if nobody reads, what's the point of writing?
"Now enter AI. What happens when it's doing the writing—and not even the author has deep knowledge of what was written? That's like a compiled or multiple author memo no one ever actually read end-to-end. - Steven Sinofsky"
Was reading this piece by Steven Sinofsky about how nobody actually reads anything at work. Even when he was sending big strategy memos to thousands of people as a senior exec, maybe 2-3 people would actually read the whole thing. The only stuff people reliably read were org charts, and even then only if they had pictures instead of just text.
Now it's getting worse. We have got AI writing everything and half the time the person who "wrote" it hasn't even read it themselves. You are writing stuff and nobody understands it, not even you. So we have gone from "nobody reads" to "nobody reads and nobody writes either."
Thing is, we are not going to fix the core problem here. People just don't want to do the hard work of reading carefully, and with LLMs around they are definitely not going to start now. But maybe there is a different approach. What if instead of trying to make people read better, we make documents feel more like conversations? Like instead of just staring at a long memo, you could actually question it, probe deeper, have a back and forth with the ideas. Similar to talking through something with another person, except the other person is an LLM that knows the document inside out.
Only problem is that you still have to want to engage. If you are not willing to actually discuss and think about stuff with the LLM, then it doesn't matter how good the tool is. The people who will use LLMs to really understand documents are probably the same people who would have read them carefully anyway.
This tells you something about how organizations actually work. Not everyone is going to read deeply. Maybe 5-10% of people will put in that effort. And that explains a lot about who gets promoted and who doesn't. It requires actual work and discipline. If you can't be bothered to understand the ideas that matter in your field, you are not going to win anywhere else either.
The effort part doesn't go away. LLMs might make it more interesting for people who want to try, but they can't make you care if you don't already.
Guess that's just how it is.