Laurence Tratt: LLM Inflation

Tratt describes a pattern he calls “LLM inflation”: LLMs can expand short, simple content into long, apparently profound prose, and compress long prose back into a short summary. He uses this to show how the same tool can be used in opposite directions.

He says this does not criticize LLMs themselves. Instead, it raises the question of why content gets inflated in the first place, since this can reward obfuscation and time wasting or hide a lack of clear thinking.

Reading notes

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• Compression used to be necessary because storage and networks were limited.
• Web content still arrives compressed.
• A worker can use an LLM to produce a long business case.
• A manager can use an LLM to reduce that email to one sentence.
• Tratt names this pattern “LLM inflation.”
• He sees it as a sign that unclear thinking can be concealed and obfuscation can be rewarded.