On Reading

You didn’t REALLY read that EULA, did you?

I’ve seen many LinkedIn posts today about the update of a well known telephony platform’s EULA and the concerns of what people have unknowingly agreed to. We act shocked – but let’s be honest, all of us have skimmed through lengthy End User License Agreements (EULAs) without fully comprehending the fine print.

When we’re all busy juggling our responsibilities, diving into any lengthy content takes a backseat. It’s like promising to listen to meeting recordings and not getting there before they expire, or attempting to tackle an overflowing inbox only to realise you never quite got the gist of that marathon email chain.

I changed my personal workflow to focus on outsourcing the undifferentiated heavy lifting to LLMs to spot for abnormality detection. It has become my secret weapon to actually work through complex information – and I use it pretty much hourly to help me synthesise clarity and outcomes. I’ll use it to summarise recorded meetings, find the actions in long email threads, and lately, I’ve even ended up using it in the office #MSGamers Teams chats to summarise what the current Dota meta is or who has the best Wordle scores every day (hint: it is not me. I’ll catch up with you Dave and Daniel).

While I feel the unlock for my daily workflow – I do believe it’ll be key to allowing everyone the ability to understand what they’re agreeing to and make more informed decisions – I fear that we risk losing the ability to critically evaluate for ourselves. If yesterday’s problem was chain emails and WhatsApp message forwards, today’s is the blind belief in any hallucination.

Otherwise, we will normalise the ‘warlock’ agreements like those hidden in Baldur’s Gate 3….