The chief executive of one of London\u2019s leading artificial intelligence companies has warned his staff against \u201cAI-sloppification\u201d after an increase in documents written by large language models. <\/p>\n
Victor Riparbelli, who co-founded Synthesia in 2017, told his staff that \u201cno one wants to read\u201d overwritten documents with \u201cpages of fluff\u201d, and that it was a \u201cnet-negative\u201d for productivity.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cNow that we\u2019re all using AI to write, I\u2019m seeing an increase in overly verbose documents,\u201d Riparbelli wrote in a company-wide memo.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cLarge language models are great tools for pushing our thinking and helping us write faster but it\u2019s a fine balance between writing with enough depth to convey complex problems and driving clarity by being concrete and concise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we write too long and verbose docs we place the burden of distilling the content onto the readers \u2014 so instead of one person spending ten minutes on sharpening a doc we have ten people spending ten additional minutes reading slop, leading to net-negative productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Synthesia uses AI to make realistic videos for employee training and marketing. The company sells to 90\u00a0per cent of the Fortune 100 \u2014 the biggest businesses in the US by revenue \u2014 and was valued at $4\u00a0billion at its most recent funding round in January.\u00a0<\/p>\n