There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

24 points by speckx 14 hours ago | 8 comments

tanseydavid
IMHO lossy/lossless feels like the wrong term to use for natural-language text.
Every time natural-language passes from one human to another whether verbally or in the written word, there is a greater than zero percent chance that the meaning will be received/understood in a way that is "lossy" compared to the communicating party's intent. The so-called "telephone game" is a very good example of this.
It seems true that the lossy problem arises even without any LLMs or any intentional transformations.
Lossless in other domains basically means perfect-fidelity carried across copies. Natural language seems almost incapable of this ideal.
- goodmythical
  SHE said she did not take his money.
  She SAID she did not take his money.
  She said SHE did not take his money.
  She said she DID not take his money.
  She said she did NOT take his money.
  She said she did not TAKE his money.
  She said she did not take HIS money.
  She said she did not take his MONEY.
  8 very different messages all containing the same words in the same order. If the emphasis is changed or lost between sender and receiver, the message itself is lost regardless of the faithful reproduction of the actual words.
owentbrown
I use AI to write documentation frequently. An AI agent, 600k tokens into a feature that it just authored, understands the feature as well or better than I do. It can document, compactly, what the code actually does, as well as the intent. These docs add value above having no docs and letting another AI, with zero context, read your bare code.
In the context in which I work, the quality of these docs is sufficient.
Unless your docs are being read by thousands of people, in 2026, in most contexts, handwriting docs adds less value than writing high quality instructions to your agent.
There are exceptions. For example, when kicking off a project, short crisp prose in a product brief aligns a team, removes uncertainty, and clarifies decisions. These are worth hand writing.
- fwlr
  An AI agent, 600k tokens into a feature that it just authored, understands the feature as well or better than I do.
  On this, we are in complete agreement.
  horticulturist
  I don't know about that. There's no understanding anywhere at that point.
- nlawalker
  > handwriting docs adds less value than writing high quality instructions to your agent
  Are the instructions not docs?
tobinfricke
> There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
Of course there are. The article simply defines "transformation" such that it excludes the lossless ones. :-)
watso
“If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can always talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to.”
bars!!