There is a popular meme that this meeting should have been an email. Why wasn't it an email? Because people frequently convey information in a way that is most comfortable and convenient for the conveyor. Current LLMs now provide unprecedented versatility in tailoring the form of a message as either sender or receiver and it will provide significant leverage to those who thoughtfully deploy it. We all have particular preferences for how we create and consume information. Now we can more easily serve wider audiences.
Last week there was a call for parents to learn about a camping trip our eldest is going on with their class at school. I couldn't make the call so I asked my wife to use granola.so, an AI notepad, to transcribe and generate notes. Seeing the bulleted notes, I wondered why didn't they just email that out. I know some parents just wanted the opportunity to talk to someone about the event and to ask questions, for me though, I was happy with the bullet points. It is exciting to be in this moment where we can more easily tailor our vehicles for communication. This flexibility in formats isn't entirely new – we've seen similar principles applied in other domains.
Just as we've long manipulated image resolution on the internet, we can now adjust the level of detail in any communication – increasing specificity (upsampling) or condensing information (downsampling). Just like with images, it's much better if you start with a high fidelity asset and then translate that to formats with less and less detail, but you could nudge it up a little without too much negative impact. You can take a video communication and translate that into prose and then into tweets, if you'd like. Summarization is easy. You can take text and have the machine make it into an audio format for listening to like a podcast. You can take a podcast, extract the transcript and use gen AI to create visuals to make it into a video. The friction of transitioning between mediums is dissolving.
It's always been best practice to tailor the message to the audience and medium. Now we are only constrained by our will and thoughtfulness about how to deploy that.
This shift in communication dynamics opens up new possibilities across various sectors. In education, for instance, a single lecture could be transformed into multiple formats – detailed notes for in-depth study, concise summaries for quick review, or even interactive visual presentations for different learning styles. In business, complex reports could be efficiently condensed for executive summaries or expanded into comprehensive presentations, catering to diverse stakeholder needs.
Ultimately, how we communicate fundamentally remains the same – we still aim to inform, persuade, and connect. But the versatility in tailoring our messages has been forever changed. As we move forward, our challenge lies not in the technical ability to transform our communications, but in our thoughtfulness and skill in leveraging these tools effectively. The future of communication is not just about what we say, but how we choose to say it across an ever-expanding array of formats and mediums.
