> Bob’s manager receives 4 paragraphs of dense prose and realises from the first line that he’s going to have to read the whole thing carefully to work out what he’s being asked for and why. Instead, he copies the email into the LLM.... The 4 paragraphs are summarised as “The sender needs a new computer as his current one is old and slow and makes him unproductive.” The manager approves the request.
"LLM inflation" as a "bad" thing often reflects a "bad" system.
In the case described, the bad system is the expectation that one has to write, or is more likely to obtain a favorable result from writing, a 4 paragraph business case. Since Bob inflates his words to fill 4 paragraphs and the manager deflates them to summarise, it's clear that the 4 paragraph expectation/incentive is the "bad" thing here.
This phenomenon of assigning the cause of "bad" things to LLMs is pretty rife.
In fact, one could say that the LLM is optimizing given the system requirement: it's a lot easier to get around this bad framework.