The arrival of “AI” has created disruption. I don’t mean the one generally in hype, but a subtler one: all the artefacts that were synonymous of intellectual work now have lost that meaning. Essays, reports, analysis, papers, articles: all of them can now be parroted out by an LLM with ease, in seconds.

Words are now cheap. A one line prompt can make a whole essay. Complexity isn’t a signal for hard work anymore. Length is not an indicator of effort either. As fallible as heuristics can be, this has been a major loss. One that is making many education systems pointless and many work documents worthless or, at best, suspicious.

Words are cheap.
Our heuristics are failing.

While the issue with mistakes, hallucinations, and overall slop is major in terms of the artefacts we produce, I also believe that the emotional impact of the fall of these heuristics has been severely understated. As limited and faulty as they are, our brain constantly takes these shortcuts to understand the world quickly and decide what to focus on. When something like this breaks, it creates a void in our instincts. Some people ignore it and continue as before while the mistakes increase, some people accept it and decide for the tiring path of thinking through everything.

As society stumbles in the dark trying to find new heuristics to fill that void, where can we anchor our perceptions? What matters then?

Brevity.

We can argue that brevity, synthesis, conciseness, have always mattered. This is true, what changed is that now words are cheap: the field is equalized. When a short text and a long text don’t represent a likely different value just by length, the ability to write less takes the advantage because it’s the one we can evaluate in a short time.

In a world where people increasingly react to long texts by generating an LLM summary, having a short text to start with wins. People that can be more precise in less words, that can communicate more with less, are the ones that have an advantage. It’s a skill we can develop.

Brevity matters. Which also means we should start valuing it, especially at work. Recognising when someone wrote clearly and briefly, assessing the quality, and elevating people that can do this work is going to be equally important.

We should ask more to ourselves and each other:

• How can we get better at writing less to send the same message?
• How can we get better at noticing and elevating this skill?
• What are better artefacts, templates, principles we can use to support it?

In short (heh) we need two things. One is the awareness that our heuristics have failed and words are cheap. One is the knowledge that brevity is an important skill. I’m aware it’s not a solution for everything, but it helps.

P.S.:
I can hear already a lot of people thinking: it’s not a skill, I’ll just use the LLM to write the short version. That’s ok to me. Reviewing an LLM summary before sending it out for accuracy is much more efficient to read anyhow, and regardless it has a lower cost than sending the long version to everyone and have many people summarize with an LLM, and risk mistakes.