There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text (via)
This is the best “AI usage” policy I’ve seen yet. I would love it if projects I worked on would adopt similar conventions and standards.
you as an author need to take the time to make sure that all of the ideas in the writing are the ideas that you personally intend to convey (including the structure and wording that determines which ideas are emphasized) and that the documents are a good use of your readers’ time.
The thing that frustrates me the most about how AI is used in the contexts where I’m exposed to it is when people try to pass off what is clearly unedited slop as their own work. Rather than seeing AI as a tool to assist with human productivity, too many people are trying to make it replace human productivity, but all they’re really doing is unloading their work on some other human. I feel pretty strongly that asking someone to read AI generated output is rude and inconsiderate. You are effectively asking them to fact-check, edit, summarize, and distill a jumbled bag of claims that may or may not be true for you. To the author, if feel like they saved a ton of time producing the document or message or whatever they needed to write. To the person on the receiving it’s another chore. To be fair I have mostly stopped tolerating this behaviour.
You will confuse your readers (and waste their time) if you present them things that are not genuinely representative of your thoughts. In some cases, readers will recognize and call out the incongruous parts; in others, they will be misled as to what your actual thoughts are.
This cuts to the core of the issue, I think. I'd strongly argue that we shouldn't be outsourcing our actual thinking to AI. It's so tempting to just post whatever it generates because it creates the illusion of productivity which is highly rewarded in many white collar jobs. Most managers reward velocity and not quality. The problem is certainly that the incentives are wrong in the first place, but until those are corrected we have to rely on our own self-discipline to resist the urge to just ship more slop for the sake of seeming more productive.
Pascal once wrote, “I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”
I love this quote, but I always thought it was Mark Twain's. I guess a lot of quotes are misattributed to him.
If you are producing a longer piece of writing from a shorter prompt, consider instead just sharing the prompt itself.
I like this suggestion.
