AI Governance Daniel Parshall, Ph.D.

Send me the prompt

If you want people to actually read what you are posting, you should send the costly signal showing it isn’t slop.

I just saw a Xeet on Xitter1 that explained the most efficient compression algorithm I’ve ever seen:

Tweet from Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig): I just discovered an awesome compression algorithm: your 4000 word blog post can be compressed down to the prompt you gave Claude to write it.

Like a lot of good humor, it contains an element of truth, to wit: you have Claude, and I have Claude, so the only novel bits are those in the prompt you used. In addition, AIs have a (well-deserved) reputation as horrible writers, with abysmal theory of mind, and it requires great effort to pan through all the piles of slop and emerge with any nugget of insight. And if you didn’t care enough to clean up that insight so that it’s beautiful, why should I care enough to dig through that slop?

To be clear, this isn’t a moral claim: I’m not saying “you used AI to write for you, therefore you’re a bad person”2. I’m actually saying, “Now that it’s 20x easier to write something, EVERYONE is writing 20x more… but I still have the same amount of attention”. I won’t waste a thousand words on this3, when the plot says it all:

Sketch-style plot of number of posts per week vs quality of post. A blue Pre-AI curve (area = 1) and a much taller orange Post-AI curve (area = 20) both decay with quality; at the high-quality tail, an arrow marks the tiny region labeled 'the part you'll read'.

By all means, use AI for drafting, exploring, and proofreading. I can’t tell you how much it reduces my writer’s block to say “Claude, make a draft”… and then upon seeing it, I can instantly understand what I don’t want my essay to say, and can then write what I do want4. But if your piece is showing as “100% AI” on Pangram, then my prior belief is that it took you ten seconds to generate this, and would take me minutes to confirm that it’s garbage.

This is probably doubly-true for form-adjacent applications such as job postings, grants, fellowships, etc. Now that it’s so much easier to submit an application, orgs are looking for easier ways to filter out applications. This has become such a pressing issue that my team created a SlopChecker5 repo at a recent hackathon for FAI/IFP (we took “Best In Show”, incidentally!). Automatically checking “was this written with AI?” is a very easy test to apply, and while some orgs have legal requirements to consider those applications anyway, plenty of orgs will just throw your application out immediately.

Now maybe you, dear reader, truly are that 1 person in 20 who had a long, nuanced conversation and explored all kinds of ideas before discarding most of them, only keeping the valuable ones. But I won’t be able to tell that without investing the effort, which, sorry, I don’t have time to do.

Or maybe you, dear reader, truly are someone who speaks English as a second language, and you wrote the post in your native tongue, only using Claude to translate it. But as before, I can’t tell until I’ve put the effort in, and ain’t nobody got time for that6.

For folks in those two categories, I might be inclined to read what you posted if you share a link to the original conversation7. But for the rest of y’all: save us both some time, and just send me the prompt.

Daniel Parshall, Ph.D., is a former physicist and data scientist working on AI policy. He can be reached at dan@canaryinstitute.ai

Footnotes

  1. https://x.com/QuinnyPig/status/2092088373687328791 ↩

  2. No, I’m saying you’re a bad person for OTHER reasons. ↩

  3. For much more than 1000 words, see the post whence I stole inspiration for the figure at https://12gramsofcarbon.com/p/meditations-on-ai-and-the-future. ↩

  4. Although I freely admit that Claude is my gofer for fact-checking, citations, and often footnotes. ↩

  5. You try it yourself at https://slop-checker.com; the source code is at https://github.com/nawagner/SlopChecker. ↩

  6. Although you truly have my sympathy; I learned a second language as an adult and know how frustrating it is when you can’t be the clever, witty person you are in your mother tongue. ↩

  7. In the spirit of transparency, here’s mine: https://claude.ai/share/6a2ffb8b-b06f-498d-873e-0a4a78b78de3. ↩