easier to get around this bad framework.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  The broken thing here is that Bob, costing $10k a week, is after a new computer costing $100 a week.
  - kelipso 1y ago
    This part I always found funny. Significantly increase productivity of the team for a fraction of the price of employing them? Absolutely not.
    - jermaustin1 1y ago
      I'm a consultant, and have been for 20 years now (except for a 2 year stint as an employee for the benefits and relocation assistance to move my family from Texas to NYC). At the NYC employment job, I was on a 2 year upgrade cycle being a software developer. Just whatever the current year Dell corpo laptop was. No procurement procedures, just IT got 2 year replacements, our laptops went to the non IT workforce after reimaging. As a consultant I usually bring my own device, and my laptops are usually WAY more capable since I will run each client on their own VM - makes it easy to delete the client when the contract is up. But I've had one client who did not allow BYOD, and any billed work had to be done on their hardware. That was fine, except that the desktop I was given was already a 12 year old dual core non-hyperthreading CPU that wasn't meant for developers even when it was built. I begged and pleaded for 6+ months for me to either bring in my own hardware they could image now and wipe at the end of the contract, or to please buy me a PC from this decade. It took 3 years to get the budget approval for a $2000 tower, roughly the equivalent of 15 hours of pay. The thing that finally pushed it over the edge, was that my PC could not handle Teams + Visual Studio at the same time, and manager couldn't handle that he couldn't watch me program. All of that to say I doubt these non-data-driven organizations are basing these decisions on anything other than micromanagement. Nothing to do with measured or assumed productivity, nothing to do with costs, so all I can think is they have to be a "decision maker" on all aspects.
jdoliner 1y ago
I saw an interesting argument recently that the reason you get this type of verbose language in corporate settings is that English lacks a formal tense. Apparently it's much less common in languages that have one. But in corporate English the verbosity is used as a signal that you took time to produce the text out of respect for the person you're communicating with. This of course now gets weird with LLMs because I doubt it can last as a signal of respect for very long when it just means you fed some bullet points to ChatGPT.
- adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  Seems like an easy hypothesis to test: Do languages with a formal tense have short corporate language?
  - jdoliner 1y ago
    This is what the argument I read claimed, I haven't verified it.
  - Ifkaluva 1y ago
    I’m a native Spanish speaker—all forms of written Spanish are more verbose than English, but the formal form is even more verbose. I remember notifications my school used to send my parents were hilariously wordy by English standards.
    - xdennis 1y ago
      > notifications my school used to send my parents were hilariously wordy There might be something else at play there. Public sector workers are notorious for wooden language. The example I hate the most is how they always say "number of" before every number like "we'll buy 10 new busses" becomes "we will commence the procurement of a number of 10 new buses".
      - Ifkaluva 1y ago
        Public sector workers? No, this was a private school.
tossandthrow 1y ago
Where I work, I do the opposite: I let my colleagues know that they should write much mess and much more concise. I actually straight up reject it when text is too inflated, and I remind people that LLMs are available to expand on request.
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > Where I work, I do the opposite: I let my colleagues know that they should write much mess Sounds like a fun place :-) (yes, yes, I know it's a typo, I could not resist)
  - tossandthrow 1y ago
    Haha, woops! Well, the thing is that LLMs actually enable being a bit more messy
BobbyTables2 1y ago
Bob is highly optimistic!
boxed 1y ago
> Brevity is the soul of wit Now that pachinko machines can create lots of prose, maybe it's time to finally learn this lesson.
OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
The author made up a fake situation to drive a point that doesn't exist
nathan_compton 1y ago
The older I get the more concise I find myself (which is not to say I'm actually concise, as my comment history will demonstrate), but LLM's have really driven home just how much noise day to day communication involves. So much filler text. It still surprises me when I see non-technical enthusiasts get excited about LLMs drafting almost useless copy or email or whatever. So much garbage text no one reads but has to be written for some reason. Its weird.
- integralid 1y ago
  "I wrote this mail slightly longer because I didn't have time to make it short" - someone famous When writing something I want people to read, I always take time at the end to make it shorter - remove distracting sentences, unnecessary adjectives and other noise. Really works wonders for team communication.
  - wafflemaker 1y ago
    >When writing something I want people to read, I always take time at the end to make it shorter - remove distracting sentences, unnecessary adjectives and other noise. This is a good advice. How can I do it when talking? I often talk too much saying little, often loosing Listener's attention in the process.
    - antisthenes 1y ago
      Just like weight loss, start talking less. Silence is better than useless noise.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  On one side you have people using LLMs to fluff a sentence in to an essay. And on the receiver side they are hitting a button to AI summarise it back to a sentence. What incredible technology.
- nicbou 1y ago
  I write guides for a living, and my audience is largely comprised of non-native speakers. I write simply and unambiguously, and I've been told multiple times that my style seeps through my blog posts, my comments and my text messages. You are so right! LLMs produce so much noise. If you ask them to be concise, they struggle to cut just the fat, and the output is often vague or misleading. I see that again and again when I ask it to produce different versions of a sentence. I imagine it's how artists feel about AI art. It seems right at first glance, but you can tell that no thought or craftsmanship went into it.
verbify 1y ago
Engaging with why we might actually want inflation of text: 1) For pedagogical or explanatory purposes. For example, if I were to write: > ∀x∈R,x^2≥0 I've used 10 characters to say > For every real number x, it's square is greater than or equal to zero For a mathematician, the first is sufficient. For someone learning, the second might be better (and perhaps as expansion of 'real number' or that 'square' is 'multiplying it by itself'). 2) To make sure everything is stated and explicit. "He finally did x" implies that something has been anticipated/worked on for awhile, but "after a period of anticipation he did x" makes it more clear. This also raises the question of who was anticipating, which could be made explicit too. As someone who spends a lot of time converting specifications to code (and explaining technical problems to non-technical people), unstated assumptions are very prevalent. And then sometimes people have different conceptions of the unstated assumption (i.e. some people might think that nobody was anticipating, it just took longer than you'd expect otherwise). So longer text might seem like a simple expansion, but then it ends up adding detail. I definitely agree with the authors point, I just want to argue that having a text-expander tool isn't quite as useless as 'generate garbage for me'.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  Can a generator do things like 2 if it wasn't in the input text?
  - lblume 1y ago
    Ambiguity is resolved via provided context, but just as with conversations, this context may be severely underspecified.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    Yes, because generators generate at the token level, which is technically smaller than an individual word. They can easily generate unique sentences, and for example transfer learning allows them to apply knowledge obtained from some other training data to new domains. The idea that generators are some sort of parrot is very outdated. The 2021 paper that coined the term "stochastic parrot" was already wrong when it was published.
sdenton4 1y ago
Huh, this post is not what I thought it would be! Even after the first two paragraphs! There's a line of thought which states that intelligence rhymes with compression: Identifying patterns allows better prediction, enables better compression of the data. However, internally, LLMs typically do the opposite: Tokenization and vectorization multiply the bit rate of the input signal. Chain of thought techniques add a lot of extra text, further increasing the bit rate.
jnmandal 1y ago
LLM Inflation is an interesting choice of terminology. Like with many things in our contemporary society there is a temptation to assign absolute, quantitative value to everyday concepts but realistically we should know this to be a fallacy. Many concepts actually have no "on paper" value but still manifest significant social value. Marketing is the typical example, and yet we don't refer to advertising as inflation (though maybe we should). This concept probably applies to lots of work in the "AI" space right now. The idea of using huge amounts of compute to generate lifelike voices for LLMs comes to mind as being recently maligned (something many users may not want). Or people upset about getting AI summaries in search that they didn't ask for. And yet, swaths of capital has been invested in these ideas and perhaps its a worthwhile use of resources. I am not sure personally. Time will tell. But I suspect its more complicated than the author is implying here.
geor9e 1y ago
Why choose the word "inflation" to mean the opposite of compression? If you said it to a stranger, they'd assume you mean the price of LLMs is going up due to scarcity. I would call this LLM fluffing or LLM decompression
- zahlman 1y ago
  > Why choose the word "inflation" to mean the opposite of compression? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflate seems relevant here.
- antonvs 1y ago
  Plus there's already a name for the general phenomenon: AI slop. Sure, it doesn't directly capture the compression/decompression aspect, but it's assumed that slop includes unnecessary filler.
numpad0 1y ago
> That we are using LLMs for inflation should not be taken as a criticism of these wonderful tools. It might, however, make us consider why we find ourselves inflating content. At best we’re implicitly rewarding obfuscation and time wasting; at worst we’re allowing a lack of clear thinking to be covered up. I think we’ve all known this to be true, but LLMs allow us to see the full extent of this with our own eyes. Perhaps it will encourage us to change! Yeah, this is the problem. Wealth distribution stopped working sometime in the late 20th century and we're fighting each others for competitive advantages. That's the core of this phenomenon. No one needs containers full of baby sized left shoes, but proof of work must be shown. So the leathers must be cut and shoes must be sewn, only to be left in the ever growing pile in the backyard. That's kind of wrong.
larodi 1y ago
Good point to better use it for haikus. Not sure if it that good at it though.
TOGoS 1y ago
> At best we’re implicitly rewarding obfuscation and time wasting; at worst we’re allowing a lack of clear thinking to be covered up. Most people don't think very clearly. That's why rhetoric is effective. That's why most communication is fluffy social signaling. You can give people great advice and their eyes glaze over because the words didn't fill them with emotion, or something, and they do the exact opposite. No wonder LLMs get put to work playing that stupid game.
nlawalker 1y ago
Long documents in business contexts that get summarized and go mostly unread are the byproduct of a specific and common level of trust and accountability in those contexts: people don't believe someone has done enough critical thinking or has a strong enough justification for a proposal unless they've put it on the page, but if it is on the page, it's assumed that it does in fact represent critical thinking and legitimate justification. If trust was higher, shorter documents would be more desirable. If trust was lower, or accountability higher, summarization would be used a lot more carefully. LLMs haven't changed anything in this regard except that they've made it extremely easy to abuse trust at that specific level. The long-term result will be that trust will fall in the general case, and people will eventually become more careful about using summarization. I don't think it will be long before productized AI used in business contexts will be pretrained/fine-tuned to perform a basic level of AI content detection or include a qualitative measure of information density by default when performing summarization.
ruuda 1y ago
I consider inflation a double insult. (https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions) It says "I couldn't be bothered to spend time writing this myself, but I'm expecting you to read all the fluff."
- hangonhn 1y ago
  To be fair, the recipient probably isn't reading it either. They're getting it summarized. LLMs are creating more work for other LLMs.
g9yuayon 1y ago
The example in the article does not look like LLM Inflation, but that LLM can't reduce the waste in a bureaucratic process.
itaysk 1y ago
https://x.com/itaysk/status/1887942925042033069 https://x.com/itaysk/status/1887942925042033069
codr7 1y ago
I've seen this happen IRL. My former (obviously) wannabe manager used GAI to pimp our CV's before sending out to clients, pretty sure they too consulted stupid to summarize on their end.
amdivia 1y ago
I think the usage of LLMs will push for a societal change in how we communicate. instead of elongated sentences, we perhaps might start seeing an increase in just communicating through the minimum constructing points of whatever meaning we hope to convey, leaving the presentation work for the LLM on the receiving side
kazinator 1y ago
We've also had XML inflation for 30 years.

193 points by ingve 1y ago

>Creating the necessary prose is torturous for most of us, so Bob fires up the LLM du jour, types in “Please create a 4 paragraph long business case for my manager, explaining why I need to replace my old, slow computer” and copies the result into his email. >Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM du jour and types at the start “Please summarise this email for me in one sentence”. The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” Sam Altman actually had a concise tweet about this blog's topic (https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336 https://x.com/sama/status/1631394688384270336) >something very strange about people writing bullet points, having ChatGPT expand it to a polite email, sending it, and the sender using ChatGPT to condense it into the key bullet points 2:42 PM · Mar 2, 2023 · 1.2M Views

unglaublich 1y ago
It's not really strange, is it? Business and politeness etiquette requires a certain phrasing that is typically more tedious than the core information of a message. Now that decorating any message with such fluff is automated, we can as well drop the requirement and just state clearly what we want without fluff.
- watwut 1y ago
  I do not know about where these people live, but managers did not read long emails for years already. Not that blame them, but this world where they would actually want those 4 paragraphs essays did not existed for years.
  - simoncion 1y ago
    Because of this, I tend to structure my business communications as "Sentence or five that best conveys what I want from (or want to tell) the reader, followed by the required background and/or supporting information required to understand the problem being described, or justify the request being made.". However, you can't do much of anything to deal with people who stop reading at the first sentence or question. Those folks are hopeless.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

unglaublich 1y ago

An LLM is effectively a compressed model of its input data. Inference is then the decompression stage where it generates text from the input prompt and the compressed model. Now that compressing and decompressing texts is trivial with LLMs, we humans should focus - in business at least - on communicating only the core of what we want to say. If the argument to get a new keyboard is: "i like it", then this should suffice, for inflated versions of this argument can be trivially generated.

tomrod 1y ago
The inverse of this is "AI Loopidity" where we burn cycles inflating then deflating information (in emails, say, or in AI code that blows up then gets reduced or summarized). This often also leads to weird comms outcomes, like saving a jpg at 85% a dozen times.
- nicbou 1y ago
  An early article about LLMs called it "a blurry jpeg of the web" for exactly those reasons. It's a good read.
- wood_spirit 1y ago
  And each cycle introducing error like a game of telephone
  - tomrod 1y ago
    And with no governance in place (like an engine governor) you get cascade failure.
AIPedant 1y ago
What I hate about this is that often a novel and interesting idea truly needs extra space to define and illustrate itself, and by virtue of its novelty LLMs will have substantially more difficulty summarizing it correctly. But it sounds like we are heading to a medium-term where people cynically assume any long email must be LLM-generated fluff, and hence nothing is lost by asking for an LLM summary. What a horrible technology.

stocksinsmocks 1y ago

> One of the signal achievements of computing is data compression Ah, yes. It is an achievement in signals in a way.

watwut 1y ago

> Bob needs a new computer for his job. In order to obtain a new work computer he has to create a 4 paragraph business case explaining why the new computer will improve his productivity. Is this situation in any way realistic one? Because the way companies work in my beck of woods, no one wants your 4 paragraph business case essay about computer. Like, it is funny anecdote. But, in real world, at least in my experience, pretty much everyone preferred short for emails and messages. They would skim the long ones at best, especially in situation that can be boiled down to "Tom wants a new computer and is verbose about it".

dspillett 1y ago
You give the concise version to the person who is going to authorise your request. The four paragraph version goes on record for the people that person needs to justfy the descision to, they'll likely declare “I don't see a problem here” without actually reading it which is the intention: they might be more wont to question the shorter version.
- watwut 1y ago
  My point is, I never encountered this. Literally never. I am not particularly young and it is not even the case that I would work in startups all that much. My friends did not complained about having to write paragraphs essays for stuff like this either. I am open to the idea that there is some bureaucratic workplace where it works like that ... but everywhere I have experience with, they preferred the short version.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    > My point is, I never encountered this. I have, though not directly but seeing it in an onsite visit to a client. It isn't as common as people complaining or joking about it might suggest, but it certainly happens.
teemur 1y ago
> Is this situation in any way realistic one? No, it's much worse than that. In real life you talk about pages and pages of documents and power points and meetings after meetings if you happen to need a computer/server/configuration that's not in the pre-approved list. (I really wish I was exaggerating. And of course no, not all employers are like this to state the obligatory obvious.)

roxolotl 1y ago

My PM said they’d written a bunch of tickets for a project yesterday morning that we hadn’t fully scoped yet. I was pleasantly surprised because I can’t complain if they are going to get ahead of things and start scaffolding tickets. Of course when I went to read them they were 100% slop. The funniest requirement were progress bars for actions that don’t have progress. The tickets were, even if you assume the requirements weren’t slop, at least 15 points a piece. But ok maybe with all of these new tools we can respond by implementing these insane requirements. The real problem is what this article is discussing. Each ticket was also 500-700 words. Requirements that boil down to a single if statement were described in prose. While this is hilarious the problem is it makes them harder to understand. I tried to explain this and they just said “ok fine rewrite them then”. Which I did in maybe 15min because there wasn’t actually much to write. At this point I’m at a loss for how to even work with people that are so convinced these things will save time because they look at the volume of the output.

kasey_junk 1y ago
Ask an llm for a project plan and they’ll happily throw dates around for each step, when they can’t possibly know how long it will take. But project plan dates have always been fiction. Getting there faster is an efficiency win. That said I’ve found that llms are good as interrogators. If used to guide a conversation, research background information and then be explicitly told to tersely outline the steps in something I’ve had very good results.
- danielbln 1y ago
  The date/week estimations in plans are especially funny when you work with an agent and it spits that out. "Week 1, setting up the structure" - uh, no, we're going to do this in 10 minutes.
dimitri-vs 1y ago
The only acceptable response to obvious AI slop - unless it's it's clear it's been heavily reviewed and updated - is to put it back into the AI and ask it for a 1 paragraph summary and work off of that.

dspillett 1y ago

This type of verbiage inflation was happening in business all the time anyway. LLMs are just being used as a method for doing it faster.

tovej 1y ago
Was it? I don't remember ever running into anyone preferring long documents. Also, anything added by the LLM is pure noise with the possibility of a hallucination or two. If, for some reason, you might even add some relevant information at times, and you're not going to start making things up. And if an LLM is also used at the other endpoint to parse the longer text, that creates a broken telephone. Congrats, your communication channel is now unreliable.

santiagobasulto 1y ago

> the load on my server is reduced isn't this the opposite? Enabling compression will INCREASE the load on your server as you need more CPU to compress/decompress the data.

reactordev 1y ago
It depends on where the bottleneck is. If it’s in network packet size, it would help serve more clients. At the expense of more CPU needed to decode/encode the data. If you’re serving large files and you have headroom in hardware it’s totally normal.
have_faith 1y ago
Depends on efficiency of compression I guess. If X bytes of data takes N time to transmit, and each slice of N takes Y CPU cycles during transmission, how many Y must your compression algorithm use, and how low must it lower N, in order to be more efficient from a CPU utilisation perspective? assumedly there's an inflection point from CPU use perspective, maybe a point that's impractical to achieve? I'm just vibe-thinking-out-loud.
- Koffiepoeder 1y ago
  Or your server can cache the compressed content (since it is a static page anyway).
ltratt 1y ago
As Koffiepoeder suggests, since the vast majority of content on my site is static, I only have to compress a file once when I build the site, no matter how many people later download it. [The small amount of dynamic content on my site isn't compressed, for the reason you suggest.]
- santiagobasulto 1y ago
  That’s a good point, didn’t know it was cached on top.
1y ago

PeterStuer 1y ago

I call BS. The 4 paragraphs requirement was not introduced 'because LLM'. It was there all along for what just should have been 'gimme 2 -3 bullet points'. They wanted Bob to hold back on requesting the new machine he needed, not by denying his request openly, but by making the process convoluted. Now Bob can cut through the BS, they want to blame the LMM for wasting their time and resources? BS!

tharne 1y ago
Maybe, but another way to look at this is that if someone is going to hold back requesting a new machine because they don't feel like writing a few paragraphs, then they probably don't really need a new computer. On the other hand, if their current machine really is so bad that it's getting in the way of their work they won't hesitate to quickly bang out 4 paragraphs to get a new one. Obviously, this trick does not work with LLMs in the mix.
- username332211 1y ago
  Or perhaps they desperately need a new computer but keep putting it off because they are busy with other tasks. And they'd be slowed down, at significant cost to the company until they get the free time to fill out the form. Furthermore, the guy who doesn't need a new computer is probably going to be writing the paragraphs on company time, so he'd do it if he has nothing to do and needs to look busy. (I think it's safe to assume that the sort of place where you need 4 paragraphs to justify a new computer would also require for employees to look busy at all times.) Why is everyone trying so hard to find purpose in broken administrative processes? There's usually none and, if there is its usually so hideous that it can't be put into writing.
  - tharne 1y ago
    > Why is everyone trying so hard to find purpose in broken administrative processes? Broken processes persist when they're benefiting someone somehow. If you can't figure out who's benefiting from a crap process, good luck trying to fix it or change it.

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thimabi 1y ago

One of the things that makes me hopeful for the future of LLMs is precisely this: humans are needlessly verbose, and LLMs can cut through the crap. I expect smaller models to become incrementally better at compressing what truly matters in terms of information. Books, reports, blog posts… all kinds of long-form content can be synthesized in just a few words or pages. It’s no wonder that even small LLMs can provide accurate results for many queries.

tharne 1y ago
> humans are needlessly verbose What a depressing belief. Human communication is about a whole lot more than just getting your point across as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- thimabi 1y ago
  Oh, no, I do understand the value of long-form and deep human communication. I’m an avid book reader, for instance, and I actually prefer longer narratives. What I don’t agree with is being needlessly verbose in circumstances in which the opposite is more valuable. Unfortunately, humans have a tendency to use flowery language even when that comes at the expense of message clarity. Think, for example, of the countless self-help books that can be converted to short blog posts. Or think about legal or academic writing, which often stands in the way of readers actually understanding what is being said. There’s so much writing like this out there that even LLMs were notorious for taking this over-elaborate language to a whole new level. And in my opinion that’s the kind of thing that we can (and should) avoid.
  - wood_spirit 1y ago
    You mean that language is a form or bureaucracy and gate keeping?
- mapmeld 1y ago
  People are not reading and absorbing the longer pieces of writing. I worked at a company which would create information-dense, wordy PowerPoint slides for client updates, and at some point you see it has no point besides trying to impress. If we actually needed something in an email, they told us to put it in the first sentence. I've also noticed it when people post LLM writing on Reddit. Something may give me pause, and then re-reading the content any given paragraph was way off. I had even glossed over the bolded conclusion "it’s a coaching-wheels moment" (?) because as you read it your brain thinks of a way it could make sense.

danielbln 1y ago

This image originally came out just around the time of ChatGPT release and captures it well: https://i.imgur.com/RHGD9Tk.png https://i.imgur.com/RHGD9Tk.png

deleted 1y ago
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reginald78 1y ago
The important part is the GDP is now increased because of the cost of energy and additional hardware needed expand and then compress the original data. Think of the economic growth all these new hassles provide!
- lubujackson 1y ago
  Next innovation: compress the AI translation layer from both sides. I feel like there might be an unbelievable Weissman score that can be achieved!
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bogzz 1y ago
    grug brain take
otterley 1y ago
This one is my favorite: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

zacksiri 1y ago

The problem described in this post has nothing to do with LLMs. It has everything to do with work culture and bureaucracy. Rules and laws that don't make sense remain because changing it requires time, energy and effort that most people in companies have either tried and failed or don't care enough to make a change. This is one example of the "horseless carriage" AI solutions. I've begun questioning further that actually we're going into a generation where a lot of the things we are doing now are not even necessary. I'll give you one more example. The whole "Office" stack of ["Word", "Excel", "Powerpoint"] can also go away. But we still use it because change is hard. Answer me this question. In the near future if we could have LLMs that can traverse to massive amount of data why do we need to make excel sheets anymore? Will we as a society continue to make excel spreadsheets because we want the insights the sheet provides or do we make excel sheets to make excel sheets. The current generation of LLM products I find are horseless carriages. Why would you need agents to make spreadsheets when you should just be able to ask the agent to give you answers you are looking for from the spreadsheet.

mmmllm 1y ago
LLMs are not able to replace Excel in their current state. See this simple accounting test: https://accounting.penrose.com/ https://accounting.penrose.com/ - errors compound over time. This is the case even with small datasets. For massive corporate datasets it's useless (try asking Gemini to summarise a Google Sheet). Until there is a fix for this (not clear there ever will be), Excel will be necessary. Word will probably become a different, more collaborative product. Notion-esque. Powerpoint...I would love if it disappeared but ultimately if you have to present something, you need to have done the work.
ModernMech 1y ago
> Why would you need agents to make spreadsheets when you should just be able to ask the agent to give you answers you are looking for from the spreadsheet. Because it seems to be a fundamental property of LLMs that they just make things up all the time. It's better to make the LLM a natural interface to a formal query language which will return hard answers with fidelity from the database.
pixl97 1y ago

amelius 1y ago

Perhaps we should judge the performance of an LLM by how well it can compress arbitrary information. A higher IQ would mean more compression, after all.

a_shovel 1y ago
Which LLMs perform better or worse will be determined entirely by the scoring formula used and how it penalizes errors. It is not in the nature of an LLM to be capable of lossless compression.
optimalsolver 1y ago
Lossily or losslessly?
- amelius 1y ago
  Losslessly, because that's easier to test.
  - optimalsolver 1y ago
    When you're recalling a memory, do you remember the position of every blade of grass, or the exact angle of the Sun? Humans, the only extant example of a general intelligence, don't do lossless compression at all. I don't think you get to AGI by trying to compress noise.
    - amelius 1y ago
      Lossless compression requires the recognition of patterns in the data. And a smart way to use those patterns to perform the actual compression.
Legend2440 1y ago
We already do this. Prediction is formally equivalent to compression, so loss is just a measure of how well you can compress the training dataset.

djoldman 1y ago

> Bob needs a new computer for his job.... In order to obtain a new work computer he has to create a 4 paragraph business case explaining why the new computer will improve his productivity. > Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM.... The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” The manager approves the request. "LLM inflation" as a "bad" thing often reflects a "bad" system. In the case described, the bad system is the expectation that one has to write, or is more likely to obtain a favorable result from writing, a 4 paragraph business case. Since Bob inflates his words to fill 4 paragraphs and the manager deflates them to summarise, it's clear that the 4 paragraph expectation/incentive is the "bad" thing here. This phenomenon of assigning the cause of "bad" things to LLMs is pretty rife. In fact, one could say that the LLM is optimizing given the system requirement: it's a lot easier to get around this bad framework.

hdgvhicv 1y ago
The broken thing here is that Bob, costing $10k a week, is after a new computer costing $100 a week.
- kelipso 1y ago
  This part I always found funny. Significantly increase productivity of the team for a fraction of the price of employing them? Absolutely not.
  - jermaustin1 1y ago
    I'm a consultant, and have been for 20 years now (except for a 2 year stint as an employee for the benefits and relocation assistance to move my family from Texas to NYC). At the NYC employment job, I was on a 2 year upgrade cycle being a software developer. Just whatever the current year Dell corpo laptop was. No procurement procedures, just IT got 2 year replacements, our laptops went to the non IT workforce after reimaging. As a consultant I usually bring my own device, and my laptops are usually WAY more capable since I will run each client on their own VM - makes it easy to delete the client when the contract is up. But I've had one client who did not allow BYOD, and any billed work had to be done on their hardware. That was fine, except that the desktop I was given was already a 12 year old dual core non-hyperthreading CPU that wasn't meant for developers even when it was built. I begged and pleaded for 6+ months for me to either bring in my own hardware they could image now and wipe at the end of the contract, or to please buy me a PC from this decade. It took 3 years to get the budget approval for a $2000 tower, roughly the equivalent of 15 hours of pay. The thing that finally pushed it over the edge, was that my PC could not handle Teams + Visual Studio at the same time, and manager couldn't handle that he couldn't watch me program. All of that to say I doubt these non-data-driven organizations are basing these decisions on anything other than micromanagement. Nothing to do with measured or assumed productivity, nothing to do with costs, so all I can think is they have to be a "decision maker" on all aspects.

jdoliner 1y ago

I saw an interesting argument recently that the reason you get this type of verbose language in corporate settings is that English lacks a formal tense. Apparently it's much less common in languages that have one. But in corporate English the verbosity is used as a signal that you took time to produce the text out of respect for the person you're communicating with. This of course now gets weird with LLMs because I doubt it can last as a signal of respect for very long when it just means you fed some bullet points to ChatGPT.

adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
Seems like an easy hypothesis to test: Do languages with a formal tense have short corporate language?
- jdoliner 1y ago
  This is what the argument I read claimed, I haven't verified it.
- Ifkaluva 1y ago
  I’m a native Spanish speaker—all forms of written Spanish are more verbose than English, but the formal form is even more verbose. I remember notifications my school used to send my parents were hilariously wordy by English standards.
  - xdennis 1y ago
    > notifications my school used to send my parents were hilariously wordy There might be something else at play there. Public sector workers are notorious for wooden language. The example I hate the most is how they always say "number of" before every number like "we'll buy 10 new busses" becomes "we will commence the procurement of a number of 10 new buses".
    - Ifkaluva 1y ago
      Public sector workers? No, this was a private school.

tossandthrow 1y ago

Where I work, I do the opposite: I let my colleagues know that they should write much mess and much more concise. I actually straight up reject it when text is too inflated, and I remind people that LLMs are available to expand on request.

lelanthran 1y ago
> Where I work, I do the opposite: I let my colleagues know that they should write much mess Sounds like a fun place :-) (yes, yes, I know it's a typo, I could not resist)
- tossandthrow 1y ago
  Haha, woops! Well, the thing is that LLMs actually enable being a bit more messy

BobbyTables2 1y ago

Bob is highly optimistic!

boxed 1y ago

> Brevity is the soul of wit Now that pachinko machines can create lots of prose, maybe it's time to finally learn this lesson.

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago

The author made up a fake situation to drive a point that doesn't exist

nathan_compton 1y ago

The older I get the more concise I find myself (which is not to say I'm actually concise, as my comment history will demonstrate), but LLM's have really driven home just how much noise day to day communication involves. So much filler text. It still surprises me when I see non-technical enthusiasts get excited about LLMs drafting almost useless copy or email or whatever. So much garbage text no one reads but has to be written for some reason. Its weird.

integralid 1y ago
"I wrote this mail slightly longer because I didn't have time to make it short" - someone famous When writing something I want people to read, I always take time at the end to make it shorter - remove distracting sentences, unnecessary adjectives and other noise. Really works wonders for team communication.
- wafflemaker 1y ago
  >When writing something I want people to read, I always take time at the end to make it shorter - remove distracting sentences, unnecessary adjectives and other noise. This is a good advice. How can I do it when talking? I often talk too much saying little, often loosing Listener's attention in the process.
  - antisthenes 1y ago
    Just like weight loss, start talking less. Silence is better than useless noise.
Gigachad 1y ago
On one side you have people using LLMs to fluff a sentence in to an essay. And on the receiver side they are hitting a button to AI summarise it back to a sentence. What incredible technology.
nicbou 1y ago
I write guides for a living, and my audience is largely comprised of non-native speakers. I write simply and unambiguously, and I've been told multiple times that my style seeps through my blog posts, my comments and my text messages. You are so right! LLMs produce so much noise. If you ask them to be concise, they struggle to cut just the fat, and the output is often vague or misleading. I see that again and again when I ask it to produce different versions of a sentence. I imagine it's how artists feel about AI art. It seems right at first glance, but you can tell that no thought or craftsmanship went into it.

verbify 1y ago

Engaging with why we might actually want inflation of text: 1) For pedagogical or explanatory purposes. For example, if I were to write: > ∀x∈R,x^2≥0 I've used 10 characters to say > For every real number x, it's square is greater than or equal to zero For a mathematician, the first is sufficient. For someone learning, the second might be better (and perhaps as expansion of 'real number' or that 'square' is 'multiplying it by itself'). 2) To make sure everything is stated and explicit. "He finally did x" implies that something has been anticipated/worked on for awhile, but "after a period of anticipation he did x" makes it more clear. This also raises the question of who was anticipating, which could be made explicit too. As someone who spends a lot of time converting specifications to code (and explaining technical problems to non-technical people), unstated assumptions are very prevalent. And then sometimes people have different conceptions of the unstated assumption (i.e. some people might think that nobody was anticipating, it just took longer than you'd expect otherwise). So longer text might seem like a simple expansion, but then it ends up adding detail. I definitely agree with the authors point, I just want to argue that having a text-expander tool isn't quite as useless as 'generate garbage for me'.

nemomarx 1y ago
Can a generator do things like 2 if it wasn't in the input text?
- lblume 1y ago
  Ambiguity is resolved via provided context, but just as with conversations, this context may be severely underspecified.
- antonvs 1y ago
  Yes, because generators generate at the token level, which is technically smaller than an individual word. They can easily generate unique sentences, and for example transfer learning allows them to apply knowledge obtained from some other training data to new domains. The idea that generators are some sort of parrot is very outdated. The 2021 paper that coined the term "stochastic parrot" was already wrong when it was published.

sdenton4 1y ago

Huh, this post is not what I thought it would be! Even after the first two paragraphs! There's a line of thought which states that intelligence rhymes with compression: Identifying patterns allows better prediction, enables better compression of the data. However, internally, LLMs typically do the opposite: Tokenization and vectorization multiply the bit rate of the input signal. Chain of thought techniques add a lot of extra text, further increasing the bit rate.

jnmandal 1y ago

LLM Inflation is an interesting choice of terminology. Like with many things in our contemporary society there is a temptation to assign absolute, quantitative value to everyday concepts but realistically we should know this to be a fallacy. Many concepts actually have no "on paper" value but still manifest significant social value. Marketing is the typical example, and yet we don't refer to advertising as inflation (though maybe we should). This concept probably applies to lots of work in the "AI" space right now. The idea of using huge amounts of compute to generate lifelike voices for LLMs comes to mind as being recently maligned (something many users may not want). Or people upset about getting AI summaries in search that they didn't ask for. And yet, swaths of capital has been invested in these ideas and perhaps its a worthwhile use of resources. I am not sure personally. Time will tell. But I suspect its more complicated than the author is implying here.

geor9e 1y ago

Why choose the word "inflation" to mean the opposite of compression? If you said it to a stranger, they'd assume you mean the price of LLMs is going up due to scarcity. I would call this LLM fluffing or LLM decompression

zahlman 1y ago
> Why choose the word "inflation" to mean the opposite of compression? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflate seems relevant here.
antonvs 1y ago
Plus there's already a name for the general phenomenon: AI slop. Sure, it doesn't directly capture the compression/decompression aspect, but it's assumed that slop includes unnecessary filler.

numpad0 1y ago

> That we are using LLMs for inflation should not be taken as a criticism of these wonderful tools. It might, however, make us consider why we find ourselves inflating content. At best we’re implicitly rewarding obfuscation and time wasting; at worst we’re allowing a lack of clear thinking to be covered up. I think we’ve all known this to be true, but LLMs allow us to see the full extent of this with our own eyes. Perhaps it will encourage us to change! Yeah, this is the problem. Wealth distribution stopped working sometime in the late 20th century and we're fighting each others for competitive advantages. That's the core of this phenomenon. No one needs containers full of baby sized left shoes, but proof of work must be shown. So the leathers must be cut and shoes must be sewn, only to be left in the ever growing pile in the backyard. That's kind of wrong.

larodi 1y ago

Good point to better use it for haikus. Not sure if it that good at it though.

TOGoS 1y ago

> At best we’re implicitly rewarding obfuscation and time wasting; at worst we’re allowing a lack of clear thinking to be covered up. Most people don't think very clearly. That's why rhetoric is effective. That's why most communication is fluffy social signaling. You can give people great advice and their eyes glaze over because the words didn't fill them with emotion, or something, and they do the exact opposite. No wonder LLMs get put to work playing that stupid game.

nlawalker 1y ago

Long documents in business contexts that get summarized and go mostly unread are the byproduct of a specific and common level of trust and accountability in those contexts: people don't believe someone has done enough critical thinking or has a strong enough justification for a proposal unless they've put it on the page, but if it is on the page, it's assumed that it does in fact represent critical thinking and legitimate justification. If trust was higher, shorter documents would be more desirable. If trust was lower, or accountability higher, summarization would be used a lot more carefully. LLMs haven't changed anything in this regard except that they've made it extremely easy to abuse trust at that specific level. The long-term result will be that trust will fall in the general case, and people will eventually become more careful about using summarization. I don't think it will be long before productized AI used in business contexts will be pretrained/fine-tuned to perform a basic level of AI content detection or include a qualitative measure of information density by default when performing summarization.

ruuda 1y ago

I consider inflation a double insult. (https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/llm-interactions) It says "I couldn't be bothered to spend time writing this myself, but I'm expecting you to read all the fluff."

hangonhn 1y ago
To be fair, the recipient probably isn't reading it either. They're getting it summarized. LLMs are creating more work for other LLMs.

g9yuayon 1y ago

The example in the article does not look like LLM Inflation, but that LLM can't reduce the waste in a bureaucratic process.

itaysk 1y ago

https://x.com/itaysk/status/1887942925042033069 https://x.com/itaysk/status/1887942925042033069

codr7 1y ago

I've seen this happen IRL. My former (obviously) wannabe manager used GAI to pimp our CV's before sending out to clients, pretty sure they too consulted stupid to summarize on their end.

amdivia 1y ago

I think the usage of LLMs will push for a societal change in how we communicate. instead of elongated sentences, we perhaps might start seeing an increase in just communicating through the minimum constructing points of whatever meaning we hope to convey, leaving the presentation work for the LLM on the receiving side

kazinator 1y ago

We've also had XML inflation for 30 years.