Mechanism◆Article

Natural-language text cannot be transformed without changing its meaning, and information is lost when the transformer lacks a detailed understanding of the author's intended message.

Every rewrite or rephrase alters the meaning of natural-language writing. When an AI or other entity performs the transformation without fully understanding the author's intended meaning, some information will inevitably be lost. ✦ AI generated

Sophie Alpert · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-11 · original ↗

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There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text — every rewrite and rephrase changes the meaning of your writing, and if this is done by an entity that doesn’t have the most detailed mental representation of what you personally were trying to communicate, information will be lost.

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✳ LLMs ✳ natural-language text

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Mechanism · 1

Document authors must stand behind every idea and sentence in their documents and ensure that the entire document represents their own thoughts before sharing it.Sophie Alpert · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%

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explains mechanism → Large language models don't actually understand things; they convincingly imitate understanding, and this pretense works fine until it suddenly and completely breaks down.Jeremy Howard · Machine Learning Street Talk explains mechanism → An LLM cannot have genuine understanding like humans do because it is a language faculty artificially detached from the rest of embodied cognition, lacking sensorimotor engagement with the world.Mazviita Chirimuuta · Machine Learning Street Talk