> I spent a lot of effort every day on both dealing with inconsiderate people lobbing LLM output at me, and making sure never to act like one myself
So why are you so eager to defend your fantastical scenario? It doesn’t matter how considerate you are, truth is the overwhelming majority of people aren’t and won’t be. We’re discussing reality here, not “what could be if we lived in a utopia which will never come to pass”.
The optimistic case is "having 500 bits, giving LLM 300, getting back 1000, and learning extra 500 in the process". Real numbers are lower. People don't vouch thoroughly and don't catch all mistakes.
But reasonable people don't send every output from LLMs to others without giving it a cursory glance (obvious hallucinations or nonsense would paint the sender as incompetent or inconsiderate), and that alone eliminates the worst levels of noise. A cursory read and cutting out obvious bullshit before sending is enough to make the message carry more bits of information than the propmpt.
> the overwhelming majority of people aren’t and won’t be.
In my experience, the "overwhelming majority" are giving something between a cursory glance and cursory edit; whether the resulting message has more or less information than prompt then depends on how much noise LLM added on top. The inconsiderate people I deal with, they often send "net more bits than in prompt" outputs, but those outputs are also verbose and not fully filtered for bullshit, thus it's effortful to tease out the signal from noise.
> This is the optimistic scenario
So is it typical or optimistic?
> I spent a lot of effort every day on both dealing with inconsiderate people lobbing LLM output at me, and making sure never to act like one myself
So why are you so eager to defend your fantastical scenario? It doesn’t matter how considerate you are, truth is the overwhelming majority of people aren’t and won’t be. We’re discussing reality here, not “what could be if we lived in a utopia which will never come to pass”.