> If you make it do double duty as a poor-man's encryption, you are going to have a bad time.
For the serious use cases you evidently have in mind, yes, it's folly to have it do double duty, but at the end of the day steganography is an obfuscation technique orthogonal to encryption, so the question of whether to use encryption or not is a nuanced one. Anyhow, I don't think it's fair to characterize this elaborate steganography tech as a poor-man's encryption — LLM tokens are expensive!
Haha, sure, you can call it that if you want, but foolish is cousin to fun, so one application of this tech would be as a comically overwrought way of communicating subtext to an adversary who may not be able to read between the lines otherwise. Imagine using all this highly sophisticated and expensive technology just to write "you're an asshole" to some armchair intelligence analyst who spent their afternoon and monthly token quota decoding your secret message.
For the serious use cases you evidently have in mind, yes, it's folly to have it do double duty, but at the end of the day steganography is an obfuscation technique orthogonal to encryption, so the question of whether to use encryption or not is a nuanced one. Anyhow, I don't think it's fair to characterize this elaborate steganography tech as a poor-man's encryption — LLM tokens are expensive!