Journalism is lossy compression

Jarvis reflecting on the summarization of ChatGPT and comparing to journalism itself.

What strikes me about the piece is how unselfaware media are when covering technology.

For what is journalism itself but lossy compression of the world? To save space, the journalist cannot and does not save or report everything known about an issue or event, compressing what is learned into so many available inches of type. For that matter, what is a library or a museum or a curriculum but lossy compression — that which fits? What is culture but lossy compression of creativity? As Umberto Eco said, “Now more than ever, we realize that culture is made up of what remains after everything else has been forgotten.”

The important pull quote about Large Language Models.

To predict the next, best word in a sequence is a different task from finding the correct answer to a math problem or verifying a factual assertion or searching for the best match to a query.

Remember that this is what the algorithm is really doing. The intelligence we see is a reflection.