There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
A short policy says engineers can use AI for writing, but they still own every line. The key warning: every rewrite changes meaning, and readers pay the price.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Sophie Alpert has put out an internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers, and Simon Willison says it’s short, readable, and strong enough to back up its own advice. The central rule is blunt: if AI helps massage your writing, you still have to stand behind every idea and every sentence before you share it.
That means no shrugging away a bad line with, “AI wrote that.” If a reviewer asks what you meant, the answer has to come from you. Otherwise you’re not just outsourcing phrasing; you’re also exporting confusion to the people reading your document.
Willison points to the post’s title idea — there are no lossless transformations of natural-language text. Every rewrite and rephrase changes meaning. And if the thing doing the rewriting doesn’t have the full mental model of what you were trying to say, some of that meaning will get lost on the way through.
The practical warning is simple, and a little unforgiving. AI can help draft, polish, and rearrange words, but it can’t be the author’s escape hatch when the text stops meaning what it should. That’s on the engineer, not the model.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right rule because writing is not a copy-and-paste sport with a shiny autocomplete attached. AI makes it easier to sound clear while quietly becoming less precise, which is exactly how teams end up debating what a sentence was supposed to mean. The grown-up move is to treat AI as a tool, not a witness.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog