Read raw transcripts

I opened up Claude one day, and asked to summarise [[Dostoevsky]]‘s Crime and Punishment into one sentence; and it said:

A young, impoverished ex-student named Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary people are above moral law, only to be consumed by guilt and psychological torment until he confesses and finds redemption through love and spiritual awakening.

Would this mean that I’ve saved 20 hours of reading, 30 days of thinking about the plotline twists, and 5 years of reflecting on the storyline to finally “get” what Raskolnikov did in this book?

No, absolutely not. I don’t think this tight compressed sentence is even a cheap substitute for what I’ve read.

I’ll give another example: More recently, a few team members picked up on the Microsoft copilot usage; and have been using it to process raw transcripts from interviews by asking the agents to ; "summarise all the transcripts, and then come up with 10 key insights you've identified.."

It’s not bad to do this, and perhaps it could save some time (I did this once or twice, and I later realised I mistook signal for noise). As I’ve shown you earlier with the compressed one-liner quote on [[Dostoevsky]]‘s Crime and Punishment, it does a poor job at unearthing insights. These “compressions” have this diabolic nature of making 0 sense, and also total sense at the same time.

We can’t just offload the insight generation process to the LLMs; they’re not the same.

Compare the copilot gibberish to actual humans instead. Let’s have 10 humans in a room, who read through the same set of 10 interview transcripts, synthesize them together with a facilitator in charge, and come up with a list, and then compare the result with the copilot gibberish, you will see what I mean. What this might generate, might actually make more “sense”. It could provocate, titilate, or make you do a deeper “hmmmm…” when you read it.

We, as humans might be limited in computation, limited in memory, as well as limited in certain types of intelligence that the LLMs possess, and yet, because of these very limitations, we have the potency to generate unique insights.

The way each of us distill the raw transcripts might be totally different. When we read, something unique happens in our funny little brains, it connects with all our key memories and gets situated in a way, that in total, we might have an unique interpretation.

Which is why, I see high value in reading through raw transcripts.

And for these reasons, whenever I see these up-and-coming apps/startups talking about “killing books”, “killing meeting notes”, “killing note taking” “killing podcasts” by summarising everything into a few paragraphs, or even a few sentences. I truly mock at them. These “AI is taking over your jobs” propogandists run into the mistake of confusing compression with distillation. It’s not the same.

Let the LLMs do the grunt work of compression; we can safely delegate them at this task.

And we should continue reading more raw transcripts; reading footnotes; reading meta-commentaries; the “devil lies in the details”, and how our brain interprets them. Distillation might be the only remaining moat for us.