cruciferous

In the world of LLM-generated slop summaries, I’m constantly wondering: what happened to the good old fashioned TLDR?

That TLDR was often a sentence or two. shorter than the new trend of an AI-slop summary.

It required the writer to sit down and think about their post. They had to distill things down.

I wish we still had that..

birds

See that bird over there? What is that? There’s a new app that can tell you!

You can just point your phone at that bird and a large language model will tell you: “why, that’s the common crow! You are so smart for asking me this question.”

You are very smart, you know how to point a phone camera at a crow.

What is a crow? Well there’s no way of knowing that on your own. And why would you want to know? The large language model can generate an answer, and that’s enough for you.

heartfelt message

When a friend texts you a heartfelt message, now you don’t need to come up with a thoughtful reply, you can just have a large language model write it for you!

The large language model says you are very smart for this. You’re saving so much time! You are so efficient to outsource this task to a large language model.

You crushed this friendship.

You’re optimizing.

What did you actually think of your friend’s heartfelt message? Doesn’t matter! You don’t even need to read it. Large language models have your back.

smart fridge

Your new fridge has a camera inside. And that camera takes pictures fed to a large language model. Now, through the magic of technology, you can ask your fridge “what do I have in my fridge?”

The large language model that’s connected to the camera inside your fridge will tell you “you have some eggs and milk and I see a salad kit and a jar of salsa. You are so smart for asking me what is in the fridge! Would you like to know what you can make with these ingredients?”

“Yes! ” you think. “That sounds great, I want to know what I can make!”

“With a jar of salsa, you could make chips and salsa. Would you like to buy some chips? Here’s a link!”

This is a great recipe. You are smart for asking a chatbot for this. In the past you might have to open the fridge door. But that was so wasteful! You know that you are optimizing… technology is making you more efficient!

And how incredible of the large language model to suggest some chips to go along with the salsa? You never would have thought of that on your own!

And what’s this? A link to buy the salsa? We can truly do anything with technology.

breakup

You recently went through a breakup. This is hard. You do not know what to do. Things feel different. You are not sure how. You ask a large language model and it says you are feeling sad.

Good: you know how you feel now.

You would not be able to know this feeling without the large language model. You are glad this machine exists so that it can tell you that you are sad.

When you search “how to cope with sadness after heartbreak,” the Google AI Overview tells you to journal.

Journaling sounds good. But it sounds hard.

But that’s ok: it’s never been easier to journal with a large language model (so says an ad on your search results).

You click the ad.

With the power of technology, you can type in how you’re feeling (“sad”), and a large language model will churn out a perfectly polished journal entry about being sad, personalized for you.

You wrote that whole journal entry! By yourself! With just a tiny bit of help from this magnificent technology!

You are very smart: you wrote a journal entry about how sad you were!

You feel less sad now, because the text that a large language model generated said journaling helps. And you just journaled. So it must have helped.

writing

Ever since you wrote that great journal entry about being sad, you’ve known you’re destined to be a writer.

You didn’t read the journal entry, but a large language model in a chatbot told you it was great. It said it’s the best journal entry it’s ever read about being sad, and that you should write more, with its help.

You’ve always wanted to be a writer really. In college you loved writing. And now, with this technology, it’s finally possible to write!

You start typing. You write two paragraphs. This is great! You remember why you love this.

But then it gets a little hard. You hit writer’s block. And you realize… you can use a large language model for this!

Just paste the two paragraphs you wrote into an online chatbot and tell it “make this into a novel.”

A large language model generates a novel that you wrote.

You wrote a novel! All by yourself. With the help of a large language model.

reading

This year you really want to read more books. But they’re soooo long. And boring. And hard.

If only there was another to make them easy to read.

But wait! We have the technology. You can just type into your favorite chatbot to summarize that book on your shelf for you.

No, wait, what it generated is too long. Much too long.

You give the chatbot clear instructions to “summarize the plot in a sentence or less.”

The large language model inside the chatbot generates a sentence summary of the book you wanted to read. No, wait, the book you did read.

You’re reading so many books now. With a large language model’s help!

conclusion

This was a life well lived.