11.
Stay in the goldilocks zone
If your unit of conversation is too big then you’ll be monologuing, if it’s too small you’re giving a one-word answer and likely getting a one-word response.
Your unit of conversation needs to be just right in order to keep an interaction moving forward in the expected way1. The same is true for large language models on both sides. A machine will time out if it’s asked to share too much information at once, and a machine won’t understand if too much information is supplied at once.
Do
Great. Can you synthesise those five points into an elegantly written blog post that is 800 words long. The blog post should have a fairly high score on the Flesch–Kincaid readability (above 80) and make frequent use of bullet points to aid scannability.
Don’t
Cool. Can you remind me of what the full “To Be or Not To Be” monologue is from Macbeth? Once you’ve shared that, could you share a version using modern English words and grammatical conventions? Finally, share an analysis of how the two differ and the importance of iambic pentameter in understanding Shakespeare’s original words.
Footnotes
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Paul Grice has the ‘Maxim of Quantity’, which relates to this ↩