Lost in Truncation

Lost in Truncation Generative AI was supposed to unleash our creativity. Instead, it became our cultural trash compactor. Welcome to the age of summarization.

- MARK WILSON

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF GENERATIVE AI-AKA LESS THAN TWO years ago—we flocked to ChatGPT to marvel at all that we could create: silly haikus, Shakespearean sonnets, and Seinfeld scenes. Generative AI promised limitless production, and we used it to make more media, mindlessly. To blink things into existence.

But the fun quickly wore off, and a new killer function has taken over: using generative AI to compress existing stuff and restate it in simplified form. We don't live in a new creative age. We live in the age of summarization.

It's easy to look at this development skeptically: This is what we get from AI tools that haven't (yet) delivered on their creative potential. But maybe these tools are simply responding to human desire. The more we create digitally, the faster we want to digest all of it. And this began long before anyone had ever heard of LLMs.