2026-08-11 23:48 UTCOriginal source1 min readUpdated: 2026-08-12 00:37 UTC

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

<a href="https://sophiebits.com/2026/06/25/there-are-no-lossless-transformations-of-natural-language-text">There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text</a> Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me: <blockquote> You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it. If a reviewer asks, “What did you mean by this line?”, it’s not acceptable to reply with “Oh sorry, AI wrote that, just ignore it.” You will confuse your readers (and waste their time) if you present them things that are not genuinely representative of your thoughts. </blockquote> The "no lossless transformations" idea from the post title is expanded on here: <blockquote> 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. </blockquote> Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/writing">writing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse">ai-misuse</a>

SourceSimon Willison's Weblog

Simon Willison’s Weblog

11th August 2026 - Link Blog

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text. Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good.

If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me:

You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it. If a reviewer asks, “What did you mean by this line?”, it’s not acceptable to reply with “Oh sorry, AI wrote that, just ignore it.” You will confuse your readers (and waste their time) if you present them things that are not genuinely representative of your thoughts.

The "no lossless transformations" idea from the post title is expanded on here:

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.