LLMs Make Writing Too Easy – We're Drowning in Google Docs
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LLMs and the Curse of the Word Count – How Massive Google Docs Are Now Killing Us All
A spectre is haunting marketing. Have you noticed it?
It’s to do with Google Docs.
In short: Now that the boss has Claude, every document is enormous.
Every brief is ten pages. Every "quick breakdown" is 2,000 words. Every strategy doc that used to be a paragraph is now a small dissertation, complete with headers, sub-headers, and an executive summary that is somehow also a page long.
The LLMs are here to stay. So what do we do? How to survive?
The Cost of Words Collapsed. The Cost of Reading Didn’t.
Before LLMs, length was a signal. If someone sent you ten pages, they had spent real hours on it, and you could reasonably assume the length reflected the thinking.
That signal is now broken. Ten pages costs seconds to produce. A prompt and thirty seconds gets you a fully-formed, confident, professionally-formatted document of essentially any length you like.
But here’s the thing: The writers might be AI, but the human marketers reading the writing (for now!) are still humans. And although the AI models get better and faster, us humans are stuck with the brains that evolution gave us. OpenAI can’t upgrade us to Human 4.8 and allow us to read at 10x the speed… yet.
The cost of words has collapsed. But the cost of reading those ten pages hasn’t dropped at all.
A human still has to sit down, focus, and get through it.
So the entire burden has quietly shifted downstream. The person generating the doc saved themselves twenty minutes. Everyone who has to read it just inherited an hour they didn’t have.
The Doom Loop Where Nobody Reads Anything
Here is the part that should make us all laugh and cry in equal measure.
An exec asks an LLM to write a strategy brief. It produces ten immaculate pages. The exec skims the top, nods, and forwards it down the chain to their team.
The team opens it, sees ten pages, and does the only rational thing a busy person juggling four hours of Zooms and a Slack lit up like a Chtistmas tree can do: they paste it straight into their own LLM and ask for a summary.
So an AI wrote the document. An AI read the document. And the humans in the middle contributed precisely nothing except the forwarding. The whole exchange was two machines talking to each other with people acting as the none-the-wiser middleman.
Here at BT, we are watching this happen inside almost every company we work with.
Length Was Never the Point
Here’s the problem, at what everyone likes to call a 30,000-foot view: Before LLMs, length was a proxy for effort, and effort was a proxy for value .
But now: dumping ten pages on someone is easy. What would have taken an hour with a typewriter and your fingers takes a second. So what length used to signal has gone.
Instead, now: Real compression is where the value lies. Deciding what matters, cutting what doesn’t, and getting a complex idea into half a page that a busy person can actually absorb – that is the work.
“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter,” as the great Mark Twain put it, has never been truer than it is right now. Except now nobody even has the excuse of time, because the machine will happily write the long one for free.
The Answer: Write for Both Humans AND Machines
So what do we actually do about it? We’re not anti-long-document. Sometimes the detail genuinely matters, and the full version needs to exist for the record, for the machines, for the person who does need every line. The BT Google Drive is swimming in decks so long they would make your head spin.
But our advice to marketers is simple: keep in mind the kind of length a human can comfortably absorb in the middle of a busy work day – and give them that version too.
Put it at the top. Put it in a different colour so it’s unmistakable. Half a page, written for a tired person between two meetings, that tells them what this is and what they need to do about it. Then let the long version sit below for anyone (or anyAI) that needs it.
Do the long version if you truly can’t compress. But never make a human dig through it to find the point.
The cost of producing words collapsed. The cost of respecting people’s attention didn’t. Think about your fellow humans!