[HN Gopher] When you lose the ability to write, you also lose so...
___________________________________________________________________
When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your
ability to think
Author : blueridge
Score : 795 points
Date : 2023-05-11 01:39 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short
| tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of
| ChatGPT.
|
| I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one
| really hated writing.
|
| I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me,
| having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from
| entertaining videos and graphic books and such.
|
| Thinking and writing don't have to be so closely intertwined as
| they are in Paul Graham's mind. He's a writer and writing helps
| him think.
|
| Some people think while taking long walks, working out at the
| gym, drawing their ideas, etc.
|
| The kind of thinking Paul Graham does may become less common. I
| have no reason to believe that's some kind of holy grail and
| thinking via other means is inherently less valuable.
|
| I say this as a blogger who may be even more guilty than Paul
| Graham of using writing to help me think.
| Zetice wrote:
| I'm sorry but your job as a homeschooler is to teach your sons
| to write. That's not a skill you can enter adulthood without,
| and expect to achieve success. Liking it, not liking it... none
| of that matters when you're asked to document a process or
| argue in favor of an idea.
|
| Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided
| for them...
| larve wrote:
| Which is exactly what the op did, patiently over several
| years. Homeschooling vs "professional" education is a
| different discussion.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| After five years of not being forced to write while learning
| grammar etc some other way, he discovered fan fiction and
| began writing thousands of words per day.
|
| But he didn't learn to write by writing because he had
| dysgraphia and emotional baggage about writing from public
| school when I pulled him out.
|
| His blog writing gets more traffic than mine. He's a writer
| by trade, though he doesn't yet make much money at it.
| Zetice wrote:
| I misunderstood the situation. Apologies.
| thoughtpeddler wrote:
| The level of mature, respectful, civil discourse on HN
| never ceases to impress me. I see this less and less on
| other discussion boards.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I've never actually seen its equal anywhere else.
| ghaff wrote:
| The key is probably explaining/creating something in a way that
| doesn't have a lot of latitude for just glossing over the
| details. I'm not sure long-form writing is especially better
| than giving a presentation to an audience or working through a
| problem/creating an artifact of some sort/etc. The key is that
| you can't just read something and go "Yeah yeah I totally get
| it." Though I suspect some outputs can be easier to handwave
| through than others--I know I've done it to some degree on
| presentations. ("This aspect is complicated and we don't have
| time to get into it today.")
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You make me think of the anecdote about the professor who had
| half the class graded for making one amazingly beautiful
| piece of pottery and the other half graded by total weight of
| the work they created.
|
| In the end, those graded by weight had nicer pieces as it
| involved more practice with producing something.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the case of writing/presenting/many things, there's
| definitely a case for doing something regularly even if a
| lot of that output is pretty routine and pedestrian. So
| there's probably a limit to the degree to which you can
| automate away the routine stuff and still expect to
| parachute in and produce something killer on demand every
| few years when you need to.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Absolutely.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| > Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more
| than admit it
|
| I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love
| writing, and I do mean _love_. Some do it for pleasure, some do
| it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their
| career, and they haven 't found value in LLMs.
|
| There's writing and _writing_. If all you 're doing is rewording
| what someone else has already done like a high school essay or a
| competing product description for what's essentially the same
| product? An LLM will probably suffice. Original and novel? Human
| beings all the way.
|
| LLMs highlight that a lot of "knowledge work" is intrinsically
| bullshit, i.e., a high school essay doesn't actually assess
| somebody's understanding of a topic, just their ability to hit
| specific keywords and points, hence even essay mills can churn
| out an "original" essay for a kid if they're too xyz to do it
| themselves.
|
| Whilst I don't care for LLMs, I do support a huge shakeup of the
| existing educational assessment paradigm as it is self-evidently
| not fit for purpose, IMO.
| kqr wrote:
| > I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love
| writing, and I do mean _love_.
|
| One can tell from the opening of your comment. Composition,
| cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It ties together.
|
| I prompted an LLM to produce an enthusiastic expression around
| writing, but it came up with drivel like
|
| > Writing fills my heart with pure delight, igniting my soul
| and inspiring my mind with boundless creativity.
|
| I found myself tempted to instruct it on how to write well but
| that sort of defeats the point.
|
| And maybe I suck at prompting but the appropriate combination
| of profanity, brevity, yet seriousness was hard for me to get
| it to do.
| tspike wrote:
| Here was my first try:
|
| Prompt: Using profanity and in the style of Allen Ginsberg,
| write an introductory paragraph in narrative style about why
| you love writing.
|
| ChatGPT: Holy shit, I fucking love this mad dance of letters,
| this wild waltz of words that paint the goddamn cosmos on a
| blank page! The rhapsodic rhythm, the sonorous symphony of
| syntax -- it's like jazz on paper, like Kerouac and Ginsberg
| on a bender in the bowels of the Beat Generation, spewing
| poetic profanity into the yawning abyss of the universe. It's
| the goddamn primal scream of the soul, the raw, unfiltered
| fuck-you to silence and nothingness. The alphabetic alchemy,
| where ink and imagination bleed together to birth whole new
| worlds, where lines live and breathe and fuck and fight and
| love. It's a heady high, an intoxicating inebriation, a
| goddamn narcotic nectar. It's the literary lust that throbs
| in the very marrow of my being, the fevered flame that
| flickers in the dark and dances to the tune of the
| typewriter's tap-tap-tapping. And oh, what a tune it is -- as
| chaotic as Coltrane, as radical as Rimbaud, as transcendent
| as Thoreau. It's why I fucking love writing, this goddamn
| glorious game of god-creation and galaxy-making. It's the
| ultimate trip, man, the ultimate fucking trip.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| On the surface-level, yes, it's semi-convincing. On the
| other hand, it lacks all the nuance of a human being.
|
| Ask it `Give me a taco recipe in the style of Stanley
| Unwin` and you'll get something that has the _style_ ,
| something that's superficially Unwin-like, but lacks the
| contextual nuance of the humour completely. In fact, I'd
| say ChatGPT doesn't do humour, especially nuanced humour
| that's in the delivery and not in the punchline itself.
| Humour is a very abstract thing and there's so many styles
| of it. Can it tell you a joke? Yes, but that's not humour
| in its entirety.
|
| Just an observation, but the LLM isn't _expressing itself_
| , it's words for the sake of words because they predict the
| next word in a sequence. It's like saying "what's the big
| deal about Allen Ginsberg? You drop a few f-bombs and a bit
| of flowery language, that's Ginsberg in a nutshell", whilst
| completely ignoring the expressivity of self.
|
| What makes writing as a medium so interesting is the
| conveyance of thought from one human being to another. Is
| an LLM interesting because it can sometimes be a little
| _alien_ whilst still having some human-like quality? Sure.
| But an LLM is just an LLM, it doesn 't have _experiences_
| or novel new thoughts that express a larger ideology. As a
| human being, I unfortunately just don 't relate to LLMs,
| even if they are a reflection of the content they're
| trained on, which is ultimately human. It just lacks
| _soul_.
|
| If the LLM can't _experience_ the zeitgeist in the way that
| we do, it can 't really capture such a big chunk of what
| human self-expression is.
|
| Anecdotal, but I find the average HN exchange to be far
| more interesting than anything an LLM has ever output to me
| in terms of conveying meaningful ideas. I've tried debating
| with ChatGPT itself a few times, that's been--hit-and-miss.
| bombolo wrote:
| as most gpt writing, it's too long and has no substance
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Yes, it's very "high schooler trying to hit the word
| count" in its output.
| criddell wrote:
| I sent the same prompt but asked it to be brief:
|
| > I love writing. It's a release for the madness in my
| head. The letters form sentences that transport you to
| another world or make you feel less alone. Writing can be
| tough, but it's worth it when you hold the finished piece
| in your hands.
|
| That's... okay.
| blatant303 wrote:
| Sarcastic critic of the following initial sentence:
|
| > I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking
| love writing, and I do mean love.
|
| Well, well, well. If it isn't the unabashed, unfiltered bard
| of the 21st century. Look at the sheer depth of passion here,
| folks! We've got 'fucking love' not once, but twice, because
| why not? Repetition is the spice of life, after all. And such
| eloquent use of the F-word, too. Truly, Shakespeare would be
| jealous.
|
| Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the vague and
| incredibly relatable 'most people I know.' Because who
| doesn't know a handful of people who also 'fucking love'
| writing? Clearly, this is the universal experience we've all
| been waiting for.
|
| And then, the piece de resistance, 'and I do mean love.' As
| if the preceding profanity didn't quite hammer home the
| sentiment. Thanks for the clarification. We were worried you
| only 'kinda liked' writing. A masterpiece of modern
| literature, truly.
|
| Great. Now show us what initial sentence you'd have used,
| same style. Just one brief impactful sentence with the same
| level of familiarity.
|
| "Writing is my jam, and I swear, everybody I know is just as
| stoked about it - and I mean stoked."
| passion__desire wrote:
| I asked GPT-4 to write in style of Alan Watts.
|
| "Indeed, I find an intoxicating exuberance in writing, a
| passion that's as profound as it is poignant. It's akin to
| dancing with words, a ballet of ideas and sentiments,
| pirouetting across the stage of one's imagination. There's a
| rhythm, a cadence to it, a harmonious symphony of phrases and
| thoughts that, when assembled with care and cunning, can stir
| the soul and ignite the mind. I don't just love writing, I am
| fervently, ardently, unabashedly in love with it. The
| artistry of it, the texture and tone of each word, each
| sentence; the way they flow, ebb and surge like the ocean's
| tide. There's a divine repetition in the crafting, a
| reiteration of thoughts, feelings, experiences, each time
| subtly different, each time uniquely enlightening. Writing is
| my symphony, my ballet, my ocean, my universe. It is in the
| weaving of words, the crafting of tales, the elucidation of
| the esoteric, that I truly come alive. It's not merely that I
| love writing; writing, my dear friend, is the very essence of
| my love."
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Looks very similar to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426
| passion__desire wrote:
| In how many different ways can a simple phrase "I love
| writing" can be expanded so that the variations don't
| resemble each other?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Personally, I could probably hand write a book of
| paragraphs, all very distinct and different to each
| other, you likely wouldn't even know they were by the
| same author if you didn't use stylometry ML, and you'd
| probably have a rough time if I used adversarial
| stylometry to counter that.
|
| You'd think by this point that music would have all been
| done too, but people keep finding novel stuff in 12TET,
| 4/4 and sound design. That's without even getting into
| other time signatures, scales and microtonality.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Can't you specifically ask LLM to tailor the paragraph to
| produce those variations that you will incorporate to
| make your own writing different each time? Most of the
| criticism of LLM not being able to produce something is
| just people asking LLM to basically MIND-READ the exact
| thing they had in mind.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Well, can't anybody else just tell it the same prompt?
| The output is generic and samey between all users because
| the average human being enters the average prompt, thus
| getting the average output from the training data of
| statistical averages because it's a next-word prediction
| model.
|
| If I run a writing workshop and tell a room of a hundred
| people to write me a story about two star-crossed lovers
| from different time periods, the likelihood of them
| writing the same thing in the same way is extremely low
| statistically speaking. If the week after I then give
| that same room of people the same exercise, they will
| write something different again, even if the core story
| that's being told is the same thing. That's because human
| brains aren't static, and they don't store information as
| binary values, the "data" is abstract and chemically
| gradient. That's without even accounting for mood, the
| general zeitgeist, and what they've been through since
| then, and not even getting into them entertaining
| themselves by changing it up or learning from the
| previous one.
|
| Long-form consistency also isn't something LLMs do well
| with.
| whoami_nr wrote:
| Maybe then, you will like playing this game based on GPT:
| https://gpt.43z.one/
| tlb wrote:
| Pop music contains 10^5 or so versions of "I love you". I
| think there could be a similar number for writing.
| passion__desire wrote:
| On what metrics are you judging them to be different?
| passion__desire wrote:
| Here's GRRM version. I asked it to include the "colorless
| green ideas".
|
| "In the labyrinthine corridors of my imagination, writing
| holds the key to an irresistible enchantment. The
| kaleidoscopic play of words, as they dance across the
| parchment, is a spectacle that never ceases to enthrall
| me. The very act of crafting sentences, like a blacksmith
| hammering out the perfect sword, is a symphony of
| creation whose composition and cadence resonate deeply
| within the chambers of my soul. The allure is in the
| unpredictable: the malleability of vocabulary, the rhythm
| of repetition, the literary waltz that ties it all
| together in a mesmerizing ballet of ideas. Yes, by the
| gods, I love writing. And it's not merely an affection,
| but an unyielding obsession, a raw and passionate love
| that fuels my every heartbeat. Those colorless green
| ideas that sleep furiously in the hidden corners of the
| mind, they are the unexpected treasures waiting to be
| awakened, ignited by the quill's touch. They may seem
| paradoxical, absurd even, like a dragon in the heart of
| winter, yet it's their very improbability that breathes
| vitality into the narrative. In this wonderful, maddening
| craft, we, the storytellers, find our joy, our purpose.
| The written word is our battleground and our sanctuary,
| our curse and our solace. Most people I know, they also
| fucking love writing, and I do mean love. A love profound
| and all-consuming, fervent and relentless. A love as
| fierce as a direwolf, as enduring as the Wall. And so we
| write, for in the tumultuous seas of letters and
| punctuation, we find our truest selves."
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Both your original version, and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35898426, and the
| new one you did, include this idea of dancing quite
| strongly.
|
| How did "Most people I know, they also fucking love
| writing" get into that? What prompt did you give it?
| passion__desire wrote:
| Please write a paragraph from the point of view of
| thinker, writer, storyteller like George R R Martin who
| loves to enthusiastically express why he loves "writing"
| Make sure to give lot of importance to Composition,
| cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It should all tie in
| together. Also make sure to include phrase "Colorless
| green ideas sleep furiously" coined by Noam Chomsky in
| the most meaningful, appropriate, contextual way. It
| shouldn't be used carelessly.
|
| "I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking
| love writing, and I do mean love."
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| On the one hand, very interesting at a technical level.
| However, on the other, it's cheesy, horribly unoriginal
| and bland in its output, and that doesn't just apply to
| just this example. Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far
| would be winning any awards or get recommended by a
| critic.
|
| Structure-wise, the output is generally very formulaic,
| even with additional descriptors.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning
| any awards or get recommended by a critic.
|
| What paragraph have you written that won awards or was
| recommended by a critic? I have none to my name. These
| are tools whose goal is not to produce something superior
| to what any human could ever write, it is useful merely
| to improve upon what a typical person would write.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| That's not the topic at hand, the greater implication is
| that people are saying LLMs are going to replace writers
| and writing as a whole because they are apparently as
| good as humans and apparently also more creative.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Stephen King writes about 6 pages a day or about 2000
| words. Let's say that takes about 4-6 hours. Now imagine
| spending that much time with ChatGPT and guide it towards
| whatever goal you have in mind. It took me just 2 minutes
| to craft the prompt and ChatGPT did the rest. You do the
| math. Humans use other sense modalities and base their
| writing inspired from those experiences. If and when
| future models incorporate those modalities, we will see
| true "creativity" on full display.
|
| e.g. "Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at
| the window pane. As long as she remained silent, the old
| man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its
| irregular pulse in her ears." - by Haruki Murakami.
|
| How do you expect a model to write this imagery if it
| hadn't experienced it?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Stephen King is expressing himself, he already knows what
| he wants to say before he writes it. "Guiding" something
| isn't the same as self-expression.
|
| Generative art, anyone?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art?wprov=sfla1
| jjk166 wrote:
| Not a single person has claimed that 100% of all writing
| will be done by machine and that AI is already superior
| to the best writing ever done.
|
| LLMs will replace writers the way cars replaced horses.
| People still ride horses, and there are plenty of things
| horses can do that cars can't, but the typical person
| trying to go from A to B is probably not going to ride a
| horse there.
| raincole wrote:
| Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN
| and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole
| Medium... would be so empty.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| There's writing and _writing_ though. Short throwaway
| comments and bickering on social media aren 't really the
| same as writing long-form prose.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Just look at the ratio of lurkers to posters on any forum.
| Most people are read only.
| Lewton wrote:
| 99% of all online comments are generated by 1% of people.
|
| ish
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most.
| ..
| smolder wrote:
| As a 1%er, member of the e-commentariat, I'm happy to have
| had the opportunity to set an example for the LLMs and
| future AIs trained on my comments.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| People really struggle writing simple essays. It takes a lot
| of work externalizing words from your own context inside your
| mind so that the sentences can be understood by themselves.
| It's one of the reasons we used to teach "word problems" in
| our mathematics classes alongside composition, but now we
| just want to compute arbitrary answers.
| notahacker wrote:
| There are a lot of people not on Reddit or HN or Medium
|
| (Also a lot of people whose terse and incoherent interactions
| and tendency to simply _re_ post on Facebook and Twitter
| suggest that writing is a regrettably necessary means rather
| an end)
| nextmove wrote:
| Is he referring to writing code or books/essays?
|
| For code I think he's forgetting that the people using ChatGPT to
| write code for them aren't really good programmers. These are
| mainly people using frontend frameworks that have horrible
| documentation and use ChatGPT to help them parse the garbage into
| something that just works. These people would never learn a
| functional programming language or any assembly. They simply copy
| the tech that others are using in order to stay employed. What
| type of code could these type of people, on their own, without
| ChatGPT produce that is actually useful for others to read or
| use?
| pictur wrote:
| pretty silly comments. historically, people have always made such
| stupid comments on things they didn't understand, and I think
| they will continue to do so.
| jason-phillips wrote:
| The key is that information exchange between a person and AI must
| be symmetric, not asymmetric. One must actively maintain that
| balance. Asymmetric information exchange will result in
| deleterious effects, similar to over-consumption of TV or social
| media.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| My experience with ChatGPT is using it as an "editor". I write
| down a rough draft of what I want, give it to GPT - tell it to
| act as an editor, and give me suggestions using certain tones,
| contexts, etc...
|
| I have difficulty expressing tact so it's helped me in various
| ways doing things like: writing code review comments about
| extremely flawed code without being accusatory or
| confrontational, or communicating poor performance in a written
| review without sounding like it's a personal attack.
|
| Of course I always proof read and even change certain things that
| it generates and put my own "twist" on it, but I always ensure it
| conveys what I'm trying to convey in the tone I'm trying to
| present. All things considered, I'm probably a _better_ writer
| because of it.
|
| ChatGPT has been such a wonderful tool for me, it's improved my
| life in so many ways - but it's just a tool. People that are
| going to write poorly using ChatGPT were always going to write
| poorly. It's like saying that using a chainsaw is going to make
| people worse at cutting down trees.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Funny story...
|
| Some of you only know math a certain way as you used programmable
| calculators etc... i learned math the way of one of the founders
| of Chaos theory learned via graphing and manual math operations.
| And the difference is that I can grasp new math fast as my meta-
| language of math objects in my head is formed of those manual
| operations and graphing snapshots.
|
| It's the same with human thinking-writing connection as writing
| helps us refine and enter new meta-language objects into our
| brains, without it we make our IQ -level die.
| lapama wrote:
| And when you stop writing on paper, you become less consistent.
| martin-adams wrote:
| I just had an interview candidate come up with questions to ask
| us about the company.
|
| It sounded formulaic and when I queried it, they said they used
| ChatGPT.
|
| I'm not disappointed, but I'm now wondering how much thinking was
| left to AI than being genuinely inquisitive.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| baffling. I am a huge fan of AI & chatgpt but that would be a
| giant red flag for me.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Someone AI'ing part of a human process is basically saying
| "this is BS and not worth my time". They may or may not be
| right.
|
| I think questions about the company should be genuine (it is
| a good chance to find out what you need to make the
| decision). But many people think questions about the company
| are another hoop, i.e. the interviewer is using their
| questions as another measure, so they need to ask the correct
| questions.
| blitzar wrote:
| It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for
| them.
| graderjs wrote:
| And I think if you lose the oral tradition, if you don't speak
| your thoughts out loud and make them into a speech then you lose
| something too. It's also the ability to think. I find my modes of
| communication in writing, and speech way different to the extent
| that I've taken to Verbally responding to things; recording that;
| transcribing that; and then putting that into writing, because I
| find like the process of writing maybe because it's cross
| pollinate it too much with my work as a programmer uses a
| different part of myself and a lot of the time ends up going on
| like long tangents to explain everything in agonizingly stupid
| legalistic detail wheras in speech, I would just get straight to
| the fucking point. Obviously, your mileage may vary my insights
| here may only apply to myself, and certainly not gonna apply to
| everyone I think.
|
| However, what I'm saying, reminds me of what Haruki Murakami
| talks about as his process for writing I think in his earliest
| novels anyway, he even mentioned trying to write it as if he was
| speaking it but certainly he writes his novels in English first
| and then translates them back in the Japanese, because he finds
| that's how he expresses his authentic voice. Kind of hilarious to
| have such lauded post modern writer, write in a way where his
| pre-translated works are then translated back into English else.
| Reminds me too of fight club / chuck Palahniuk copy of a copy of
| a copy. Yet in Murakami's case it seems to create rather than
| erode quality.
|
| Of course there's always the issue of the very low quality
| transcription available in a by default in iPhone and android
| keyboards. The voice typing sucks and so you always get some
| weird homonyms inside probably there's some in his comment to.
| [deleted]
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| PG's premise is not really correct. We worry that AI will become
| super-powerful, but when you use AI you realize its superpower is
| the ability to _collaborate_ with people. The _combined_ system
| of one human plus one AI makes each component more capable and
| powerful than either acting independently.
|
| So, what PG really should worry about is people losing the skill
| of _independently_ writing, and instead getting really used to
| having AI work as a muse, or worse, a ghostwriter. My writing
| always will be better with an outside collaborator, and if youre
| so busy or important to rely exclusively on a ghostwriter, oh
| well. In all circumstances, AI will not be as good without strong
| human interaction, and likewise humans can take their work to a
| different level by leveraging AI.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400
| years ago that writing will make people forgetful:
|
| "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the
| minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not
| practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by
| external characters which are no part of themselves, will
| discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have
| invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer
| your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they
| will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem
| to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and
| hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear
| wise." [1]
|
| [1] Phaedrus 275a-b,
| http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
| euroderf wrote:
| So like, if writing is one of many extensions of man, then
| Plato is an anti-McLuhan.
| tim333 wrote:
| It may be true that writing makes people worse at remembering
| unaided, but better if they can check their diary. I imagine
| ChatGTP type things may likewise make people lazier at unaided
| thinking but better at AI aided thinking.
|
| I tried asking ChatGTP what it thought and it came back with
|
| >... it's also important to note that technology is a tool, and
| its impact largely depends on how it's used. For instance, AI
| writing tools ... can be used to augment human creativity and
| productivity, rather than replace it. These tools can help
| writers brainstorm ideas, overcome writer's block, write more
| quickly, and even learn to write better by providing examples
| and suggestions.
|
| >Moreover, the use of AI tools might also stimulate new forms
| of thinking. Just as calculators didn't eliminate the need for
| mathematical understanding but rather allowed for more complex
| problems to be tackled, AI writing tools could help individuals
| refine and expand their thinking, enabling them to tackle more
| complex writing tasks or express ideas more effectively.
|
| Which is kind of interesting - I didn't think of writers block
| on my own for example. Also lazy thinks at the moment probably
| tend to just go along with what they see in the media. AI aided
| thinking could improve on that.
| happycube wrote:
| Yeah - so much of writer's block is looking at an empty
| page/screen. It's very often easier to fix something _bad_
| than to write something good.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he
| didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social
| scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical
| and temporal distances.
|
| It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent
| makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of
| scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't
| a loss though, and his warning against false wisdom is more
| relevant than ever today when it feels like half the people you
| talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base
| their world view upon on the fly.
|
| --edit-- sometimes me not grammar good
| efficax wrote:
| plato is specifically thinking of the social impact but he's
| also not actually arguing against writing. after all, he's
| _making his argument in writing_. he 's trying to push the
| reader to look into their souls for the truths that he thinks
| are already there. "remembrance" here is specific, so is
| "memory". It doesn't mean, to remember facts and things that
| happened, but to reach back into ones mind beyond sensation
| and to "remember" the eternal forms.
| adregan wrote:
| Thanks for this context. In this light, I am reminded of
| Emerson's "Self Reliance."
|
| > Trust thyself
| mannykannot wrote:
| Socrates (for it is he who was opposed to writing) did not
| appreciate how the act of writing exercises our abilities of
| both memory and reasoning, at least as much as speaking and
| certainly more than listening. Someone who has written
| extensively on a topic is almost certainly well-versed in it,
| and more so than when they began (even crackpots are
| generally masters of their own flawed theories.)
| bestouff wrote:
| > people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia
| articles to base their world view upon on the fly.
|
| Well you're lucky if they do; often they just make stuff up
| on the fly depending on what they saw on some dubious media
| or social network.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well that's the human brain for you. It's very good at
| extrapolating new information from things it's seen and
| heard that may not be true, without actually telling you
| that it's basically making shit up as it goes. It's yet
| another reason why education matters.
| brookst wrote:
| I can't tell if that's a tongue in cheek criticism of the
| panic over AI hallucination. Bravo either way.
| digging wrote:
| Would this be different in a world without writing? We
| generally synthesize incoming information into a knowledge
| base and a set of beliefs - I'm not convinced we're _less_
| susceptible to that when all knowledge is oral.
|
| What's the difference between having read something last
| year and believing it, vs having heard someone tell you
| something last year and believing it? Would people stop in
| a conversation and go try to find the source of their
| information if they had to track down a specific person?
| mike_hock wrote:
| Ironically, we'd never know what he said had it not been
| written down.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Plato gives multiple hints across his works about the
| esoteric, unwritten teachings [1]. We can only speculate
| about the content; for me, they were surely tied with the
| Eleusinian Mysteries [2]: early, myths-driven psychonautics
| based on ergot.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries
| asimpletune wrote:
| I also think he had a bunch written teachings that were
| intended only for his students. Obviously they're lost to
| time.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| With some luck and intelligence maybe we will discover
| more about the past in the future [1].
|
| [1] https://scrollprize.org
| asimpletune wrote:
| Yeah, I've been excited about this because we're only
| about a month away until the ink detection deadline.
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, and then some.
|
| Tired Alfred North Whitehead quotes aside, he's basically
| the single most influential author in the western
| tradition, arguably even eclipsing the bible.
| coldtea wrote:
| We would, if we retained an oral tradition (as in the case
| in that Platonic dialogue).
|
| And even better, we would know it by heart.
|
| Assuning we considered it important of course. But that
| would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant
| works over time.
|
| Of course not everybody would know it by heart. That's a
| third benefit: only people interested and caring enough
| would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
| digging wrote:
| I disagree with all of the above.
|
| If we never had writing, would the Huns have carried
| forth Platonic wisdom? Would it really have survived
| thousands of years of cultural evolution and the decline
| of Greek civilization itself? Who even is the "we" who
| should consider it important?
|
| > that would be another benefit: it would also filter
| unimportant works over time.
|
| How would it even be possible to know what's been lost in
| the oral tradition without anyone writing things down?
| Only takes one autocrat to massacre followers of a
| specific tradition to effectively erase it. Things get
| filtered based on their ability to survive, which is
| _partially_ a function of "importance", whatever that
| actually means at a given time.
|
| > a third benefit: only people interested and caring
| enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
|
| This just seems like unabashed elitism. A "benefit" of
| the oral tradition is that knowledge is reserved for the
| deserving? No thanks.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| > You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of
| reminding;
|
| > What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had
| on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas
| over physical and temporal distances.
|
| Why would his words be less potent when applied to billions
| of people, as opposed to only a few? Are those billions not
| just as susceptible to fallacy as the elite few?
| largepeepee wrote:
| It's also useful to point out that historical verbal
| tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but
| that doesn't automatically make anyone wise.
|
| Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on
| Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that
| in a particular circumstance.
|
| Very much like early AI models.
| kruczek wrote:
| This is actually what Plato also mentions, a few paragraphs
| later:
|
| > He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art
| in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that
| anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an
| utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the
| prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any
| use except to remind him who knows the matter about which
| they are written.
|
| https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atex
| t...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Strong memory is almost always an indicator of exceptional
| skill. Whether it's chess players, musicians, writers or
| poets, mathematicians or also programmers, people who excel
| generally have astonishing ability to recall.
|
| That's not an accident. Wisdom emerges out of practice and
| the effortlessness that comes with it. The genius piano
| player isn't that good because of some pie in the sky
| wisdom about music, just like the AI they just played tons
| of scales and training pieces. Literally meaningless stuff.
| This rejection of rote memorization as some sort of lower
| skill, that students should be 'smart and lazy' is one of
| the stupidest modern tendencies.
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| > also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition
| trained a very specific type of memory recall
|
| I'm genuinely curious, why do you think this is relevant?
| How would you differentiate "specific types of memory
| recall" scientifically?
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Cued recall in the form of verbal tradition is often
| criticised to be subject to inaccuracies as, for one
| example, stories accrue embellishments over time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_(memory)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| In Appalachia that's just called storytelling. :)
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on
| Wikipedia, doesn 't mean you now have the wisdom to apply
| that in a particular circumstance._
|
| It's much more likely that you can, that someone who would
| only look them up "on demand", however, as you at least are
| aware of the possibilities in those domains.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think the contrast should be between studying and
| internalizing a subject versus having the ability to look
| up a subject. That seems the most true to Plato's
| intention.
|
| It's common and easy to fall into considering the things
| you could look up as things you already know.
|
| What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem
| with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in
| your head? Well the thing when you learn something is that
| it doesn't just permit access to the information, it also
| permits synthesis of new ideas. The sum of knowledge is
| greater than its parts.
|
| A very concrete example: As someone who only speaks English
| one may look up the Latin terms 'manus' (hand) and 'facere'
| (to act/do/make); but unless you actually do, you'll
| probably not immediately grok the etymology of the English
| term 'manufacture'.
| _glass wrote:
| Exactly. My compsci prof was forcing us to learn so much
| by heart, but then it's internalized and you start to
| think in those terms. Right now I am writing my PhD
| thesis in management and in the beginning I didn't have
| all of those papers really in my head. But now slowly
| that knowledge accumulates and I can think through things
| I couldn't think before. But on the other hand, I now
| think, how could I not understand that, it's trivial. And
| to add, it is the same for literature and poems. If you
| know a poem by heart, it's not just fancy to recite it,
| but that you start to really incorporate part of that
| language.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I think of it in terms of computer memory levels.
|
| There are some computations (synthesis) that require so
| many (non-front loadable) memory accesses that it's
| impractical to do them from memory with significant delay
| (books), because the number_of_accesses * access_time
| dominates the project time.
|
| Instead, you _must_ have a working set of core
| information (or at least pointers to information) in low-
| latency memory (your brain).
|
| Example: How much longer would it take me to do a multi-
| digit multiplication if I had to look up the process for
| multiplication in a book for _every_ digit multiplication
| I did? And what if that multiplication were just one of
| many in the higher-level math problem I was trying to
| solve? (Then generalize to any problem that requires a
| core base of knowledge)
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| It is very similar to caching performance impacts. And
| like you say, sometimes performance is just faster, and
| sometimes it actually enables functionality...
| dalbasal wrote:
| I think it's better to think of these as different, rather
| than superior... especially given our times' proliferation of
| mediums with differing cognitive implications.
|
| Is Twitter > books? Is HN > podcasts? Every medium has its
| tendencies... positive, negative and complicated. We don't
| actually choose between them. It's useful to keep an eye on
| losses, not just gains.
|
| Oral traditions, for example, naturally evolve and diversify.
| A fairy tale can literally spread over the whole world, and
| develop thousands of versions. Each one adapted and
| localised. Written stories also spread, but remain
| identical... even more-so after printing.
|
| This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether
| or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the
| religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple
| authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral
| tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became
| extremely stiff an unyielding.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > This is, largely, the story of monotheist religion.
|
| This is largely the story of religions, especially old
| pagan religions. Myths and folklore came about. The moment
| when religions went scriptural, the message became firm and
| technical. And gave rise to law as a study.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| Not really, that only really happened in the reformation
| for Christianity.
|
| The romans were already pretty good at law.
| nashashmi wrote:
| I had judaism in mind.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| > This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions.
| Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times,
| the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple
| authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from
| oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became
| extremely stiff an unyielding.
|
| The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their
| religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition,
| institutional church authority and individuals like the
| Pope.
| naravara wrote:
| > The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their
| religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition,
| institutional church authority and individuals like the
| Pope.
|
| IIRC this was their main contention against the
| Protestant reformation. They believed that just pointing
| at scripture without some practice of custom and
| tradition to ensure you're properly interpreting it in a
| sensible way would lead people to folly and
| extremism/fundamentalism.
|
| Granted it's sort of a pick your poison deal. You either
| get the fundamentalism of hardline scripturalists or you
| get the corruption that comes with a hierarchical
| institution that requires people to offloading some of
| their critical thinking. Or you can blend them together
| and get the worst of both worlds by creating something
| that looks like the more noxious elements of the American
| Evangelical movement.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > You either get the fundamentalism of hardline
| scripturalists or you get the corruption that comes with
| a hierarchical institution that requires people to
| offloading some of their critical thinking.
|
| I don't think it is fair to say the latter leads to
| "corruption" or "offloading some of their critical
| thinking". This phobia is largely a feature of radical
| individualism and the lack of humility that the notion of
| radical self-sufficiency (intellectual or otherwise)
| entails. The paradox of individualism is that it actually
| weakens the ability to be an individual. Human beings are
| social animals whose lives are relatively short and
| therefore whose experiences are limited. And because
| individualism atomizes the individual, the effect is that
| this social animal becomes subject to greater levels of
| fear and stress about his isolation, and when isolated
| from the social and from tradition, he becomes easy prey
| for weird ideologies.
|
| In this specific case, scriptural canon was compiled by
| the Catholic Church. You obviously cannot appeal to the
| canon to codify the canon, so some extra-biblical body of
| knowledge and understanding must exist that would allow
| such a canonical body of scripture to be identified. This
| body of knowledge and understanding is called Tradition,
| and it is guarded, refined, and transmitted by an
| unbroken chain of authority found in the apostolic
| succession. (Tradition is the basis for the transmission
| and development of all knowledge in human history; there
| is likewise a scientific tradition without which there
| could be no science.) The notion that an individual could
| do better alone without relying or drawing on tradition
| is belied by the presence of over 40,000 Protestant sects
| in the US alone, each claiming to be able to interpret
| scripture. And how do they interpret scripture? However
| they want! In most cases, it means interpreting it
| according to whatever happens to be fashionable at the
| time. So much for "critical thinking". This is very
| visible in the mainline Protestant churches that, not so
| incidentally, are shrinking very rapidly. Where this
| Protestant mindset has leeched into Catholic circles, it
| has produced the same deadly effect.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| But the body of canon law would have been impractical to
| standardize and disseminate without the printed word.
|
| See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in
| medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also
| much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs
| now)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But the body of canon law would have been impractical
| to standardize and disseminate without the printed word.
|
| Would it? The _Bible_ , which is much larger, was
| practical to standardize and disseminate without the
| printed word, and its not like there was a proximate
| relationship between the availability of printing
| (presumably with movable type, in the 15th century) and
| the codification of canon law in the 20th. The idea that
| this was waiting on printing is...hard to defend.
|
| > See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in
| medieval times
|
| The really durable schisms after the 11th Century emerged
| after or just before (and became crystallized because of)
| printing, though.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| I largely agree about the administrative difficulty
| although I'd emphasise the written word over the printed
| word in this context.
|
| Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand
| instead of using printers was incredibly resource
| expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It'd be fascinating to see a conversion to person-hours
| to copy one book in medieval times.
|
| And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be
| spent {farming/military/political administration} to give
| a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow
| them time to copy the book itself.
| naravara wrote:
| I think they viewed the transcription itself as a form of
| meditative/devotional practice and didn't prioritize
| efficiency as much. The illumination on some of these
| manuscripts can get pretty elaborate and, sometimes, kind
| of whimsical. So they were clearly doing some creative
| expression while doing it.
| brookst wrote:
| It's an interesting thought. Challenging because of the
| fixed costs though. The cost to produce one book would be
| almost identical to the cost to produce 1000 books; it is
| the infrastructure more than the marginal resource cost
| per book.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Could see it going either way. Agricultural efficiency
| (in terms of person_fed : person_farming) in Europe was
| pretty low. So the dedicated headcount (monks) might
| dominate the net cost, which would make it scale more
| linearly with number of books.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| The market price 1 medieval book was roughly the same
| price for 5 pigs according to this analysis [1]
|
| Price of 7 books = PS5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of
| 1 Pig in London = 3s
|
| 14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book
|
| Note PS1 = 20s
|
| [1] http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Today I learned! Thanks!
| ghaff wrote:
| Paper was also a huge cost--maybe more than the monks'
| labor depending upon how you want to value their real
| cost.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I'm not following. The parent, I believe, was not talking
| about canon law specifically (which is changing and to be
| distinguished from doctrine which only undergoes
| development, but never revision). I also don't understand
| what papal crises have to do with anything in this
| context. And what is meant by "political-nation-religious
| entity"? The Church is a religious institution whose
| bishops (including the pope) have also exercised distinct
| secular political authority in addition to religious
| authority. It was never "national" in character, only
| supranational (hence, "catholic").
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Parent was observing that the Catholic Church was an
| exception to GP's point that the written word stiffened
| and froze monotheistic religious practice, as it blended
| oral and written transmission.
|
| I was observing that the modern Catholic Church (post-
| printed word) has offified in exactly that way, with the
| printed word allow direct dissemination of the "agreed"
| canon (i.e. pope / hierarchy) to the entire church,
| thereby unifying them into a single practice.
|
| In counterpoint I offered the number of papal crises and
| schisms that abounded during the medieval and pre-
| medieval period (i.e. before printed material became
| cheap and available).
|
| Ergo, the use of the printed word allowed the Catholic
| Church to unify and standardize in a way it had not
| before -- GP's point.
|
| It's indicative that the majority of monotheistic
| religious splits within Catholicism happened before the
| printing press, when intervening human parties could
| reinterprete the canon as it flowed through them.
|
| For political-national-religious entity, the Catholic
| Church / Holy Roman Empire partnership allowed the Church
| to become a nation in all but land, by the power its
| blessing conveyed upon a chosen leader.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law#Catholic_Church
| Balgair wrote:
| I'm sorry, _Plato_ wasn 't thinking about the effects of the
| written word on social issues over time and space?!
|
| The whole point of his writing all it down, the very literal
| foundations of ~2500 years of philosophy and the bedrock of
| Western (and others) civilization, was so that he could have
| an effect on social issues over time. That was the whole
| point! He is super clear about this in his writings and
| throughout his life and travels.
| samuell wrote:
| Whether this applies depends on what situation you are
| supposedly replacing by writing.
|
| If you replace intense IRL dialogue and discussion, with
| writing, this might be the case.
|
| On the other hand, if you replace just letting your thoughts
| fade in the void, with writing them down as coherent though out
| ideas in writing, I would argue that the writing has actually
| both triggered retention from memory (thus exercising the
| memory), and helped you critically assess and make your own
| thinking clearer.
|
| Thus, I think writing is an extremely helpful tool for
| processing your thoughts for most knowledge workers who are not
| already involved in constant dialogue with others (which is
| most of us I guess).
| NoWizards wrote:
| I have seen this happen before my eyes: When i was young (~17
| y.o) i was able to remember all my family IDs, my friends phone
| numbers and a lot of data about them. Now i rely a lot on my
| smartphone to tell me their phone numbers, their birthdays,
| their address, etc... (Sadly today i dont even know the phone
| number of my gf, out of pure laziness). As i have become more
| and more lazy and let the tools do their job i'm losing my own
| skills on it "because i need my brain for bigger things -
| sure".
| yason wrote:
| Plato had it easy... When we were young, there was no memory.
| You had to work everything out yourself, each time. And it was
| a hard life having none of that fancy thing of memorizing but,
| frankly, life was better for it.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I can only begin to wonder what would his opinion on Google
| search would be since we (developers) always practice the
| "don't memorize what you can easily search", and there's a
| sizeable amount of people claiming that memorization shouldn't
| even be a concern most of the time, and that's an advice given
| to people who are new in the field (like myself).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Do people really practice this? Like I usually physically
| unplug my computer from the network as I develop as it's such
| a distraction to have emails and stuff popping up. Doesn't
| really feel like a limitation to not be able to look stuff
| up.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I go in the completely opposite direction nowadays. I have
| chatgpt [*] up, I use google searches, I have online api
| documentation and tutorials open. I log on to IRC and chat
| with (other) skilled developers. (psst... I even read stack
| overflow ... _sometimes_ [*]) ... so ... I definitely use
| the internet a lot while developing.
|
| As mentioned above, I do try to research things to the
| point of understanding. Which is something human contact
| definitely helps with. To stay on topic: ChatGPT is
| obviously less good, but is often good enough, is patient,
| and guaranteed to answer you in a couple of seconds.
|
| [*] My exact workflow would not quite fit into this
| footnote, but I seldom cut-and-paste answers, unless it's
| for something exceptionally non-critical. I try to
| understand what is written and then type out my own version
| (which should be very close), or at very least I type it
| across by hand rather than use ^C-^V. (the latter is an
| edge case). In general, there's this AI-koan about how some
| things only work if you also understand them, which has a
| kernel of truth to it. (
| http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html first one about
| tom knight)
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I think understanding is more important than both. Even if
| you're cut off fro the internet somehow, you can still re-
| derive things if only you understand them. And understanding
| also allows you to solve novel problems.
| nforgerit wrote:
| Plato.. wasn't that the guy who invented the acronym "IIRC"?
| asimpletune wrote:
| I think that was actually homer. "Speak muse tell us the
| deeds of..." (or something to that effect)
| jjk166 wrote:
| Good thing Plato disregarded Socrates' advice and wrote that
| down
| bombolo wrote:
| Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by
| memory?
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Books (largely) aren't written for memorisation these days,
| with possible exceptions of some poetry, or children's books.
|
| Classic oral literary traditions are based on rhyme, meter,
| repetition, simile, metaphor, and references to cultural
| touchstones and themes, for the most part, all of which
| _strongly_ assist with memorisation. These are not only
| necessary for a literature which isn 't written down and
| instead is passed on through generations orally, but also
| quite likely represents a survivorship bias in that works
| which _didn 't_ exhibit these patterns didn't survive. And of
| course the versions we know are the end of a long pipeline of
| transmission (or the world's largest and oldest game of
| telephone), captured in writing and then passed on to us as
| (among) the first _written_ traditions.
|
| I've committed a few poems and homilies to memory, one
| example for nearly thirty years now. I do refresh that
| recollection from time to time (and realised I was dropping a
| stanza consistently). It's an interesting counterexample.
|
| Then again, I turned up a piece earlier today I'd written
| myself about eight years ago and had all but no recollection
| of.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| If we wrote entire books in song, they could probably be
| memorized. Shakespeare attempted some of that work.
| EleanorKonik wrote:
| Unironically one of my favorite uses of chatgpt is to tell
| it to rewrite things as a Homeric epic in the style of
| Tennyson so it's more pleasant to read aloud and I have a
| better chance of remembering it
| lordnacho wrote:
| Isn't it a thing of honor in the Islamic world to be Hafez
| (?), someone who has memorized the Quran?
|
| Of course I have no way to check whether it's done correctly,
| but from what I hear a lot of people have done this.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| We just use our brains differently now, mostly to find ways
| that support our default positions, that leave our minds
| unchallenged and certain.
| maxbond wrote:
| As I recall Socrates was put to death by the ancient
| Athenians for "corrupting the youth" by encouraging them to
| be critical of dogma.
| bayindirh wrote:
| The thing is our bandwidth is limited and we allocate it
| differently now. However, not all replacements are
| beneficial and adding external dependencies adds points of
| failure.
|
| Challenging yourself is conscious decision. Make choices to
| challenge yourself, and don't build an echo chamber.
| RealityVoid wrote:
| Hah, as if people 2000 years ago were more open to
| challenging ideas.
| [deleted]
| musicale wrote:
| It's remarkable what some 200,000 people (maybe fewer?)
| in ancient Athens were apparently able to come up
| with.[1]
|
| They even did pretty well with computing with the
| Antikythera mechanism and its predecessors; though, like
| Babbage, they were limited by the manufacturing
| technology of the day.
|
| [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1165/ancient-
| greek-inve...
| lifeonlars wrote:
| Not sure this is a representative sample of "people 2000
| years ago".
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| The point was that with Plato (but also ~2,000 years before
| his time, with the Sumerians, who probably invented writing)
| we were already discovering that we don't have to bring the
| exterior into an inside which we call "self", memory, we can
| actually leverage stigmergically [1] the environment to
| enhance and extend the "self", i.e. by writing, leaving a
| mark; the Greek word _grapho_ grapho [2] meaning literally to
| carve.
|
| Not sure if LLMs will enhance our current "self" by
| themselves, but once we get a chip or two inside our brains,
| once we start controlling the cells to regenerate or grow
| specific limbs [3], we will surely consider our present
| "selves" as tiny as we consider the "self" of one of our
| cousins, the chimpanzee, in a zoo today. The journey and
| expansion of the "self" is merely starting.
|
| [1] "the trace left in the environment by an individual
| action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by
| the same or different agent",
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
|
| [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CF%86%C
| F%8...
|
| [2] "HCN2 Rescues brain defects by enforcing endogenous
| voltage pre-patterns",
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03334-5
| dalbasal wrote:
| This is perhaps abstract and tangent but....
|
| Especially for this quote, I like attributing it to Socrates as
| Plato did. We obviously don't know the details and nuances.
| However, I feel it captures the (perhaps inexact) tension
| between Socrates' old, mostly oral tradition of philosophy and
| Plato's newer tradition of written philosophy.
|
| It's ancient Marshall McLuhan. Oral philosophy and written
| philosophy create different philosophies, not just a different
| medium for the same philosophy.
| Borrible wrote:
| Remembering changes memory.
|
| It embeds what is remembered in a current context.
|
| Did Plato take this into account?
| rodelrod wrote:
| Most of the comments here are assigning this as Plato's
| opinion.
|
| I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his
| own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not
| that are being expressed.
|
| In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of
| Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the
| voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their
| actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato
| left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic
| Greek philosophy.
|
| Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought
| there was a value in the writing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Plato's warning is true, actually. Since I started to write, I
| remember less and less about the things I have written down,
| because the brain replaces them with a pointer.
|
| However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two
| different things, and it activates different parts of the
| brain.
|
| I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper
| allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking
| speed, so things doesn't escape or my focus doesn't get
| derailed. Also it changes how brain works so it can think
| better.
|
| Also, blogging and writing documentation at work made me a much
| better thinker, because converting these abstract concepts to
| meaningful sentences with a context and easy to understand
| structure affects also how clearly you communicate in other
| parts of your life.
|
| Offloading this really robs you of the joys and power of
| meaningful communication on many mediums.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the brain replaces them with a pointer.
|
| And, unfortunately, as you get older and memory starts to
| fill up, the pointers get overwritten.
| passterby wrote:
| [dead]
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| I remember MUCH, much better things that I once had written,
| not just read.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I remember better when I hand-write things rather than
| typing them, too.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Perhaps having a conversation with an LLM will help thinking
| even further? I am prone to thinking out loud (in private)
| and it helps me a lot.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I agree. Instance from today; I have a very novel task at
| work that nobody seems to know how to approach, I had a
| hunch that metaheuristics could play a role; I used ChatGPT
| to help me better formulate the problem and at least now
| there is a way to tackle the problem.
|
| It made a few errors in at least presenting my ideas, but
| these errors were a consequence of my misunderstanding and
| lack of clarity.
|
| The errors themselves, in my opinion, are invaluable
| because they force you to think, to be clear, and to guide
| the model into giving me useful ideas to look into.
|
| For all intents and purposes, it was an example of the
| Socratic method, albeit inverted, where the student is
| asking questions to an all knowing teacher, and the teacher
| / LLM responds with ideas and hints. Ultimately, it's up to
| the student to synthesize the solution, be critical of the
| data, and tie everything together.
| bayindirh wrote:
| An LLM is not a conscious entity, and while it can babble
| and assemble meaningful sentences, it has no guarantee of
| correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and
| pieces we value in a conversation. It's just a sentence
| builder.
|
| As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by
| real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful.
| I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either
| with a different human being or an artificial construct
| which can babble meaningful sentences.
|
| Currently, we simply ignore or don't understand the fact
| that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built with
| word order. There are higher orders of information carried
| implicitly, and they are not articulated in words. Hence an
| LLM can not replace, even mimic a real human being in a
| conversation.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Whilst by no means a new idea, physical and digital
| zettelkasten may interest some folks more than conversing
| with an LLM. Some people describe it as conversing with
| yourself or having a second brain. I don't find discourse
| with an LLM to be productive, but I do find surfing my
| zettelkasten to yield new and novel ideas, especially
| when it comes to problem-solving and research.
|
| However, I'm still on industry forums and communities
| like HN to hopefully have _new_ and conflicting thoughts
| thrown my way by peers. That 's my primary concern with
| LLMs, a lack of fresh perspective that has all the nuance
| of experience and _understanding_ behind its output.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> Currently, we simply ignore or don 't understand the
| fact that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built
| with word order_
|
| Many people argue convincingly that it's exactly how the
| meaning is built, though.
| bayindirh wrote:
| If convincingly arguing about something was the only
| thing we needed for proving correctness, we wouldn't have
| the scientific method.
|
| Or, if word order built the meaning and it's devoid of
| the character itself, we wouldn't be praising authors for
| their character building skills and embedding things not
| written or spoken into their stories, regardless of the
| medium it's presented.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| And your proof?
| orbital-decay wrote:
| To apply the scientific method and prove correctness, you
| need to define the subject first. Meaning is ill-defined,
| just like consciousness, intelligence, and others.
|
| LLMs can clearly grasp higher order abstractions and
| concepts just by reordering the words. In fact,
| embeddings (developed much earlier) are specifically
| intended to represent the semantical meaning extracted
| from text using just statistical methods; until the
| introduction of transformers they lacked a good
| architecture to demonstrate the usefulness of that.
|
| This makes many people argue that being a sentence
| builder is enough to be intelligent, as they also
| received most of their intelligence from the same source
| (concentrated experience of someone else - social
| intelligence).
|
| "Honesty" and other forms of self-introspection is just a
| high level construct which current models aren't trained
| for, and likely not a fundamental issue with being a
| stochastic parrot.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and
| other small bits and pieces
|
| Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.
|
| I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of
| everything, and it always responds with something that
| sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use
| your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this
| is not so different from conversing with a person. People
| can babble too.
|
| > There are higher orders of information carried
| implicitly
|
| You're not always looking for those in a conversation.
| Sometimes you really are just checking that you've
| thought things through. Like if someone asks you what the
| arguments in favor of democracy are, you want a list of
| points so you can check you haven't forgotten something.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck.
|
| That was my first thought too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
|
| But it's a pretty amazing rubber duck that has read the
| entire internet and thus can correlate your ideas with
| the ideas of all of humanity in a split second on the
| spot.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.
|
| However, humans are more nuanced than that. One might
| remember wrongly, or act in bad-faith. This is why I said
| "baseline honesty". One people's traits definitely
| affects how their words are perceived, and this is not
| carried in the sentence itself.
|
| > I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. ... People
| can babble too. (Snipped for brevity)
|
| Humans are not as random as an LLM.
|
| > You're not always looking for those in a conversation.
| Sometimes you really are just checking that you've
| thought things through.
|
| Again the person you're asking or answering has their own
| character and their or your words are affected by that
| implicit knowledge. This is a background process we're
| not aware of unless you dig into yourself and look for
| it.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Humans are not as random as an LLM. //
|
| Humans you know and trust, sure. Humans you think you're
| conversing with online, not so much.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Humans you think you're conversing with online, not so
| much.
|
| Two decades of experience shows me otherwise. Even your
| two comments shows a consistent tone. We're just started
| to discuss, yet I have started to build an image of you
| thanks to your comments.
|
| This is one of the mechanisms we don't fully understand
| and don't dare to dig much, because tinkering with
| people's minds are dangerous.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Having known a few habitual liars over the years, the
| similarity to LLM chatbots is quite striking.
| Last5Digits wrote:
| I know this is HN, but can we please stop drawing these vague
| parallels between basic programming concepts and the
| functioning of the human brain?
|
| No, the brain does not "replace written information with a
| pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether
| writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I
| can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in
| support of either case.
|
| I could posit that writing actually improves your memory,
| because the minute movements of your arm require more of your
| brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections
| and possibilities of recall.
|
| This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that thinking
| up some vague explanation is insufficient to make a point
| about a system as complex as the human brain.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Fun fact about the biological machine is that we could
| maybe make it "replace written information with a pointer".
| In planarian worms we can use a voltage-sensitive dye to
| see a "memory" the cells will fallback to in case of injury
| and they regenerate based on that "memory", however we can
| alter that "memory" to say "build a worm with 2 heads"
| instead of the regular worm with head and tail [1].
|
| [1] "Michael Levin - Plasticity without genetic change:
| bioelectric embryos & synthetic proto-organisms",
| https://youtu.be/5ChRM4CEWyg?t=1169
| bayindirh wrote:
| > I know this is HN, but can we please stop drawing these
| vague parallels between basic programming concepts and the
| functioning of the human brain?
|
| No, because I literally don't remember my to do list after
| writing to my EDC notebook. The only thing I know is, it's
| in the notebook. So I only know the address of my to do
| list. I'm a literal sitting duck if I leave my notebook at
| home.
|
| > I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether
| writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it ...
|
| I can tell you because I observe myself over 5+ years since
| I started to write my daily plans consistently to my
| notebook.
|
| > I could posit that writing actually improves your memory,
| because the minute movements of your arm require more of
| your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural
| connections and possibilities of recall.
|
| What it improves is not the "verbatim memory", but the
| concepts you work on. Working on something slowly, and with
| a reflection medium (i.e. pen & paper) allows your brain to
| refine the thing you're working on better and store it as a
| concept, rather than memorized string.
|
| > This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that
| thinking up some vague explanation is insufficient to make
| a point about a system as complex as the human brain.
|
| I have read a paper about supporting the claims I did in
| this comment, but I failed to find it in a whim. Will
| update/reply this comment if I find it. I use these
| analogies because of that paper.
| numbchuckskills wrote:
| [dead]
| Bran_son wrote:
| The abstract idea of a 'pointer' is a piece of information
| to the location of some other information. It is not even
| an analogy - it is literally the same thing, differing only
| in implementation details.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| A librarian might say they create a reference card, a web
| person might say they're creating a hyperlink.
|
| In all cases I think parent post is trying to communicate
| that they are putting the large mass of information
| elsewhere, and only retain a reference locally.
| (implementation details notwithstanding)
| passterby wrote:
| [dead]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I know this is HN, but can we please stop drawing these
| vague parallels between basic programming concepts and the
| functioning of the human brain?_
|
| Why? Those are perfectly good parallels, and quite specific
| at that. Forgetting the thing, and replacing that memory
| with the memory of the location of that thing - that's an
| "indirect reference", i.e. a pointer in programming terms.
|
| > _I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether
| writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I
| can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in
| support of either case._
|
| You can construct analogies to anything in support of
| anything, what matters is whether the analogy is bringing
| the reader towards or away from the truth.
|
| Also, even when you have two similar analogies pointing in
| opposite direction, that doesn't mean either is wrong -
| they may be talking about two different things. For
| instance:
|
| > _I could posit that writing actually improves your
| memory, because the minute movements of your arm require
| more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more
| neural connections and possibilities of recall._
|
| I believe that to be true just as much as GP's pointer
| analogy. In fact, I attribute my learning of irregular
| verbs in English directly to my grandfather insisting I
| copy the verb table by hand several times. Doing it, I went
| from near-zero recall to near-perfect recall in two
| sessions (with each having me copy the table once or
| twice).
|
| Now the difference here is, in case of irregular verbs, I
| wanted to memorize them. The act of writing the information
| down myself somehow helped commit it to memory, perhaps
| because the brain was more focused, or because I was more
| invested, or a bit of both.
|
| In case of GP's (and mine too!) experience with TODO list,
| the act of writing serves the explicit purpose of _getting
| the thing out of your head_. This is the opposite of
| memorization - you literally want to _forget_ about tasks
| you write down, so they stop circling around in your head,
| distracting and stressing you.
|
| Incidentally, when I write some TODOs by hand, I actually
| improve my immediate recall of them - should I try and
| check. But I don't, because I don't want to reinforce those
| thoughts. My brain understands, and before I know it, I no
| longer remember most of them in detail.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Maybe kinda pedantic but, this is not Plato/Socrates saying
| this here, but Socrates telling Phaedrus what King Thamus said
| to Thoth. It's kinda important I guess, because Socrates is
| ultimately somewhat ambivalent by the end of the dialogue on
| this issue.
|
| Consider also Derrida's thoughts on these matters:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Sure, the game of differance [1] can be played till the end
| of the universe. Socrates is well known as an aporia [2]
| lover, but at the end of the day even he had to take an
| executive decision, leave the agora, and go home to the
| nagging wife [3]. Ancient Greek misogyny aside, Xanthippe can
| be interpreted as Socrates' aporia solver, in the same manner
| his 'daemon' [4] would only tell him "No", Xanthippe would
| tell him "Yes".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthippe
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#Socrates
| EGreg wrote:
| Actually, I always found this part much more interesting:
|
| _You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing,
| which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter's
| products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you
| question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the
| same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though
| they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what
| they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just
| the same thing forever._
|
| Because it is now not the case, and AI trained on a corpus of
| many books can in fact say something new.
|
| That and Meno's paradox!
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| Plato turned out right. I'm not extremely old and I still
| remember time before the Internet, when to know something, you
| had to look it up, which took ages, so you simply had to know
| it. Yourself.
|
| We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have
| shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no
| longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to.
|
| Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so, and AI even more
| so. Eventually you can build the entire thinker out of those
| crutches and you need no humans anymore.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| We measured intelligence by the number of memorized facts
| we'd internalized, but little did we know that collecting
| more facts doesn't make us more intelligent
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| Well, "intelligent" has always been a murky term, and as
| tech is rapidly surpassing us in every way, it'll become
| even more meaningless as times goes on.
| bravura wrote:
| I've argued that if ChatGPT means that motivated students spend
| less time doing expository writing, and more time:
|
| * learning to ask good questions
|
| * learning to fact check
|
| * learning to edit the writing of others
|
| Then they have truly learned the Socratic method. Which is a
| much more valuable tool than writing from scratch
| solipsistically: being able to actively engage with the writing
| of others.
| nstart wrote:
| > For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in
| the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not
| practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by
| external characters which are no part of themselves, will
| discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have
| invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding;
|
| That is correct. I mean, some of that is exactly why I write at
| least 5000 words a day of journal notes while working. Because
| I want to offload everything from memory to a written form that
| is indexed.
|
| > and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true
| wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and
| will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the
| most part ignorant...
|
| This part is where we veer into prediction of how it will alter
| people and it is both right and wrong. I think the education
| system has shown us it's possible to have a great memory and to
| remember many facts and still be ignorant. At the same time,
| there's so much material that can be consumed and people have
| surface knowledge of many things and once you dig into a
| conversation with them on it, the ignorance pops up and it
| turns out that they don't know much about the topic. I know
| this. This has been me on many occasions and is still me on
| some occasion.
|
| >... and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but
| only appear wise.
|
| Again, there's some truth to this. I think about the times
| where I've jumped into a conversation about politics with some
| half baked knowledge that I read somewhere but failed to
| understand or recall correctly and I think I must have a looked
| a fool at those times.
|
| But then again, I've course corrected here and there and I've
| spent time writing and sharing thoughts with others where I've
| used previous writings to pull up facts and my own synthesis,
| and I feel like I've been a better participant at times like
| that. In that way, writing has helped me steer away from
| ignorance.
|
| I can't comment further though on the quote because I've never
| read the rest of the context so I may be missing out on some
| stuff.
|
| I think Paul is on to something here though. I can't count how
| many thoughts I've had that I thought were clever but when I
| started to write the thoughts down and organize it on my own, I
| discovered for myself that either I didn't have enough evidence
| to prove myself entirely or that I was just flat out wrong.
| Writing is a form of thinking in my opinion. And if we don't
| write, we do lose that side of thinking too. I do appreciate
| though that Paul doesn't go further into predicting the
| consequences as Plato's warning does here. But I'll be willing
| to bet that Paul is right that there will be some negative
| consequences for sure.
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Socrates' main argument is that the word itself cannot teach
| but that it takes two parties which are often a student and a
| text instead of a student and a teacher. If Socrates sat down
| and explained to a student, he could impart not only the
| written word but other examples from their own lives. But the
| word can be uprooted from its context and read by many who
| will learn just the word instead of the meaning of the whole
| of it. There's even a whole class of philosophy who argues
| _inside_ the definition of words.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There were the same warnings about the printing press, both
| books and newspapers; "kids don't play anymore, they read books
| all day", or "people don't share news anymore, they all read
| their own newspapers".
|
| I'm not going to deny it's a change, but it's too early to
| decide if it's a bad change. Every generation has its own big
| shift in the past 100-200 years, and every generation complains
| about the change.
| derrida wrote:
| It's true. People can memorize 100'000s of words of text and
| this ability was common place among learned people. The pali
| canon is an example. I found myself remembering huge amounts,
| having just read a text, with no intentional effort to recall
| after a month in a forest monastery and in the 4 months I was
| there but afterwards when exposed to the internet and sensory
| stuff again found my ability to recall texts had gone.
|
| "What is the cause of people forgetting texts they had learned
| before?" I can't remember the precise answer but that was one
| such line in the texts.
|
| Today if you say that you sound kinda crazy.`
|
| but like socrates there's still a few orders of wandering
| mendicant homeless-like orders out there (the theravada forest
| tradition being an example)
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > [W]hen exposed to the internet and sensory stuff again [I]
| found my ability to recall texts had gone.
|
| The overstimulation could be part of it as well, couldn't it?
| There isn't a lot of other information-rich inputs in a
| monastery.
|
| Holding a summer school in a forest or on an isolated resort
| seems like exploiting a similar idea, and it does work quite
| well (for a month or so, before isolation sets in).
| petercooper wrote:
| Just because I wasted too much time thinking about it: _" Within
| a year the median piece of writing could be by AI."_
|
| What does/could "median" mean in this context?
| ulrashida wrote:
| I believe it implies that looking at the volume of writing
| produced over a period, more than half of it would be AI-
| generated. It may also suggest a quality lens: all writing
| average and below would come from AI directly or through AI
| support.
| nnnnnande wrote:
| I said the same thing to my SO the first time I tried out
| ChatGPT.
|
| However, I'm not sure if AI is where I'd draw the boundary for
| myself at least, as I've had the same lingering feeling from only
| reading HN comments and seldom writing my own, or consuming
| BreadTube content for instance.
|
| More often than not, my opinions and thoughts are constructed for
| me by someone else as opposed to me doing my own critical
| thinking. Perhaps I'm one of the below-average thinkers for who
| ChatGPT will be a godsend.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Some of my favorite thoughts are those that I wouldn't in a
| million years have come up with on my own. Being exposed to
| these is a warp gate for the mind.
|
| The strange thing about being human is that we have an
| inordinate capacity to normalize and then universalize just
| about anything. On one had this plasticity allows us to deal
| with almost anything we are apt to encounter. On the other
| hand, it's an enormous blind spot to what could be. We're much
| more likely to add to our initial mental model than conceive of
| an entirely new perspective and it's these entirely new
| perspectives that I value the most.
| ghaff wrote:
| My experience with ChatGPT writing is that, if I have some
| essentially boilerplate to put down on page and work from, it's
| "fine" so long as I know enough to cross out the stuff I don't
| like and expand on the parts I do. Saves some time. But if I
| ask it to analyze a more complicated/nuanced question, it's far
| less useful. It certainly doesn't come up with unique insights
| into complicated topics I have a lot of familiarity with so far
| as I've experienced.
| alfor wrote:
| For writing yes, the more we offload the lazier we will get.
|
| But for reading, I can't stand most text as it's way too long and
| convoluted. I would gladly take a short version most of the time
| or one that is created just for my level of understanding.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| If an AI saw cuts an AI tree in an AI forest and no AI is around
| to hear it does it matter to AI?
| marttt wrote:
| "I warn you now, this is going to have unfortunate consequences,
| just as switching to living in suburbia and driving everywhere
| did." -- This is a really good comparison by pg. If anything, it
| will be a sneaky change in human behaviour for most people.
| Everything seems fine, and then you suddenly realize living
| without that AI "crutch" is simply _too hard_.
| ancount wrote:
| Would you be willing to explain how that comparison makes any
| sense at all? How is living in a city "too hard" for people in
| suburban and rural communities?
| BrianHenryIE wrote:
| Here's an earlier tweet of his lamenting what has been taken
| away from children by the rising dominance of cars in
| society, a function of suburban living:
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1656249684300640259
|
| The growth of suburbs had plenty of drawbacks. Many people
| will argue they "need a car", aka the price of entry to
| modern society is thousands of dollars.
|
| Transport is ~28% of US GHGs. But there's no quick and easy
| way to rebuild cities to facilitate most people getting to
| where they need to go quickly and cheaply by transit and
| walking/biking.
|
| There's lots to say on it, but I'm not a great writer!
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-seniors-driving-
| id...
|
| https://jalopnik.com/what-i-mean-when-i-say-ban-
| cars-1849122...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-
| Americ...
|
| https://twitter.com/bancars4life
|
| https://www.facebook.com/groups/whatwouldjanejacobsdo/
| justinzollars wrote:
| I enjoy writing. I hate writing business tone jargon. I use
| ChatGPT for that.
| jononomo wrote:
| Maybe most people will write more now that they have GPT
| available.
| nestorD wrote:
| My experience has been that GPT4 is terrible at thinking but, if
| I provide it with both the content and the way I want structured,
| it can give me an output that requires very little tweaking
| before being ready to go. I do my writing-as-thinking when
| getting the draft ready.
| tkgally wrote:
| Many people find writing very difficult or are not confident
| about their ability to do it accurately. For people like that,
| GPT can be a godsend. If they need to write an e-mail or short
| report for work, they can just give GPT a few bullet points and
| it will produce a perfectly serviceable, error-free text.
|
| People who need to write in a second language will find GPT
| especially useful, because they can write those bullet points in
| their first language and GPT will produce a text in the target
| language that both serves the purpose and is much better than
| anything they could produce on their own. The result is likely to
| be better than a straight machine translation, too, because GPT
| can, if appropriately prompted, adjust the content, structure,
| and formality of the text for the intended purpose. And, if they
| are trying to become more fluent in the target language, the text
| produced by GPT will be good to learn from, because it will show
| them how to say just what they were trying say.
| rprospero wrote:
| If my entire message can be condensed into a few bullet points
| that could be fed into ChatGPT, wouldn't it be an insult to my
| audience's time to provide them with anything but that very
| list of bullet points?
|
| This is exactly the thought that puts me in your category of
| "people [who] find writing very difficult"
| tkgally wrote:
| Depending on the situation, a set of bullet points might seem
| insulting to your audience for other reasons.
|
| Here's a real-world example. I live in Japan. While I am
| fluent in Japanese, it is not my first language and I am not
| confident about writing formal e-mails, as the grammar,
| vocabulary, and strategies for making requests are quite
| different from everyday usage. Now, though, I can feed
| prompts like the following to GPT-4:
|
| "Compose an e-mail in Japanese as follows:
|
| Sender: [my name and affiliation in Japanese]
|
| Recipient: [name of company in Japanese]
|
| Content: Request to visit the company to tell them about [my
| product name in Japanese], which is our new accounting
| software that uses AI to streamline work. Tell them that I
| can visit their headquarters at any time on any weekday. Ask
| them to reply by e-mail or to call my mobile at [number]."
|
| In a few seconds, it produced a much better e-mail than I
| would have been able to write without a lot of effort or
| someone else's help [1]. From my experience, I can say with
| confidence that GPT-4's e-mail is much more likely to elicit
| a response than anything I could compose by myself. (I would
| change one or two things in its version before sending it,
| though.)
|
| Millions of people around the world are like me: doing much
| of their work in a second language and often feeling at a
| disadvantage to native speakers, especially when writing for
| formal or public-facing purposes. GPT-4 is a great tool for
| people like us, as well as for people who are not confident
| about writing in their first language.
|
| [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-
| comp...
| nottorp wrote:
| Not so sure being served the text on a platter will lead to any
| improvement.
|
| Which is fine when some experienced person uses the generator
| to do something that they already know how to do (boilerplate
| code generation) or is tangential to their main activity
| (report generation).
|
| In the long run though, what happens when we reach a generation
| that is taught to use the LLMs for their job from the start?
| Will they be able to handle anything unexpected?
| spopejoy wrote:
| Oh the irony of issuing stern warnings about imminent loss of
| human thinking ability ... in a tweetstorm
| esjeon wrote:
| I don't think most normal people will spam their own SNS/blogs
| using LLMs. If you hate writing, you won't be writing at all,
| instead of using LLMs to generate stuffs. If you have a message
| to send, you'll be taking much of your time creating a piece even
| with LLMs. Obviously, there can be many exceptions here (e.g.
| trolls, flamers), but the key point is that using LLMs only can
| reduce the cost of act of writing, but it hardly lowers the
| barrier of writing itself, especially when there are implications
| to consider.
|
| So, I think OP(Paul Graham) is basically overestimating people's
| will to write, probably because he's a such good writer himself.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| He's naively assuming that people don't already just dip their
| finger in the social media feed, Google's first page of
| results, or their favourite forum to get an opinion instead of
| formulating their own. Nothing will change except the medium
| for figuring out which way the groupthink wind is blowing.
| bombolo wrote:
| Think of all the blogspam that is on medium, or all the
| clickbait done to get impressions.
|
| That isn't born out of passion.
| shadowtree wrote:
| Just for one persona.
|
| Good old Peter Drucker formalized the personas in his advice to
| new employees to figure out how their bosses _consumed_
| information:
|
| 1 - The lawyer. Needs walls of text.
|
| 2 - The architect. Needs diagrams, visuals.
|
| 3 - The accountant. Needs numbers, spreadsheets.
|
| 4 - The actor. Needs a conversation, verbal.
|
| It's a generalization, of course, but I have applied this pattern
| successfully. The core bit is that using the wrong method with
| any of the 4 personas flat out does not work.
|
| Send a long article to an accountant and they're stumped. But
| send them a bunch of numbers and they hear the numbers sing. Etc.
|
| Tangent on the Amazon way of write ups - Bezos forced his persona
| on the whole company. I would _hste_ it. I am an architect, a few
| diagrams is all I need.
| programmarchy wrote:
| Which persona is Bezos? Accountant?
| svnt wrote:
| Probably the lawyer. At Amazon they're somewhat known for the
| their six-page essay.
| alttab wrote:
| Yeah but the weekly WBR where the directors ask what a cell
| means on the DataNet report but the data isnt' sussed out
| so the L5 Data science guy that reports to the L7 PMT will
| spend the next week changing SQL to produce that requested
| view for the next week WBR.
|
| Many L6 promos over the years went out to folks who could
| quickly and accurately build WBR decks that gave L8s the
| visibility they wanted.
|
| So maybe Bezos is the lawyer, and all the directors are
| accountants.
| alttab wrote:
| Definitely lawyer and accountant.
|
| PRFAQs, COEs, and WBRs.
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| Here are some guesses at popular CEOs.
|
| LAWYERS - needs walls of text
|
| Jeff Bezos is known for his long-term thinking and his annual
| letters to shareholders are famous for their extensive detail
| and length.
|
| Mark Zuckerberg is known for his long-term vision and often
| communicates his ideas in lengthy blog posts and public
| statements.
|
| ACCOUNTANTS - needs numbers, spreadsheets
|
| Sundar Pichai has an engineering background and tends to rely
| on data and analysis in decision-making.
|
| Satya Nadella has an engineering background and has emphasized
| the importance of data-driven decision-making at Microsoft.
|
| Warren Buffett is famous for his value investing approach,
| which emphasizes analyzing financial statements and data to
| identify undervalued companies.
|
| ARCHITECTS - needs diagrams, visuals
|
| Tim Cook is known for his attention to design and user
| experience, and Apple's keynotes and product launches often
| feature detailed visuals and product demonstrations.
|
| Elon Musk frequently communicates his ideas through visually
| compelling presentations, and is known for his ambitious plans
| for space exploration and sustainable energy.
|
| ACTORS - needs a conversation, verbal
|
| Mark Cuban is known for his outgoing and talkative personality.
| He often engages in conversations with fans and customers on
| social media and in public appearances, and is very comfortable
| in front of the camera.
|
| Richard Branson is known for his flamboyant and charismatic
| personality. He often appears in public events and media
| interviews, and is known for his storytelling and ability to
| captivate audiences with his words.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| pg's observations are equally applicable to all of those
| domains, all of which are likely to become AI-mediated by
| default.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _The lawyer. Needs walls of text._
|
| Lawyer and law professor here: No, _no_ , _NO_!
|
| Wall-of-words text is a sign of a L.O.A.D. -- a Lazy Or
| Arrogant Drafter.
|
| I teach contract drafting to 3Ls and stress The Two Great Rules
| of Readability:
|
| 1. SSSSP: Short, Simple, Single-Subject Paragraphs.
| https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
|
| 2. BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front.
| https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
| andersentobias wrote:
| Interesting. Is this really true, that every person prefers at
| most one of these?
|
| Also a quotation link would be appreciated.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think this can be generalized to, "when you lose the ability to
| create a certain Form, you also lose some of your ability to
| imagine new types of that Form, and instead just rely on
| shuffling existing versions of it around to generate novelty."
|
| A bit wordy, but I have the skill of drawing/sketching in mind.
| There is a big difference between sketching an idea on a blank
| sheet of paper, and using some kind of software tool that puts
| you on predefined rails from the start.
|
| That said, I think the notion that ChatGPT replacing "good
| writing" as an artistic activity is basically nil. It's more like
| the next generation of word processing: immensely useful for the
| right operator, not that useful for people without something
| interesting to say in the first place.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Honestly ChatGPT is hot garbage. I can't find inputs to make
| anything it writes sound like it comes from a real person. It's
| very good at sounding like a specific, boring person. It's
| impressive that it has mastered human language, but is it
| really close to mastering humanity?
| keiferski wrote:
| I think it is much more useful as a "word processor" than as
| a source of information. It's really good at reformatting
| text, changing it into questions/answers, summarizing it,
| etc.
|
| For example, I'm a huge fan of Anki and I've found ChatGTP to
| be very helpful for generating questions from a block of text
| and in formatting Cloze cards. But I _don 't_ recommend
| asking it for information directly.
|
| I wrote a bit about it here:
| https://neurotechnicians.com/p/generative-ai-and-anki-
| part-1...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I think this can be generalized to, "when you lose the
| ability to create a certain Form, you also lose some of your
| ability to imagine new types of that Form, and instead just
| rely on shuffling existing versions of it around to generate
| novelty."
|
| And it has a very serious consequence: "when you lose the
| ability to write, you lose the ability to create new content on
| which future LLMs are going to be trained".
|
| One guy has been exposed for producing one computer programming
| book _per week_ , for six months or a year straight, all with 5
| stars reviews.
|
| How many people like him are gaming, for their own benefits,
| the system?
|
| It's all too obvious on GitHub and StackOverflow already:
| people gaming the system with automatically generated code that
| just, to reuse you words, _" rely on shuffling existing
| versions"_.
|
| How can this LLM-generated content possibly be used to created
| a better LLM?
|
| Basically: how do we train future LLMs using content produced
| by those among the humans whom didn't lose their ability to
| think?
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| I think the generalization is more minute than that. Take
| mathematics for example, we can write that down and so we have.
| A lot of people "hate" math because they understand math as the
| shuffling of symbols. They hear "math" and think "arithmetic".
| Math appears a lot like some puzzle-game because when they read
| textbooks they see these symbols being shuffled around which
| produce exact answers, like 4.8473. But mathematics is about
| expressing ideas which can produce answers for specific
| problems, not specific answers in general.
|
| It's the allegory of the cave all over again, mathematics has
| become a shadow of itself in many people's minds. Instead of a
| tool in which to express ideas, it just became stuffy
| definitions and arcane symbols which produce hard yes/no
| answers. Why? Because when those ideas are expressed by writing
| down the mathematics in textbooks, they are expressed in arcane
| symbols and stuffy definitions which have exercises that have
| hard yes/no answers.
| pcblues wrote:
| If anything, writing froze ideas (see religion), whereas speaking
| them from generation to generation allowed the dross to slough
| off good ideas. Does good science require writing? That's a good
| debate to have. Are written notes essential for scientific
| progress/discovery? Maybe. If failures are recorded and
| researchable, then I would argue yes, because it is likely only
| the successes were transmitted with spoken word.
| bigwavedave wrote:
| I would argue that broad collaboration requires the written
| word. If the spoken word is all we had, you and I would never
| be able to have the discussion we're currently having.
| Verdex wrote:
| I think it's the other way around. With certain thought
| techniques, you will find yourself writing. I'm sympathetic
| towards having a mode of thought that allows you to be a prolific
| writer and then bemoaning the lonely path you're on as new
| technologies allow people to completely bypass what you are good
| at. People simply do not understand what they are missing.
|
| However, people who don't write weren't going to be writing
| themselves anyway. It's similar with math. Everyone talks about
| how important it is for children to learn math in school. And
| everyone recoils with primal terror if I so much as mention the
| most minor of mathematical constructs.
|
| Be joyous that you are good at something. But I don't think you
| should look down upon those who find a way to survive by not
| being good at your thing. Even if things would objectively be
| better if everyone was a mathematician, scribe, and poet, this is
| probably not a realistic goal.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| This is precisely what I came in here to say. People who say
| writing and thinking ability are hand in hand are typically
| good writers who were told they're good thinkers because their
| writing ability set them apart. Similarly, the ability to do
| rote math skills once set people apart as geniuses, literal
| computers in the classic sense of the word. I see these tools,
| as applied to this task, as an equalizer of sorts that lets
| people who have great ideas express them in a compelling way.
|
| In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a
| time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life
| skill. I couldn't to save my life. I strongly believed I was
| bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and
| mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn't
| make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This
| time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top
| marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum
| laude in a top engineering computer science school.
|
| How many people have been marginalized because they couldn't
| express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better
| writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical
| abilities and towards completeness of thought isn't a bad
| thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core
| skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much
| as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.
| jzb wrote:
| "People simply do not understand what they are missing."
|
| I think you can say this about people who haven't learned to
| write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can
| get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and
| call it writing.
|
| Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when
| you have an idea and want to cut to the finish.
|
| The problem is that part of writing is starting with an idea,
| thinking about how to express it, and then realizing that your
| initial idea might be flawed or need work.
|
| Sure - ChatGPT seems fine for spitting out web copy or
| something where the role of the writer isn't to examine an
| idea, but just to go from start to done as quickly as possible.
|
| But I think he's talking about the types of writing that
| involve wrestling with an idea and, for example, trying to
| persuade others. ChatGPT will happily spit out copy in that
| form. But it won't trip over a paragraph and say "hey, shit,
| now that I write this out, I think it's wrong or not well-
| expressed."
|
| People bemoan co-workers who coast by on people skills and
| bullshit over people who have expertise and do the work.
| ChatGPT is likely to be similar - helping people who can't
| write (express or work with ideas effectively) sound
| authoritative and generate more content that they don't really
| even understand.
| BogdanPetre wrote:
| History repeats itself - from oral to written, now to AI. Fear
| not, it's a shift, not a shutdown. Writing didn't dull minds, it
| sparked ideas. AI isn't the end of thinking, it's a new chapter.
| andsoitis wrote:
| The risk isn't so much losing the ability to think (I think that
| is exaggeration), but rather that interacting with it is
| _changing how_ we think, or, indeed, _what_ we think.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| * but rather that interacting with it is changing how we think,
| or, indeed, what we think*
|
| That's simply the world moving forward. You might assume that a
| house is a smoky place before folks invented the chimney.
| Horses were important before mechanical transportation got off
| the ground. Belief in humors has dwindled since germ theory
| proved to be successful. Reading and non-religious texts being
| easily available introduced ideas folks might not have had on
| their own. The camera caused folks to reconsider what art is
| and allowed for impressionism, abstract art, and more.
|
| Tech and advancement changes the way we think and what we
| think, and it shouldn't be surprising.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| This also plays out over time and assuming future LLMs will be
| trained ever more on the generative output of todays LLMs we
| could end up communicating using a Language itself that will
| become frozen in time as it cycles through the same feedback
| loop. As John Culkin said: "We shape our tools, and thereafter
| they shape us."
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This assumes there's some kind of collective ability to think.
|
| The evidence for that is tenuous at best.
| hello_computer wrote:
| [dead]
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Drawing is thinking, too.
|
| https://tumamocsketchbook.com/2011/12/drawing-is-thinking.ht...
| chasing wrote:
| Writing is thinking. You do it as much for yourself as you do
| your readers and having to put effort into it is how you realize
| gains. Like strength training.
|
| Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for
| you. It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move
| weights up and down -- sorta misses the point.
|
| (Before I get the usual sorts of replies: I'm not talking about
| writing boilerplate or marketing copy or canned responses to
| e-mails or just generating reams of prose so you can slap ads on
| it and make money or whatever. I'm talking about writing with the
| purpose of getting your personal thoughts and ideas out into the
| world.)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| But what if AI will write a more compelling paragraph than you
| ever could, even if you devoted your life to writing? So it
| might only be people who use AI who get their personal thoughts
| and ideas out into the world.
| chasing wrote:
| I wrote:
|
| "Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part
| for you."
|
| I didn't say I was opposed to using the AI tools. I'm opposed
| to using them to think for you -- to do the "hard part." If
| they help with a turn-of-phrase or vocabulary or structure or
| whatever then they're just a more advanced version of tools
| people already use for those things.
| psychlops wrote:
| > It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights
| up and down -- sorta misses the point.
|
| As a lazy writer who never skips legs day, I appreciate this
| comment. It inspires me to write more than snarky snippets
| online.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| > or marketing copy
|
| I don't think marketing copy deserves to be grouped with
| 'boilerplate' and 'canned responses'.
|
| It takes a _lot_ of brain power to create marketing copy that
| isn 't boilerplate / canned / generic.
|
| Good marketing copy persuades people to take a specific action,
| and figuring out what this takes just as much critical
| thinking, iteration, and getting your reps in as any other
| compelling content.
|
| Which is why _most_ marketing copy feels bland / generic /
| boilerplate / canned.
|
| It's _not_ easy.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Writing is a _form_ of thinking.
|
| It only takes one or two manic episodes to realize that they're
| not always super correlated.
| waboremo wrote:
| Don't even need manic episodes to understand this (and if you
| went through one I'm terribly sorry, they can be such cruel
| events people disregard), music is a good example. You can be
| so profoundly moved by a song in an entirely different
| language you don't understand not because of writing, but
| because of what the person conveys through sound. Instruments
| as another example of this.
|
| What our thoughts are made up of visuals (shapes, lights),
| feelings, and sounds. Not words, however words are convenient
| shortcuts to communication so we use them a lot. This is part
| of why we continue trying to understand animals. It's also
| why multilingual people will have these jarring stops in
| speaking/writing, and struggle to connect those
| visuals/feelings/sounds in their mind to the expression
| (speaking/writing).
|
| It's literally the reason that "love" is so elusive to us.
| Despite numerous people trying their best over centuries to
| express it in writing, music, art, etc. it's still this
| profound feeling we feel has endless potential. We know it's
| just brain signals, and yet it continues to be deeply
| embedded in our thoughts.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| I totally agree with you. Had a similar discussion in a
| previous thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35683027
| waboremo wrote:
| Thank you for linking that! I enjoyed reading the
| responses and also the Kurt Vonnegut passage linked
| within, such a great connection to how we think.
| wwweston wrote:
| > Use tools, of course
|
| "Tools are the subtlest of traps. We become reliant upon them
| and in their absence we are vulnerable, weak, defenseless..."
| chasing wrote:
| Eh, or they just save time and headache.
|
| I'd much rather type on a computer than write longhand in
| notebooks.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I made a up a word to differentiate the
| boilerplate/canned/whatever activity to the personal-growth
| oriented one:
|
| ----
|
| Righting. verb.
|
| 1. writing to change the way the world is oriented
|
| > I resolve to continue righting until the wrongs go away.
|
| 2. writing to change the way oneself is oriented
|
| > I resolve to continue righting until I'm not wrong anymore.
|
| ----
|
| Ambiguity in usage being more or less the point.
| sva_ wrote:
| In contrast,
|
| > _If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their
| souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on
| that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer
| from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What
| you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for
| reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your
| disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many
| things without teaching them you will make them seem to know
| much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men
| filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they
| will be a burden to their fellows._
|
| - Plato
|
| Although this is different, because it is still written, just
| not by oneself, which probably makes the effect of relying on
| it and forgetting even worse.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Plato here is often brought out as a counter example for why
| saying a technology will damage cognition is obviously wrong,
| but I don't think its that simple. Writing and the
| proliferation of knowledge is an obvious good, but I think
| plato is otherwise correct here. Societies without reading
| and writing seem to have people who are able to memorize much
| larger amounts of information, the early muslims memorized
| the koran at first, which is quite a feat, before writing it
| down. A more accurate view is that there are trade offs.
| chasing wrote:
| I guess I disagree with Plato, unless he's talking about how
| I no longer know anyone's phone numbers off the top of my
| head.
|
| I think it's fairly well established that when you think
| about a topic well enough to generate ideas and put them on
| the page that you also cement those ideas in your mind. If
| you want to remember something you read (or see or do), write
| about it. In your own words.
| d--b wrote:
| Oh come on. The guy has been pushing AI startups for years, and
| now he's worried that some people are going to use it? And his
| worst fear is that people are going to stop thinking?
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of ChatGPT, I think it's overhyped and
| oversold, and very fundamentally limited.
|
| But I also completely disagree with his take, it's too broad and
| sweeping.
|
| Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people
| stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor do
| tools that abstract away some processes.
|
| A good example is driving. Does a manual transmission require
| more focus and thought? Sure! But that's focus and thought that
| can instead go into paying attention to surroundings. Same with
| having a GPS. Not having to think about the layout of the city,
| or how to use a map, just leaves less distraction and cognitive
| load.
|
| Another is programming. Having high-level languages instead of
| having to write assembly does not make programmers worse. It just
| means that instead of having to worry about byte alignment,
| structure packing and nuanced cache details - they can instead
| focus on providing more features and functionality to the end
| user - which is a good thing!
|
| ChatGPT at its best will be like those two examples. Something
| that removes some existing load and lets us handle higher level,
| more abstract problems.
| hosh wrote:
| I don't think pg is talking about the short-term, cognitive
| deficiencies of using AIs during execution of a specific task.
| I read it as the long-term decline in capabilities because you
| don't regularly exercise certain things:
|
| - being able to organize and compose your thoughts
|
| - being able to synthesize disparate ideas into a cohesive
| whole
|
| - tuning word choice, diction, and flow for a particular
| audience
|
| - choosing the narrative frame in which you present your idea
| (this one is huge)
|
| More concerning than long-term decline is that the next
| generation never develop these at all.
| quickcheque wrote:
| Sounds like an ideal labor force.
| hosh wrote:
| That is indeed what factories preferred since the beginning
| of industrialization.
|
| I'm not concerned so much about AI taking over my
| livelihood as I am of businesses treating humans as
| automatons, and have been for over a century, if not more.
| We even adapted our education system to crank out more
| automatons (John Taylor Gatto's book).
|
| The flip side is understanding what a true autonomous agent
| is from the lens of Promise Theory. At the core of it, you
| trust humans to do what they promise to the best of their
| abilities. This is the heart of voluntary cooperation. For
| AIs to be truly autonomous, they cannot be proxies for
| promises humans make to each other. (Being a proxy for
| humans is how AI safety ethicists are approaching this).
| Instead, AIs have to be capable of making and keeping
| promises in their own right, and we have to trust they do
| what they promise to the best of their capabilities. ...
| but not every business can't seem to do that with humans.
| tjr wrote:
| For what kind of labor?
| d11z wrote:
| I assume they mean one that does not dissent.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people
| stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor
| do tools that abstract away some processes.
|
| Agreed, but so much depends on where that focus goes instead.
| Whatever you do instead of writing is going to be what you
| improve at, while those other skills atrophy. That thing you
| spend focus on could be thinking deeply about abstract
| concepts, or composing sonnets, but it could also be mindlessly
| scrolling TikTok. Whether you ultimately buy Graham's thesis
| here depends on what you think the most likely outcome is.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| > Having high-level languages instead of having to write
| assembly does not make programmers worse. It just means that
| instead of having to worry about byte alignment, structure
| packing and nuanced cache details - they can instead focus on
| providing more features and functionality to the end user -
| which is a good thing!
|
| It also means that now we seriously lack people capable of
| working close to the bare metal - and the same will happen to
| many other skills and niche knowledge that AI will be able to
| replace (e.g. why school statics engineers, if AI can solve the
| math for architects directly).
|
| That will IMHO result in some bad things as well:
|
| - There will be no one left to oversee and improve the work
| done by AI,
|
| - It will further slow down the overall progress because the
| most of people will lack deeper insights into how things work
| and AI will probably still be of the limited use for making
| ground-breaking original discoveries,
|
| - And finally, though as individuals we will probably keep our
| IQs, just entertaining them with something else, as whole our
| civilization will loose some knowledge and skills - making us
| all dumber in a way.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| For me it's extremely useful for revealing information I know I
| need to know, but I'm not yet sure how to query it.
|
| That's a skill I've developed over the years, and I'll still
| need to use it, but it's often a major time sink. Skipping it
| lets me focus far more on learning and applying rather than
| grasping in the dark for a while, digging, sorting through
| sources, verifying and validating, etc.
|
| GPT will even surface studies pertaining to very specific
| topics by linking regular language to more sophisticated,
| field-specific jargon. I wouldn't use it to learn what's in the
| papers, but it's extremely useful for simply finding what I
| need to know.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| This is overly optimistic. If this were true, most people
| driving an automatic transmission would be safer drivers in
| light of the lighter cognitive load. But that's not what
| happens. Instead the brain is overwhelmed by autonomous
| friending and vending apps until the car becomes an autonomous
| ending machine.
|
| My n=1 experiment with driving a manual for 40 years in urban
| environments coast to coast is that I can't focus well without
| it and my experience doing half of that data set on a
| motorcycle just enforces that conclusion.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The automatic transmission and modern infotainment aren't
| really the same thing, they're different parts of the car. I
| think even if automatics had never existed, infotainment
| systems would still be around as we know them today.
| bjornlouser wrote:
| "But I don't expect to convince anyone (over 25) to go out and
| [ignore ChatGPT]. The purpose of this article is not to change
| anyone's mind, but to reassure people already interested in
| [unassisted writing] -- people who know that [writing in
| isolation] is powerful, but worry because it isn't widely used.
| In a competitive situation, that's an advantage." -- slightly
| modified PG drivel on Lisp http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
| hosh wrote:
| The scope is much broader than choice of computing language,
| since it affects the discourse of our whole civilization, and
| how we think about and discuss societal issues, and where we
| want to go as humanity.
|
| On the other hand, if you want to be a thought leader, you'll
| have less competition.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Most people hate to write as much as they hate math.
|
| The target audience of openai.
| alecco wrote:
| While I enjoy the act of writing, I dislike the amount of time
| it takes to do it well.
| newswasboring wrote:
| I expected something more than a person's unsourced opinions if
| the link is on the front page of HN. I know it's PG, but he isn't
| an authority on any of this. Feels like it's here because it's
| cool to hate on LLMs. I usually flag such stuff and move on, but
| I want to make my own doom proclamation. The cynicism for
| anything which will change the status quo is going to be our down
| fall as an industry and society. I understand raising concerns,
| but my god man at least pretend to balance it with some
| excitement. I've truly lived long enough to see the heralds of
| new technologies turn into doomsayers.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Future generations
| not only won't learn write, they won't learn to read either.
| Writing is a technology that "freezes" language and inscribes it
| onto paper. That was important when you couldn't record speech
| directly, or broadcast it easily. But now you can just record a
| video or audio stream and put it on the internet, and that
| obviates the benefit of transcribing it.
|
| Of course there are a lot of benefits of writing relative to
| audio/video. But are those benefits important compared to the
| enormous amount of effort that is required to learn to read and
| write?
|
| I also don't think it's wise to demean the skill involved in
| generating good speeches/podcasts/talk shows compared to good
| writing. Language skills are language skills. The difference in
| ability of a strong speaker vs a weak one is dramatic and
| instantaneously obvious.
|
| As the talent pool of good writers shrinks, the benefit of
| learning to read will shrink as well, leading to fewer readers.
| And then the incentive to become a good writer will diminish,
| since there are fewer readers who can consume your work. This
| will lead to a vicious cycle of reduction in literacy.
| [deleted]
| jgalt212 wrote:
| [dead]
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| it's the opposite, your ability to think is your ability to write
|
| anyone can write, even a machine, but do they think?
| carrolldunham wrote:
| As a possible counterpoint to LLMs atrophying writing, in order
| to have fun on Character.AI, and tease out nuances with various
| GPTs, I've had to dust off my ability to write/think. I notice a
| lot more verbal reasoning going on in my mind after these weeks
| of back-and-forthing.
| zabzonk wrote:
| title of this post could have been written by gpt. oh, and
| twitter - no thanks. can we simply stop posting twitter stuff
| here? it's just unreadable to anyone that doesn't use that
| platform. (i.e. most people)
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Aren't most HNers using Nitter?
| https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
| zabzonk wrote:
| i would have thought not - certainly not by me
| snvzz wrote:
| I am, as it is the only sane way to handle links to twitter.
|
| Unlike twitter, nitter is usable.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book on this idea that the
| medium changes you.
|
| TL;DR: When a disruptive technology comes along (books, radio,
| television, the Internet, now AI) there's an intrinsic shift in
| how we think and how information is communicated.
|
| For example with books there is generally the assumption that you
| have read the chapters in order and thus there is no need to give
| you a recap with each chapter.
|
| However, in television, you can make no such assumption and so at
| the beginning of every episode they have to remind you what
| happened before because it's possible either you didn't watch the
| previous episodes or it's been a long time since then.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| rcme wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone
| else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really
| terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count
| the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying
| to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling
| every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new
| tools.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Try coding in a language/style you are not familiar with.
|
| It is not revolutionary for areas you specialize in, but if I
| try using it for something like setting up a web scraper with
| python (something I understand conceptually but have never
| done) it feels pretty amazing.
|
| My one concern is that if I use it for JS I can immediately
| spot issues with it, but I am too ignorant of python to spot
| subtle problems.
| d23 wrote:
| It's definitely awesome for that, but for me, on side
| projects even in languages I'm familiar with, getting ChatGPT
| to write the boring annoying stuff, or things that would
| require a bit of referencing (like a library I've not
| completely memorized), I've still found it to be pretty
| useful.
| hoseja wrote:
| It seems really great at vacuous american essaywriting.
| keithnz wrote:
| they are tools, you have to learn how to use them.
|
| I use chatgpt everyday and am getting better and better at
| asking questions to get the answers I want.
|
| I used copilot when it was free, and it was best at
| boilerplate, and sometimes not bad at auto completing the next
| few lines, I didn't think it was worth paying for at the time.
| I use Codeium now, that works in a similar way, probably not
| quite as good as copilot in that it doesn't understand as many
| languages, but still does a reasonable job with boilerplate
| type code.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct
| reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with
| it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it,
| but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example
| of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly
| wrong, but they herald it as amazing.
|
| The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still
| using and loving databases here for the foreseeable--still
| writing things by hand for the foreseeable, and loving every
| moment.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| It might depend on your workflow. In many workflows (mine
| included), you tend to start out with a bunch of messy ideas
| and then slowly polish them into something usable. ChatGPT is
| a very powerful tool along the way here. It can help organize
| things, it can help rephrase your thoughts, and it can help
| solve minor issues along the way. Sometimes it can even do
| some fairly fancy things that previously could only be done
| by a human.
|
| For now I'd treat it more like a sparring partner who can
| help you with your ideas and support you throughout your
| process, rather than a magical genie that can magically solve
| your problem for you. And in this manner I find it to be very
| useful indeed.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Can you give an example on how you organize via ChatGPT?
| Keep in mind that this is a term I associate with project
| management systems like Active Collab, note-taking systems
| like Obsidian.md and OneNote, task managers like
| MyLifeOrganized, so your idea of what that entails might be
| quite different.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| You're not impressed!?
|
| Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft
| publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer
| AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible
| scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel
| spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown
| this over the fence" and released it to the public for free.
| This, despite man-years of effort developing the thing. It
| was working, and everything.
|
| I made a comment wondering if Chat GPT 4 with the vision
| extension could solve the same problem. One of the devs that
| had worked on the aforementioned AI (for years!) mentioned
| that yes, yes it can.
|
| Game over.
|
| Those _years of effort_ had just been replaced with a one-
| sentence English-language prompt that starts with "Please
| output a table from..."
|
| If this _doesn 't blow your mind_, then... I don't know how
| to help you understand just how much has changed, virtually
| overnight.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage
| Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does
| the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including
| reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even
| take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or
| stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure,
| different methodology, but it's not something we haven't
| already been doing for yonks. Users have even been able to
| train OmniPage Ultimate to recognize someone's bizarre and
| unique handwriting styles in seconds.
|
| OmniPage Ultimate is an entire _workflow_ that 's turn-key
| and ready-to-go.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Neat? _Neat!?_
|
| Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf
| OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get
| confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the
| R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-
| built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these
| elements and then output the result not just as ASCII
| text, but as a spreadsheet.
|
| Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft
| AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-
| years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries.
|
| You can just _ask_ ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in
| seconds.
|
| A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the
| formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had
| created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text
| editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on
| individual rows, interleaved with the _headings_. Even if
| I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess
| up the alternating row interleave. E.g.:
| Overview Hardware SKU A2
| Zone 2 Software Operating System
| Windows Image Licensed Yes
|
| Chat GPT can "undo the damage" because it _understands_
| not only what text is likely to be a heading, property,
| or value... but it has also seen _specifically_ the
| properties of the type of cloud VM I was working on! It
| understands these things to the same level as I do, and
| can fix up the formatting the same way I would.
|
| Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time
| and effort would you have to invest to solve this _style_
| of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken
| table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject,
| fix up the formatting.
|
| Years of effort?
|
| _Decades?_
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you
| in seconds.
|
| And how well does it do them? Correct me if I'm wrong,
| but for the time being all you know about its ability to
| replace that other MS tool is a "yes, yes it can" by a MS
| dev? Don't you want to withhold judgement until after
| you've spent some time actually using ChatGPT to do OCR?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| And yet, my default go-to example with me being
| personally unimpressed with ChatGPT 3 and 4 is getting it
| to output a valid NGINX configuration without
| hallucinating, despite feeding it the required
| documentation, the original Apache .htaccess file, and
| telling it what URL rewrites would be required. This
| should not be a difficult thing, but it constantly
| hallucinates things that aren't there because it's an
| LLM, and that's what LLMs do, they predict the next word.
|
| Whilst to the untrained eye, sure, the NGINX config
| looked great, but it didn't function, and it didn't
| include the URL rewrites as instructed, hallucinated a
| bunch of rewrites that didn't exist and would serve no
| purpose, and despite refining the prompts over many days,
| and consulting with self-proclaimed "prompt engineers",
| it still didn't give the expected output.
|
| It's neat. Reliable? Not in my experiences for my needs,
| but I am genuinely glad you're making it work for what
| you need, that's definitely cool, provided it doesn't
| hallucinate in an unnoticed capacity. It's a lot of trust
| to place in an LLM.
| blatant303 wrote:
| Here's an experiment that showcases GPT-4 deep
| (meta)semantic abilities:
|
| https://pastebin.com/8FwQzDiE
|
| TL;DR. I start by asking it to generate sentences where
| subject-object inversion yields a meaningful sentence
| where the verb's meaning is shifted metaphorically. For
| instance "I smoke the cigarette vs the cigarette is
| smoking me". After some back and forth it comes up with:
|
| The painter captures the landscape vs. The landscape
| captures the painter. The gardener shapes the garden vs.
| The garden shapes the gardener. The chef creates the dish
| vs. The dish creates the chef.
|
| Maybe that will change your mind.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Nginx/Apache config is not an easy task. I would call
| this an incredibly hard problem to solve. I certainly
| never trust that I've done the config correctly until
| I've tested it carefully. The way this eventually works
| is you tell the AI "I want Nginx config that has these
| properties" and the AI generates config _and tests it
| against Nginx_ until it has the requisite config and it
| 's tested.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| These things have limits, definitely. In almost every
| use-case I've tried, I've bumped up against them.
|
| The trick is to know what they can and can't do, and use
| them where they're useful _enough_.
|
| Someone here on HN quipped that ChatGPT is "isn't
| intelligent" because it couldn't come up with a
| revolutionary new battery chemistry.
|
| Like... what are you expecting? A god?
|
| LLMs are useful when you can validate the output
| yourself. Similarly, they're useful when the output
| doesn't have to be precise but the inputs are English.
|
| For example, they're awesome "filters" for human input as
| measured against human metrics. "Is the following text
| rude? Output YES or NO only?" is very useful and works
| well enough, right now.
|
| They're also useful when you need to iterate to find
| something, or when your search parameters are incredibly
| vague but have a narrow Venn diagram intersection.
|
| I've been using ChatGPT as a replacement for the
| /r/tipofmytongue sub-Reddit. It knows _everything_ well
| enough to be able to interactively find what I 'm looking
| for to an extent that is super-individual-human, and in
| some ways beyond what even a very large collection of
| humans can achieve.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I think you and I are pretty aligned in our thoughts on
| ChatGPT. I think its revolutionary, and I use it every
| day. But I don't consider it generally intelligent, I do
| think that novel thoughts of demonstrable value are the
| real test for that, and a useful invention would convince
| me beyond all doubt.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm really surprised it cannot output a valid NGINX
| config when you give it that amount of context.
|
| Can you share the prompt and your expected output? I'm
| interested to see where it goes wrong.
| nluken wrote:
| So what you're saying is that one piece of software with
| years of labor from a team of engineers can match another
| piece of software with years of labor from a team of
| engineers? You're incorrectly comparing the creation of the
| software with the usage of the software. Yeah, now all you
| need to do is give ChatGPT the file and prompt it for a
| solution, whereas before, you... gave the file to a
| different piece of software and hit a button.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| ChatGPT isn't a complete workflow and doesn't even get
| off the starting blocks for doing what OmniPage Ultimate
| does.
|
| This is like saying you could do CAD via ChatGPT, sure,
| but it's an objectively crappy experience versus an
| actual piece of CAD software with an appropriate UX.
|
| Using different pieces of software isn't a problem for
| most adults.
| emmelaich wrote:
| What effort have you put into learning useful prompts?
|
| I only use the free 3.5+ ChatGPT and it's written some nice
| mapping code and some fun poems for me. Poem subjects ranged
| from rheology to texas hold'em.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| ask it to write like someone else (some established author you
| know) and it gets much better, you need to play with it a bit
| SergeAx wrote:
| I am trying to use ChatGPT for writing code and that code is
| mediocre to bad. I really hope that in couple of years LLMs
| will advance enought to support/refactor what they are
| generating now.
| shapefrog wrote:
| My experience is very similar. I am neither a great writer, not
| a great coder, not a grammar nazi - but still have to make
| major corrections to the output of such tools.
|
| I came to the sad conclusion that perhaps what I write and what
| I do is not as repetitive or as generic as others. Over the
| years when I have had to do more repetition, writing once well
| and ctrl-c / ctrl-v.
| sschueller wrote:
| Totally agree, I also pay for api access and I am still trying
| to figure out how I can benefit from using it when it gives me
| blatantly incorrect commands or wrong answers.
|
| I can see it guide me in the right direction if I have a more
| generic question but even then, if I am not specific enough I
| fear I might go down a rabbit hole that ends no where.
|
| It may be better than google in finding something but when I
| manage to find something on google the information is usually
| correct and not totally wrong. Especially technical problem
| that someone wrote somewhere on a forum regarding a specific
| device.
|
| Finding the things I am looking for on google allows me to
| judge the correctness of the data. When I find answers in what
| is clearly blog spam I know that the info is probably wrong.
| Which ChatGPT I have no idea how it arrived at the conclusion
| it gives me.
|
| A good example is if I want to know the max current rating for
| a chip. If I search google and find the manufacturers
| datasheet, I know the information is correct. If however the
| same information is on stack overflow or some forum I may not
| take it as a fact but more as a guidance.
|
| ChatGPT would be 100 times more useful is it cited a source.
| Like "The max rating of chip ... is ... according to the
| manufactures datasheet dated ... which you can find here ...".
| I guess Bing and Google are trying to do something like that.
| gwd wrote:
| > Totally agree, I also pay for api access and I am still
| trying to figure out how I can benefit from using it when it
| gives me blatantly incorrect commands or wrong answers.
|
| So here's one that saved me a bunch of time:
|
| https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535443
|
| Basically, I knew the package could do what I wanted; I knew
| it was almost certainly in GPT-4's data set; I could do it
| myself, but it would involve searching through all the
| documentation and figuring out the right bits. It just did it
| for me.
|
| Now there were a few minor bugs: It duplicated a buggy error
| message, and at some point later it called a "Subtree" method
| rather than a "Tree" method. But those were a lot easier to
| fix than writing the code from scratch.
|
| Once I had a list of 27 book names I wanted put into
| "canonical order" and in the form of a golang array. I could
| have done it myself but it would have been tedious; I just
| pasted the list into GPT-4, asked it what I wanted, and out
| popped the result.
|
| Here's another place it was helpful recently; I prompted:
|
| "We're hiring a new community manager for the $PROJECT. I'd
| like you to help me develop some interview questions. What
| information to you need about the role to help you develop
| more useful questions?"
|
| The questions it asked me about the role were _really good_ ;
| just answering the questions was quite a useful exercise, and
| I'm sure the resulting document will be a good intro to
| whomever we hire. I wouldn't say the resulting interview
| questions were brilliant, but they were solid, and I used a
| couple of them.
|
| There are times when "the form" is there for a reason; if you
| want something re-written in a specific form, GPT-4 can do a
| good job. I wrote an email recommending something to
| somebody's managers in a different company in a different
| country; then I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked if it had any
| suggestions. It did a fair amount of rewording, of which I
| decided to take about half. In this case, the "polite form"
| is there to avoid offense, and it's exactly what I wanted.
|
| I've also asked it to write some Tweets highlighting some
| specific aspects of an upcoming conference I'm planning. It
| did a good job coming up with the sort of punchy, tweet-
| length messages which seem to do really well.
|
| Connecting it to the context of the article: My day job is
| basically arguing with people on the internet. :-). I do read
| and write all day every day; but I don't write messages where
| diplomacy is critical, nor do I write tweets. Perhaps I could
| get better at those, but I don't think it's worth the effort.
| Am I the worse off for that? Probably not in the way the
| author thinks; I don't think being diplomatically polished
| would change my thinking that much -- much less being able to
| write punchy tweets.
|
| If I started relying on it for the core writing, however, I'd
| certainly be selling myself short.
| sandinmyjoints wrote:
| > There are times when "the form" is there for a reason; if
| you want something re-written in a specific form, GPT-4 can
| do a good job. I wrote an email recommending something to
| somebody's managers in a different company in a different
| country; then I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked if it had
| any suggestions. It did a fair amount of rewording, of
| which I decided to take about half. In this case, the
| "polite form" is there to avoid offense, and it's exactly
| what I wanted.
|
| FWIW, this use case of writing a core message, then using
| an LLM to polish it into, as you put it, the polite form,
| is what I had in mind with Nicer.email, a Gmail extension
| that lets you do exactly what you described with one click,
| rather than copying/pasting/writing prompts. Trying to
| optimize the common case!
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/niceremail-
| easiest...
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| It is probably because you have standard / quality expectations
| and those are above the level of what GPT will give you. Keep
| your standards and quality expectations, I say.
| redox99 wrote:
| Tell it the columns of a certain table. Ask it a GraphQL schema
| for a CRUD for this table. Ask it for a resolver using X
| libraries. Ask it for unit tests using Y libraries.
|
| Couple hours work done in a few minutes.
| conductr wrote:
| It makes me feel like my grandmother who can't use search. She
| can use the browser fine she just lacks any Google Fu and uses
| the most ridiculous search phrases.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I suppose you have to play with it enough to get a feeling of
| what kind of stuff you can trust it with. For most tasks it's
| pretty bad, and this is why, if you just try it for something
| you just thought about without any kind of filter or feedback,
| you're going to be disappointed with the results.
|
| I agree that there is currently way too much hype. I mean GPT4
| is certainly _cool_ and probably going to be useful in some
| limited use cases, but it 's not the new electricity and it's
| not going to take over the world.
| barrkel wrote:
| The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack
| Overflow searches for common tasks.
|
| An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into
| separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them
| back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned
| signed version).
|
| This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf
| munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.
| ChatGPT gave me command lines straight away.
|
| That's what they're good for right now. Beginner / common tasks
| in areas you're not familiar with.
|
| And a further implication, they're great for one man bands,
| generalist roles where simple things need to be done in lots of
| different areas. For specialist deep roles where you have all
| the tacit knowledge in mind already, not nearly as useful.
| haint_ wrote:
| Yes, I mostly use ChatGPT for ffmpeg commands. Just give it
| the description along with the full file path and it will
| output the correct command 99% of the time. Bard can also do
| that (not as well though) but the format of the answer is so
| much worse, the resulting command is not put in a code block
| for example.
| digging wrote:
| > The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing
| Stack Overflow searches for common tasks.
|
| Interesting, because I still find it faster/easier to do a
| quick DDG search, with a click on the first relevant SO post,
| and scrolling straight to the top answer. Asking the same
| question to ChatGPT means waiting for its output, which may
| be objectively a few ms faster but creates the perception of
| slowness ( = irritation). (That is: _waiting_ for X seconds
| is more disruptive than taking several actions for 1.5X
| seconds.)
|
| And then it's definitely going to be much more verbose, which
| is worse 99% of the time. SO is nicely folded - if I want a
| deeper explanation, I look at the answer's comments, or I can
| read other answers, or I can even read the full question.
| ChatGPT doesn't have the same guarantee of such a clear
| information hierarchy in its answers.
| mh- wrote:
| I see these complaints about ChatGPT's verbosity, but this
| is no different than when crafting an effective google
| query was a _skill_ in the early 2000s.
|
| Here's a GPT4 response to a (poorly written) prompt from me
| to answer the parent question and try to satisfy your
| desire for a straight-to-the-point response.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/OmsHaXO.png
|
| _> Using only the command line, answer the following
| question (also, keep it terse, no extraneous narrating
| please): how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the
| command line, and how do you put them back together again_
| digging wrote:
| Ok, but that's not an answer to my actual point, because
| now it's _more_ work than doing a web search for the same
| solution.
| AverageDude wrote:
| For me, they are more miss than hit. I was amazed in the
| initial days but I have bounced back to searching from google
| and reading stackoverflow. It's not just about finding
| solution for your problem, it's also looking at what other
| options are there and comparing them mentally is a really
| good exercise. You learn a lot by that way. The comments and
| not accepted solution are also invaluable.
| revelio wrote:
| By the way, on macos the preview tool can do this. You can
| drag and drop pages between documents using the sidebar and
| reorder them the same way.
| barrkel wrote:
| Cool. I wasn't running macOS though.
| marvin wrote:
| That's interesting and relevant to know if you'd be doing
| this a few times. And it doesn't invalidate your point at
| all, but the time savings of having a machine tell you
| _really fast_ how to do something simple is valuable.
|
| I recently had to do a 'git pull' on 120 repositories, and
| of course we already had an in-house tool to do that. Of
| course I could google a script to do it. But it saved me 5
| minutes to just have ChatGPT write it for me, and I saved
| the overhead of a more thorough context-switch.
|
| Even the guy sitting next to me. "Hey, check this out,
| ChatGPT wrote this script for me and saved me 5 minutes".
| "Oh, but we already have a tool for that". "Yeah, I
| figured. Where is it?" "Ummmmm, I don't know, let me ask
| someone. Frank maybe?" And 5 minutes spent chasing Frank.
| [deleted]
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Hopefully that ad-hoc second script never makes it into
| persistent storage or a repo, otherwise you now have 2 of
| them and Frank will think his part to himself about
| others duplicating things.
| [deleted]
| bombolo wrote:
| > it is a really terrible writer
|
| Most people are terrible writers, and never read anything at
| all. So they have no way to judge if the wordy informationless
| crap gpt wrote is good or not. It's long, thus is good.
| carlmr wrote:
| >It's long, thus is good.
|
| It's also somewhat structured, which puts it at above average
| for writing tasks.
| dr_pardee wrote:
| You are likely not prompting correctly.
| https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/chatgpt-prompt-eng...
|
| GPT-4 Passed the Bar Exam, so I think there's something to it
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389233
| imtringued wrote:
| Everyone knows that using ChatGPT is about signalling your non
| Luddite status so that the police won't go after you.
| dbtc wrote:
| I noticed that you haven't been talking to your AI very much
| lately, what's wrong?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Please drink a verification can of AI marketing kool aid!
| meerita wrote:
| Maybe you're not using the right prompts. But yes, ChatGPT
| needs more creativity input.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I paid for it too, but I'm slowly figuring out its utility.
|
| The trick is to use it for what it's good at.
|
| For example, I had this vague, fuzzy memory of a talk I saw
| online about a decade ago. It was about a database modelling
| paradigm. All I remembered was that the country it was
| developed in was in northern Europe, the methodology was based
| on splitting out columns as individual objects, and that it had
| funny little icons such as diamonds on the edges connecting
| things together in a graph.
|
| Good luck finding _that_ on Google. I had tried and failed. It
| was bugging me, because I needed something like it for my work,
| but for the life of me I couldn 't dig up the reference.
|
| Chat GPT 4 found it just _three_ prompts:
| https://www.anchormodeling.com/
|
| That's insane.
| Doxin wrote:
| I find copilot most useful when writing comments tbh. Whenever
| I'm stuck contemplating how to phrase the rest of a comment it
| comes with a suggestion. It might be a terrible suggestion but
| that's usually enough to get me unstuck. And every now and then
| it's exactly what you need and it saves a bunch of typing :P
| weinzierl wrote:
| There is also a huge difference between code generation (be it
| Copilot or ChatGPT). With Code you still have the compiler that
| rejects the utter nonsense and then you hopefully have tests to
| check if what was generated makes sense.
|
| With prose it's all your manual work again to check. If your
| text is mundane it might be trivial but for anything a pg would
| write I guess an AI is pretty useless in its current state.
| neodypsis wrote:
| I wonder if someone has tried to chain ChatGPT's output with
| static analyzers/compilers/linters in a loop to improve the
| final response.
| blatant303 wrote:
| https://github.com/newhouseb/clownfish
|
| Structural Alignment: Modifying Transformers (like GPT) to
| Follow a JSON Schema
| natch wrote:
| I don't know how you're using it but it seems to step up its
| game if you challenge it more. You can also ask it to refrain
| from dumbing things down.
|
| Copilot wasn't useful for me because I want a back and forth
| conversation to straighten out concepts. With Copilot you don't
| get that and it just sprays out little messes of code.
|
| I use GPT4 like a rubber duck in the sense of "rubber duck
| debugging" and it can be surprisingly supple and creative in
| its solutions... many bad ones, but again, push back on those
| and you get to good ones.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I find copilot and chatgpt constantly useful as just a simple
| way of automating what would otherwise be tedious work. I think
| the most important thought in using them is that as you use
| them more you get a sense if what they are going to be able to
| do and what they aren't, which lets you know when you can use
| them (and therefore use them with more confidence and more
| often)
|
| Especially in refactoring or working with poor codebases. I do
| notice with copilot specifically some people seem to get wildly
| different response times with it, for me it gives suggestions
| almost instantly so as im typing ive got an ongoing suggestion
| I can accept at any time as it gets closer to what I intend or
| ignore if not. A common really useful thing is when I have to
| set up a series of something (recently in a power plant code I
| set up parameters for a certain kind of battery) and then I
| just start writing for each other kind of battery it suggests
| the whole boilerplate for every case, I can go back and fill in
| the details and exceptions.
|
| As for chatgpt its more useful at interpreting existing code. I
| often give it a giant function and say "I want you to split off
| this part and put it into its own thread, get the output with a
| queue" or something like that. Again, output can often need a
| little bit of massaging, but I find it reduces cognitive load
| involved in doing such a task. The trick is to be naturally
| skeptical of the output but appreciate how much of your life is
| spent writing nonsense.
|
| I've also found that learning to put what I want exactly into
| words can be a particular skill that has helped my
| communication. Making sure you know the name and function of
| every tool you use. I think if I had said that to myself before
| I started using these things id have been incredulous, "of
| course I know the name of things" but no, its a different thing
| to be talking about them often, especially when you have an
| idiot savant that takes everything you say too literally. You
| have to learn to be consise and precise
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That's the gist of it.
|
| People want to use LLM hammers like screw drivers and are
| disapointed.
|
| Also, since the quality of the context matters a lot for
| completion, copilot will be way more useful on clean code
| with beautiful variable names and nice structure flows than
| on code-golf snippets. Same got chatgpt: write good prose,
| and it will help you better.
| laserlight wrote:
| > People want to use LLM hammers like screw drivers and are
| disapointed.
|
| IMHO, the reason people do so is because LLMs are
| advertised as such.
| auggierose wrote:
| > (recently in a power plant code I set up parameters for a
| certain kind of battery)
|
| I can't tell any more what is satire and what is not.
| efields wrote:
| I needed to read this. Seeing posts about having gpt "write
| apps from scratch" vs me trying to get it to spit out what I
| want has been tedious. I'm assuming what's not written about is
| the hours of just how tedious this process currently is, and
| how much "from scratch" is your own human brain doing the
| prompt edits bc you have a very good idea of what coding step
| comes next. It's a lot of work, and not faster than me just
| concentrating hard and doing it myself.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I use Copilot with nvim and C-x C-e at my terminal. I can use
| it to build out pipelines in the shell so easily it's crazy.
|
| But in the end, it's just a tool. If it isn't working for you,
| it isn't working for you. For me, I prefer thinking in what
| structure to me as bigger building blocks.
|
| So I prefer vim bindings because I used up teenage time
| learning it. And now I don't think in terms of characters but
| in terms of text-blocks.
|
| I prefer writing Java in IntelliJ and Rust in Clion because I
| don't think in char terms since I can use the built-in refactor
| tools. E.g. I write functions inline and then extract them
| rather than writing them as functions and calling.
|
| Likewise when I'm at the shell I think of pipelines as less
| than pieces. Being an experienced shell user I can usually
| write a parallel pipeline with conditionals and loops correct
| first time verbally with no computer usually.
|
| But my copilot flow is improved even better. I talk to the
| computer in components:
|
| # get all private ip addresses in Alibaba region cn-zhangjiakou
| ips=...prompted text... # ssh to each and check last long line
| ...Prompted text...
|
| It's faster than me and this is great for r-i-search with fzf.
|
| Overall, quite happy. But just a tool.
| nicbou wrote:
| It fills the role of an intern. It can do stuff but the quality
| is inconsistent and the work needs to be verified.
|
| Nonetheless it's better than Google at many things. I find it
| really good at giving paragraph-long introductions to things,
| instead of pages-long blogspam. It's also good at suggesting
| improvements when writing in a second language.
|
| But I don't see what those AI startups see when they want to
| replace all sorts of skilled workers with this bullshit
| generator.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I'm surprised about copilot. I find every day it saves me time
| by "nexting" whatever I'm doing. Whenever it's right about what
| I wanted to write, I save a bit of time.
|
| My go-to example is if conditions. When I start with the first
| case, it almost always figures out the rest of the cases
| correctly.
| javchz wrote:
| I think copilot it's amazing saving time in boilerplate code.
|
| But I can understand why some workflows may be a liability
| rather than help. Similar to chatgpt sometimes allusinate
| code with reserved words that don't exist in the language
| (but exists in others), or uses old code from a deprecated
| api / version of your framework.
|
| In other words, somtimes the cleaning process can take as
| much time, as just writing the code yourself.
| arvinsim wrote:
| I thought Github Copilot was useless until I found out that I
| have to wait for a few seconds for Copilot to display the
| autosuggested code.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| For writing I find it makes an excellent rubber duck. I
| absolutely do not expect it to write long form prose for me,
| but I can explain what I am trying to say and talk to it about
| how I might present that information.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Just to make sure, are you selecting the GPT4 model at the top
| of the conversation in ChatGPT?
| sberens wrote:
| 5 minutes ago I copy pasted a 200 line react component and
| asked ChatGPT to explain why I was getting a certain bug.
| Although it didn't quite get it right, it allowed me to quickly
| identify the cause.
|
| It only needs to save 10 minutes of my time a month for it to
| be worth the $20 - I would estimate it saves hours.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| The point of it isn't to write something like a book from
| scratch. Imagine if I told you "write a book about unicorn", it
| would be trash.
|
| The genius of it is that you could give it the notes of a
| meeting and get it to rewrite them in a different form. Nothing
| else can handle language like that.
| dbtc wrote:
| I think that you are at least using the same one that I am.
|
| "Hype" can also mean marketing.
| animuchan wrote:
| I have similar experience.
|
| The differentiator is, I guess, expectations: I fully expect my
| own code to strike a certain balance of readability /
| optimization / correctness. In this context all but the most
| trivial code suggestions, sloppy as they usually come,
| instantly fall out of place.
|
| On the other hand, there is a group of people (e.g. those
| spamming GitHub pull requests...) who expect the output to be
| kind of visually similar to some code. When they realize that
| the result also sometimes works and gives sane-looking results,
| they are absolutely blown away.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I feel like this is the bias of a very smart, highly educated,
| highly capable person. If you are already an excellent writer
| and coder, can take vast fields of knowledge and blossoming
| ideas and spit them out onto paper in skilled form with minimal
| anxiety, GPT probably does very little for you. Maybe you could
| see if you were missing something very obvious and average.
|
| I read for probably 8-12 hours a day. I write every day. I
| think every day. I've been doing this for decades. GPT has been
| like a talking dog. It's an insane achievement, but he's not
| the worlds best conversationalist.
|
| But to be 17 again and struggling all night to write a three
| page paper filled with unoriginal ideas, it would have been a
| game changer back then.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I think the thing to remember is that there are far more
| people like me than you. People who are poor writers or
| middling thinkers outside of specific domains.
|
| I agree that GPT isn't much of a conversationalist. But it is
| an exceptionally good tool some of us. It has already proved
| invaluable for me in helping diagnose a medical issue with a
| family member -- one that escaped several ICU doctors and
| nurses. And a couple of weeks ago helped me fix an issue with
| my car.
|
| A good analogy might be a calculator. There are some people
| who can do calculations in their heads near instantly. And
| some of these people could do arithmetic of numbers too large
| to be represented by calculators even. But for most of us,
| calculators were immensely useful.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| > I read for probably 8-12 hours a day
|
| Jealous. What's your job?
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| May I ask - what job do you do that you read 8-12 hours a
| day?
| dougmwne wrote:
| I'm an enterprise architect. I've got a pretty wide set of
| projects I need to keep up to date on, a lot of industry
| developments and just following general tech trends. Lots
| of my role focuses on documenting our designs and projects.
| lifeonlars wrote:
| But the only purpose of writing that paper is for you to
| practice doing research, thinking and writing. Most people
| who write deep, thought-provoking work started out doing
| assignments like that. What could possibly be the point of
| getting a computer program to do it for you?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| That you never have to learn how to do it yourself.
| greggyb wrote:
| I feel similarly to how you have described.
|
| My worry is the innovator's dilemma. Given a few generations
| (software generations, not human) of continuing exponential
| improvement in capability of LLMs (or whatever replaces
| them), I worry that those who have spent much more time
| learning to co-work with a GPT-alike (or replacement) will
| move to the fore.
| noobermin wrote:
| The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that
| learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that
| is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never
| develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and
| untalented will only grow.
| dboreham wrote:
| I think we went through this with calculators in the 1970s.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| You are wrong.
|
| LLMs are the single biggest advance in mass learning since
| the printed book. They are infinitely patient and can be
| reprogrammed, or repurposed with three sentences. Debate
| partner, editor, quiz master, literally anything. Every new
| tool can be _abused_ , of course we can't structure
| education the same, but we should always be re-evaluating
| our methods and techniques in the face of new technology
| and knowledge.
|
| I am dreaming when physics students can have an electronics
| TA that can projection map over a breadboard to help kids
| understand and debug their circuits. For 70% of physics
| undergrads, hands on electronics classes are the hardest
| classes they took.
| noduerme wrote:
| Which is worse, having no debate partner, editor, or quiz
| master? Or a debate partner who insists they're right
| when they're wrong, an editor who injects false
| references and made-up citations, and a quiz master whose
| accuracy is essentially random?
| donkeyd wrote:
| I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up
| that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end
| there's just something else people spend time on. My
| generation built their own PC's, struggled to install
| Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping
| none of the steps failed, our internet connection made
| sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way.
|
| The generation after me is hardly able to reset their
| iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help.
| Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in
| their phones, readily available video editing software and
| processing power to create content like no generation has
| ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people
| around the globe while doing it and some build incredible
| wealth at the same time.
|
| My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets
| their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded
| together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority
| of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| > _They are able to entertain millions of people around
| the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth
| at the same time._
|
| I think you meant _hoard_ incredible wealth?
|
| There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually
| create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best
| seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides
| value to millions of readers, it also _removes_ value in
| the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what
| to do with your own time.
|
| Other alternatives have more potential. Educational
| content could lift some people out of incompetence and
| help _them_ build actual wealth (say a very good
| programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software
| could also create wealth, even more so if it 's Free (and
| free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care
| not to deplete our resources or burning up our
| planet...).
|
| We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously
| misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they
| _extract_ money. Hopefully this money is actually earned
| in proportion to the value they actually injected into
| society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair
| and square). But never forget that the people who "make"
| the most money generally do so by taking it from other
| people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders... who get
| most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from
| what they _own_.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| What makes a chair more valuable to society than
| entertainment?
| squirtlebonflow wrote:
| You can't rest your legs on an entertainment
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| I did not say it was.
| joelfried wrote:
| Many of us have the ability to entertain ourselves
| entirely within our own minds on the regular. None of us
| can snap our fingers and summon a chair from nothingness.
|
| Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?
| liber8 wrote:
| If people do not "make" money (i.e. create value), how do
| you explain the increase in the standard of living over
| the last 100 years?
| mandmandam wrote:
| > how do you explain the increase in the standard of
| living over the last 100 years?
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
|
| That _will_ catch up to us. It already has, in many parts
| of the world, and it 's not looking like it'll get better
| soon.
|
| And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid
| the price.
|
| > The contemporary rate of extinction of species is
| estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the
| background extinction rate, the historically typical rate
| of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the
| planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to
| 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass
| extinctions in the history of Earth.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
|
| The ecocide which we've inflicted on the planet for the
| last 100 years will some day be seen for what it _is_ -
| an atrocity.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
|
| All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in
| how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is
| incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of
| reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion
| humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| You only see the curves go upward. But if you look very
| detailed, you see that a plateau is coming. A downward
| trend will follow.
|
| When the going gets tough...
|
| About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds
| years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of
| food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and
| kings.
|
| Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too
| much food than of too little.
|
| My point is, you need to take a step back and look from a
| bit more distance to see the real trend. Things are bad
| now, because we are at a maximum.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| > _" make" money (i.e. create value)_
|
| See, the harmful confusion right there.
|
| Making money and creating value are two separate things.
| There are people who create value without receiving any
| money in return. And there are people who receive an
| obscene amount of money while creating very little value
| -- and sometimes destroying more value than they create.
|
| Understanding that the two are separate is the only way
| you can question the legitimacy of our richest people.
| I'll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals
| routinely praise as geniuses, are very, _very_ unlikely
| to produce as much value as the money they actually
| receive.
|
| If you want to even stand a _chance_ at critically
| looking at our current economic system, you absolutely
| need to properly separate the notions of "making money"
| and "creating value".
| DiffEq wrote:
| I think your viewpoint stems in a belief that there is
| only so much money to go around. Your view about a
| landlord taking money is kind of a micro view. I am a
| landlord...the house I rent I actually built. It is an
| asset that people are willing to give me money to use for
| a while...they get a place to live...IF I could not have
| ever rented it out I would have never built it...it would
| be a worthless piece of ground that nobody would want to
| live on...this is how the world works...when I die, I
| will give it to my son...he will rent it out. Are you
| saying that he also would be "taking" money from people?
| TFYS wrote:
| So if you didn't build the house, no one would've and
| people would live on the streets? No, people need a place
| to stay and the house would get built even if renting was
| impossible. We would just figure out different ways to
| pool money to build houses. House prices would also come
| down if wealthy people couldn't store their money into
| land.
| noobermin wrote:
| Just a thought, why is it ok these skills were lost? You
| never really said whether it was good or bad, just that
| it happened.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I would agree. At least for some people. The act of trying
| to code something and failing and then failing again before
| I finally get it right is what I enjoy about coding.
| Sitting down to write code and it just works each and every
| time is boring. It's like writing boiler plate UI code.
| But... other people want to succeed quickly so they can
| show people they succeeded quickly. For them, ChatGPT is
| like a super power.
|
| Edit: I've had conversations with people who write. We have
| come to an agreement that there are writers who love the
| process of writing. They want to BE writers. Then there are
| people who want to HAVE BEEN a writer. ChatGPT was meant
| for these people.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| I recall a study whose result said that beginners improve
| faster when they're told the solutions right away, and
| experts improve faster when they're given time to figure
| things on their own.
|
| Struggling as a learning tool is important, but there's a
| good chance the fastest path to expertise is to start with
| examples of how to do it, and delay that struggle a bit.
|
| What you don't want is to keep the crutch forever and
| _never_ struggle. That would be a sure path to stagnation.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| It would be trivial to configure multiple LLMs to track a
| student's progress in real time and ensure the optimal
| difficulty gradient for maximum learning. It could even
| detect when you should go outside and play.
|
| The rejection of LLMs for education by otherwise
| intelligent people is disheartening.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Indeed I believe the LLMs are an excellent tool to
| education. Especially because you can ask it questions
| until you understand.
|
| Also, some things are not need to be known anymore, like
| phone numbers or the inner working of a car. There are
| plenty of things to learn even if automation made some of
| knowledge beneign.
| didericis wrote:
| It will rob people going through the motions and cheating
| from actually learning. The people who most benefit from
| education have never been the people just going through the
| motions and have at least some intrinsic motivation to
| actually learn.
| albrewer wrote:
| > The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that
| learning
|
| I disagree with this take. My personal anecdote is that I
| am far, far better at mental math than I was in high school
| because I ended up in a job where doing a lot of ad-hoc
| calculations was just a day-to-day thing. I started out
| using a calculator, but eventually got to where I didn't
| need it most of the time just through sheer repetition.
|
| I think AI tools (the kind people are worried about right
| now, anyway) will be used in a similar fashion to
| calculators. After learning the basics, it will be a tool
| taught as an assist for streaming ideas into and getting
| out a well-formatted and coherent output. People who write
| a lot will eventually find the hassle of using the tool to
| be more trouble than it's worth. People who don't will
| still know how to use it to and know how to recognize when
| the output doesn't make any sense.
| blagie wrote:
| I would add: And doing the same thing over and over.
|
| I find GPT very useful in that I can quickly become mediocre
| in any domain. Need a legal filing? I can get a good-enough
| legal filing. Need some code in a framework I've never used?
| I can get it instantly. Need something written in the
| language of some esoteric field of science? I can get that
| instantly from a bullet point list.
|
| It doesn't do the hard parts well: What's being written, and
| how it's structured. That's where I fit back in.
| jononomo wrote:
| You read for 8-12 hours per day? I guess you get paid to
| read? What do you spend 8-12 hours per day reading?
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Slack, email, Jira, StackOverflow?
| whinenot wrote:
| hacker news, obviously
| vagab0nd wrote:
| No offense but you are almost certainly using it wrong.
| Consider the following:
|
| 1. Use it when you know how to do something but don't want to.
|
| 2. Use it when you don't know something, _and_ don 't know how
| to find the answer.
|
| 3. Never trust. Verify.
|
| Clearly, this means the examples that impress others will often
| not impress you.
| d23 wrote:
| It's very difficult for me to wrap my head around people that
| aren't blown away by both this and generative image AIs, and
| I tend to be in the skeptical side when it comes to fancy
| tech adoption.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The people who are least impressed by GPT seem to be the
| ones who've never tried to build anything similar, even a
| text adventure game.
|
| Industry outsiders also tend to take ML for granted, even
| when the 'experts' can see it's completely inappropriate.
| (My GF, a few years ago: "Why do we still need judges and
| juries? Can't computers judge cases and author legal
| opinions?" Me, at the time: "LOL, no, that would be
| ridiculous, and here's why..." Me, today: "Uh, about that
| argument we were having...")
| jonahx wrote:
| It is astonishing, even more so that some in this camp are
| smart people.
|
| I chalk it up to "hype aversion" -- an internal heuristic
| that anything with so much hype around it must be bullshit.
| For some, there might also be good old resistance to
| change, to the unknown consequences of all these
| developments.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| How is #3 supposed to work when #2 applies?
|
| Especially when folks are already out there LLM-generating
| SEO-spam, so even "well the answer also came up in a Google
| search" isn't a sign of accuracy.
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Example: I want to buy some construction material that I've
| seen somewhere. I don't know what to search for since I
| don't know the term. Prior to LLM, the only way was to ask
| someone familiar with it, e.g. a plumber. Now I can ask
| GPT. And then I just do a quick image search to verify.
|
| This doesn't always work, as some stuff is harder to
| verify. But what's valuable to me is it allows me to ask a
| vague question and have follow-ups. I usually learn just by
| having the conversation.
| piokoch wrote:
| This is so not true... For the whole Middle Ages people rarely
| could write, but still there were lawyers (yes, lawyers who could
| not write), doctors, scientists, poets, merchants, mighty and
| clever kings (yes, there were kings who could not write).
|
| Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European
| civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like
| three-field system, ships building technology and so on), also we
| have got well developed philosophy - especially scientific
| methods of reasoning and logic, that were cornerstone of all
| later science development.
|
| How it was possible without writing?
|
| Middle Ages life was simply not writing/visual oriented, it was
| based on speaking and listening and in no way people lost ability
| to think because of that. For instance PhD thesis was presented
| as a lecture followed by discussion.
|
| When people wanted to "sign" something they were exchanging or
| giving some symbolic item (like a ring) and that's all. That's
| why various saints relics were so popular then, they were
| symbolizing people's affection, etc. Or people were just signing,
| as most people could write their names even though they could not
| write as we understand it today - despite many believes people in
| Middle Ages were quite educated, including "Third Estate", that
| is "the Peasantry", more, typically they were going to the same
| schools as rich people kids, the only difference was that rich
| people had to pay for the school.
|
| I really recommend "Lumiere du Moyen Age" ("Those Terrible Middle
| Ages!: Debunking the Myths") by Regine Pernoud, it nicely
| describes a really rich, open and dynamic culture that didn't
| really need writing.
| dalbasal wrote:
| "Middle Age" Europe is poorly named. It's based on an idea that
| ancient europe is Greece and Rome. Then, dark/middle ages. Then
| Renaissance and modernity.
|
| The problem is geography. France, Britain, Germany and such
| were never part of the ancient world. Rome had colonies there.
| But, these were (relatively) short lived outposts of
| civilisation. Civilisation was never a dominant culture in non-
| Mediterranean "Europe."
|
| In the East, civilisation existed for thousands of years before
| Rome. They always had roads, kingdoms, bureaucracy,
| restaurants, banks and such. Even in dark ages, after
| collapse... these were collapsed _civilisations_. They didn 't
| revert to tribal, oral societies.
|
| The european Renaissance (excl Italy) was never a Renaissance.
| It's the actual birth of civilisation in europe. It's the first
| time writing became a major thing.
| n4r9 wrote:
| That's interesting but not sure it's relevant to the linked
| Tweet.
| [deleted]
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The moyen age had plenty of writing, it's just that most of it
| was religious writing: hymns and saints' and martyrs' lives,
| and treatises on the soul and so on. You have most likely seen
| the beautiful illustrated manuscripts produced by the monks in
| monasteries all over Europe.
|
| The other thing that I have noticed is that a great deal of the
| art from the time is wonky and out of proportion. I was
| recently at the Musee Cluny in Paris and it was really striking
| how much of the art in there is pretty badly made, as if by
| very inept creators. La Dame a la licorne stands out in part
| because it's not that badly made (though mainly because it's an
| epic multi-piece tapestry that you'll never see the like of
| anywhere else). I also remember a statue of a saint whose
| creator was named (I don't remember the name but it was
| something like "Le maitre de St. Joseph" or perhaps he had the
| name of a city) and that was obviously head and shoulders above
| everything else around it in terms of craftsmanship, which had
| an almost modern quality.
|
| Then I went to the Louvre and I noticed again how the art
| before and after the middle ages very clearly lacks this shoddy
| and haphazard quality of European middle ages art. The Greeks
| in particular practically worshipped proportion, and the
| Italian masters would not be caught dead painting an unbalanced
| figure, by the looks of it. But also Egyptians and Assyro-
| Babylonians, and all the earlier cultures seemed to take well-
| crafted art pretty seriously (the bad artists were probably
| flayed alive early on ... brrr).
|
| So something definitely happened in the middle ages that did
| not do good to art and culture. Whether it had any impact in
| everyday life, the ability of people to produce food, build
| houses, etc, I don't know. There's certainly plenty of
| architecture that's survived from that time, so clearly not
| everything deteriorated.
|
| Btw, I think it was the same in the Eastern middle ages too.
| You can see slap-dash ecclesiastical icons in Byzantine
| churches of the time. And when you visit Ravenna, and see the
| mosaics in St Vitale (which are from the very early middle
| ages), it is clear that something was lost in the ensuing
| years.
|
| Perhaps we're about to sink into a new "dark age" (regardless
| of how "dark" was the original "dark ages"). Maybe we'll get
| lucky this time too, and the light will not be forever
| extinguished.
| INGELRII wrote:
| You understood the argument "When you lose the ability to
| write, you also lose some of your ability to think." very
| literally. Too literally.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I have the feeling this is missing on what people want ChatGPT to
| do for them.
|
| They're still communicating their exact thoughts to the prompt,
| and will adjust to get exactly something matching their intent.
|
| To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional
| sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value
| writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a
| very specific intent: "I quit". The rest is to them useless
| decorum that can be handled by a random word generator.
|
| I kinda hope that ChatGPT will push people to actually write
| shorter and more to the point. If a bot can understand their
| message in 40 words, why send their fellow humans 400 words of
| useless prose ?
| notahacker wrote:
| > To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional
| sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who
| value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still
| expressing a very specific intent: "I quit".
|
| But they're _not_ expressing other very specific intents like
| going out of their way to assure the team that the new
| opportunity was unmissable or pointedly thanking some people
| but not others or being deliberately terse because frankly the
| whole experience was a bit shit. (and might if they 're not
| careful be expressing particular intents they specifically _don
| 't_ wish to convey)
|
| And ChatGPT itself generally gives the most verbose answer
| possible, because people training it reward verbose and
| somewhat ambiguous responses more than _clear but not quite
| right_ answers, so I suspect its impact on prose norms will be
| the exact opposite...
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think that's really the crux of it.
|
| We currently require people to express the full extent of
| their intentions. Not writing that you feel so sorry for your
| colleagues your are leaving in the dust is a faux pas.
| ChatGPT fills that gap of generating random acceptable
| feelings, where you might either not care, or do not want to
| express your actual ones.
|
| I'd argue adding people to thank or sneaky attacks to the
| ones you hate wouldn't add much to the prompt when requesting
| the letter to the bot.
|
| The joke of course will be that progressively, I'd expect
| we'll have people sending the bot a prompt, have it converted
| into verbiage, and the receiving end tl;dr it in the same bot
| to get basically the initial prompt.
| [deleted]
| jasoneckert wrote:
| As an educator, I wholeheartedly agree with the author's points.
| The act of writing our thoughts allows us to make connections
| between concepts in our mind that we wouldn't otherwise make,
| often reorganizing and assimilating existing concepts in the
| process. Similarly, rewriting written notes (e.g., from a class)
| is an incredibly effective study technique.
|
| Writing blogs, detailed emails, and articles also provides these
| same benefits. If we rely on others or AI to write them, we lose
| this learning benefit.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Writing isn't learning. Learning is learning. Writing a blog
| post about something is a good way to learn about it, but the
| learning doesn't come directly from the writing. Needing to
| write it just inspired you to learn, there are other ways.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Common sense packaged as wise sounding sentences.
| ricardo_nh wrote:
| I think that this question is also an existential one: how do we
| want to live our lives? besides the scientific/philosophical
| discussion about memory and writing, which is fascinating by
| itself, the question for me is what kind of human beings do we
| want to be? do we want to let AI's write down everything for us
| or do we want to leave a mark, leave OUR mark in the world and
| actually do the things ourselves? also, if we think of every
| activity as a chore, then we are only looking at its results. but
| there is also the satisfaction of doing the activity. this view
| of AI's as a replacement for everything is just the climax of the
| fantasy of the modern hedonist society addicted to instant
| gratification.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| This reminded me of a recent post of mine:
|
| Control is an illusion.
|
| But that also means that illusions can be used to gain at least
| some (sense of] control. See that mismatched bracket? I did
| that, despite the Universe screaming with a thousand voices
| that I shouldn't.
|
| This text was written by a humane life form. #NoAI
| theGnuMe wrote:
| PG jumps the shark.
| tlogan wrote:
| This is not correct and I cannot disagree more.
|
| Sadly, in our society, smart people were not successful as they
| could due to the prominence of written communication (I call it
| obsession with fluffy writing). This is because alternative modes
| of conveying knowledge and ideas, such as mathematics or visual
| diagrams like mind maps, may not be comprehended as easily as
| writing.
|
| We need also to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that English
| written by non native speakers often face unwarranted mistrust.
|
| This is where ChatGPT steps in, serving as a great equalizer.
|
| Math is the core skill required for critical thinking and
| problem-solving. Not writing.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Given premises
|
| P1. You use AI to write
|
| P2. You lose ability to think
|
| The argument seems to be: P1 -> P2
|
| I would like to point out the reverse direction is far more
| likely as a causal direction: P2 -> P1
| [deleted]
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Alternate model:
|
| Iterative refinement with an AI will make you think better by
| shortening the feedback loop.
|
| The AI will force you to clarify your points because, if not, you
| will see it has meandered into the weeds when writing based on
| your prompt.
|
| And since you have not authored the prompt directly, you will
| have to critically read it to validate fidelity to your view
| point.
|
| This will help you build the skill of critical assessment as well
| as how to concisely specify your ideas.
| https443 wrote:
| Wait, didn't Paul Graham leave twitter?
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| For about two weeks, then right back to tweeting 5x/day. Just
| like most who "left twitter" in the past year.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| You won't lose the ability to write when you get a fountain pen
| crocowhile wrote:
| [reference needed]
| scientist9113 wrote:
| When discussing writing as a form of thinking, I think it is
| unlikely that ChatGPT will replace this process. In fact, ChatGPT
| could potentially enhance it, as thinking through writing
| primarily involves refining ideas, clarifying concepts, and
| ensuring they are well-considered and robust. ChatGPT offers
| well-organized summaries of established facts and information,
| thereby aiding in the clarification of ideas.
| dw-im-here wrote:
| Many times when I am asked to write something it's not so that I
| may think but so that others may not. If this is the case I have
| no problem serving them some AI generated unthoughts
| yawnxyz wrote:
| paulg equates "writing" with "writing for a public audience for
| exposure bucks".
|
| He probably feels like writing inwardly for the purpose of
| thinking for yourself, e.g. in your own notes and notebooks,
| isn't really writing at all.
|
| At least, I suspect he's kind of person who treats this kind of
| writing as nonsense. But writing for yourself, in your own
| shorthand, I think makes you faster and better at thinking than
| writing clearly for the public. Of course, using an LLM to write
| for yourself like this makes no sense.
|
| Most writing for others isn't really writing to think. It's to
| please others and fit in and make sure people aren't mad because
| your one-word email reply ("no.") would be misinterpreted.
| criddell wrote:
| He's on Twitter a lot. I wonder what he would have to say about
| time and words spent tweeting?
| voidhorse wrote:
| I don't typically agree with pg, but I think he's right here. I
| was thinking about this topic yesterday.
|
| I've already seen people start using using these tools to help
| them craft messages (email, text) _to family members and
| friends_. Do we really inhabit a world in which the average
| person is that creatively bankrupt and lazy that we 'll start
| mediating our intimate social relationships through these tools?
| It's pretty pathetic.
|
| The outliers who are able to produce truly novel styles that the
| models can't replicate yet (since they aren't in the dataset yet)
| are going to increase in value 10000x as soon as model produced
| language becomes the norm.
| nocoiner wrote:
| My question is though, how many of these people who are
| supposedly offloading the mental energy of writing onto ChatGPT
| are good writers in the first place? And are they really
| delegating that much substantive thought?
|
| I think the pg comment presupposes that most people currently
| know _how_ to write, and I just don't think that's the case, at
| all. At least not to the extent that doing less writing (or
| using an AI) will dramatically reshape their modes of thought
| (much less the trajectory of human thought as a whole).
|
| Also, I'm not saying that written communication is the be-all,
| end-all of human intellect - I think I'm a fairly good writer
| (used to be better, though) but a fairly poor verbal
| communicator. I know lots of people who are great verbal
| communicators but not-great not-terrible writers. Some people
| are great at both, and some people aren't good at either. But
| it's all part of the mix of original human thought.
|
| I guess when we get to the stage that a 21st century Orwell is
| using AI to write his books, then I'll worry that we're
| stunting human potential, but until then it just doesn't seem
| to me like much original thought it getting displaced here.
| Yet, anyway.
| febeling wrote:
| The thought in the last paragraph resonates. Not sure which
| shape it will take, but the extreme inflation of reasonable and
| orderly text that the models produce will make it lose all its
| value. It might be an opportunity for the better, in the end.
| Maybe quirkiness, authenticity, and personality will see a
| revival.
|
| It might be better, because the long-winding and formulaic text
| from the models is something also only models can read well :)
| jxramos wrote:
| "If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot
| think well, others will do your thinking for you." -- Oscar Wilde
|
| The above quote may be apocryphal (I tried to source it once but
| only found secondary sources) but I shared it at work slack when
| chatGPT had a lot of action with our tea, chats. Seemed quite
| fitting much like a pilot rotting their flying skills leaning on
| the autopilot too heavily. You get good at what you do or so the
| saying goes.
| discreteevent wrote:
| "The spectator is a dying animal" - Jim Morrison
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| > "[...] others will do your thinking for you." -- Oscar Wilde
|
| Ironic.
| pyrale wrote:
| I would prefer this kind of ideas floated by reputable
| neuroscientists backed by peer-reviewed papers rather than a dev
| turned investor with a history of falling for theories that are
| more intellectually appealing than proven.
|
| As it is, this tweet series looks so much like one of the many
| scares we got earlier: RPGs loosen moral norms, videogames make
| you violent, television cartoons make children less smart, etc.
| New edition: using chatGPT lessens your ability yo think!
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| In general, taking the easy route stiffs development. Relying on
| AI to speak for you is a major crutch.
|
| "The Art of the Essay"[0] describes the process of formalizing
| thoughts and ideas into structured arguments and logically
| unfolding them as a result of trying to put them in writing.
|
| This also dovetails into the notion that communication mediums
| can support only certain information. "The medium is the message"
| [1] is the phrase coined for this idea.
|
| [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
| truculent wrote:
| And yet pg is still here, writing
| INGELRII wrote:
| I completely agree with PG.
|
| Writing is not just communication with others, or writing down
| information for later.
|
| Writing is not just writing down something that already exists in
| the mind.
|
| Writing is a part of thinking process. You talk to yourself few
| seconds or minutes later. It's back-and-forth. Marshaling
| thoughts and ideas, reading them back, reflecting, to be
| processed then writing them down again.
|
| Writing is process of improving thoughts, generating new thoughts
| and ideas, making thoughts clearer for yourself.
| discreteevent wrote:
| He is also right about laziness. The tragedy might be that some
| people will never be challenged to write and so they will never
| develop the potential that they might have. I would not have
| bothered to make the effort to write somewhat clearly if I had
| not been criticized for sloppy writing. And, like you say,
| writing is thinking - so it's a lot more important than the
| words that end up on the page.
| simonw wrote:
| I'm a big fan of writing as a crucial skill for thinking.
|
| But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this
| will actually play out the way people think.
|
| Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to
| learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or
| similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a
| pretty big obstacle to getting started.
|
| Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to
| develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit.
|
| I wonder if the act of sweating over word choice and spelling and
| grammar in order to explore your ideas might turn out to work in
| a similar way?
|
| Maybe we'll find out that people who didn't spend years
| developing their fundamental writing skills will be able to excel
| in a new, LLM-assissted world where ability to write well is no
| longer a pre-requisite to using writing to explore, develop and
| share their ideas.
| nickagliano wrote:
| Yes! Thank you Simon. Takes like this will make this
| conversation a lot more well-rounded.
|
| Of course writing is important. Writing free-hand on paper is
| beautiful. But so are the ideas, and the organization of the
| writing, and the style, and the plot and the characters.
|
| Of course playing instruments is important, but I'm reminded of
| the Rick Rubin interview where he talks about how he's not a
| musician, and he doesn't know how to do any real technical
| music production.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to
| develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun
| bit.
|
| It might just be me, but I find it weird that one would
| consider the act of actually _playing_ music not to be
| precisely the fun bit.
| britzkopf wrote:
| Some might even say that an analysis of the compositions by
| those who took up music writing _after_ the advent of
| Garageband etc. proves the harm of such tools.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| He's right though. Working in an industry that uses a lot of NLP,
| its funny to me that people are also so excited about generative
| LLM.
|
| Soon we won't have to read or write! It will be AI expanding
| content and producing sentences for other AI to condense back
| down.
|
| Less words good, me like nice computer talk for me
| idlewords wrote:
| Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen Keller
| offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway show.
| isanjay wrote:
| Good or bad?
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen
| Keller offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway
| show.
|
| I think you can dunk on someone's writing without ableism.
| (Observing that a blind and deaf person isn't likely to enjoy a
| Broadway show isn't necessarily ableist, but gratuitously
| bringing them into a discussion that doesn't involve blindness,
| deafness, or Broadway shows is.)
| [deleted]
| dS0rrow wrote:
| > Really, has there been a backlash against me? I hadn't
| noticed any change. I actually worry a lot that as I get
| "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff
| than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens
| to a lot of people, and I would _really_ like to avoid it.
|
| http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html
| jbj wrote:
| Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling
| control, and successively suggestive typing.
|
| writing a sentence while making it, I feel too much the words are
| being forced on me.
|
| Where as it can be a great tool, I like to exercise my mind, the
| same reason I calculated all Matrix determinants with pen and
| paper when I started my engineering degree.
|
| Some people may go to the gym and work out, but I am like to just
| squeese in exercise within my bicyle commute.
|
| Sometimes there may be greater projects requiring more heavy
| tech, but for housekeeping I honestly dont mind harvesting the
| synergies of planning and doing things by myself.
| rdparedes wrote:
| > Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling
| control
|
| I can see that
| jbj wrote:
| no pun intended, actual typo caught in the wild ;)
| usgroup wrote:
| I've made the point before that I don't even use a spell checker
| so there is a deep sense in which I agree with this, but it is
| tempered by the recognition that I'm hardly the sharpest tool in
| the box and I get great purchase from my doodles, scribbles and
| other "outsourced" mental facilities.
|
| I think that for most of us, the mental outsourcing optimum which
| makes you most capable is probably not the one which maximally
| enhances and preserves the capacities you have.
| benreesman wrote:
| Miss the essays pg, when you lose the ability to blog, you gain
| the obligation to tweet.
| wnolens wrote:
| I agree in the same sense that by using a calculator you lose the
| ability to think quantitatively.
|
| We build tools and move up the stack. Were not going to lose the
| ability to think. The types of thinking we do change to better
| serve our needs. Needs change.
| metacircu1ar wrote:
| A couple of good posts on this topic, from Jorge Manrubia of
| 37signals:
|
| https://world.hey.com/jorge/writing-for-yourself-c25a5a13
|
| https://world.hey.com/jorge/writing-is-thinking-95dee8cb
| nologic01 wrote:
| > Most people hate to write as much as they hate math.
|
| This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience
| and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both
| individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic
| modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully
| different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have
| not discovered them all.
|
| Ancient bards were learning and reciting day-long epic poems by
| just hearing them. There are still cultures that train themselves
| to long recitations of text. I don't even know what that might
| feel like to have such a long sequence readily available in your
| brain.
|
| But training our brains requires massive energy. Depending on
| individual and social characteristics people will stop training
| their brains when the going gets tough. Math is a great example.
| You could argue that chatGPT has a job because our public
| information repositories are so littered with low-density
| information (unstructured textual information) that its
| impossible to navigate. Some professions would go to great
| textual length to describe in an ambiguous and limited way
| something that can be described concisely with an equation.
|
| Superficially at least, the impact of digital assistive tech is
| that we are being collectively dumbed down (just like we are
| becoming obese through the ready availability of massive amounts
| of fatty foods). Its a multi-pronged process: Before chatGPT
| decimated our writing skills, visual dissemination of information
| (which conveys less meaning but requires no training) has taken
| over like a raging wildfire. E.g., tiktok versus twitter.
| smolder wrote:
| > (just like we are becoming obese through the ready
| availability of massive amounts of fatty foods)
|
| Not to derail, but: fat in food isn't what leads to fat people.
| As far as diet, the culprit is too many calories, and
| particularly foods which lead people to overconsume calories
| for various reasons.
| dsign wrote:
| The small silver lining is that there are arguably more people
| who have access to literature, and who like to read, write, and
| do math, because generally those things have become more
| accessible to the wider world.
|
| But when the going gets really tough, those people may try to
| band together and secede[^1].
|
| One thing I have to add though, as somebody who loves to write,
| is that I couldn't do it without our modern digital tools.
| Because I'm not a native speaker, I tend to bungle prepositions
| and semantics, and it's only with great effort and many Google
| searches and ChatGPTs and grammar checkers that I dare to
| afflict[^2] the world with my words.
|
| [^1]: I found this idea in "Homo Deus," blame Dr. Harari!
|
| [^2]: "Afflict": To the point, I used thesaurus.com here to
| find a suitable synonym of "torment".
| nologic01 wrote:
| Digitization is definitely enormously empowering in
| principle. You could indeed imagine that it might enable a
| sub-culture of super-literate people. But in practice after
| 50 years of tech hyperventilation the only nuance we've added
| to Phoenician script is... emoji.
|
| Amazing things will come, but not as fast as we might like
| them. The digital space is gigantic but we are exploring it
| at a snail's pace. The reason is not very different from the
| barriers linked to writing and math: people need to train
| their brains to code and it doesn't come cheap or easy.
|
| Imagine if 8 billion people would actually be able to code.
| Would there be room for "big tech"? The digital conversation
| might be very different.
|
| Right now we are roughly (in digital age chronology) circa
| 3000 BC, the dawn of organized digital agriculture. A few
| digital priests have invented cuneiform and in cahoots with
| the prevailing power structures are using it to tax and
| oppress the digitally illiterate masses.
| janandonly wrote:
| When early books began to include this new thing called an
| "index" scholars decried that people could now simply look-up the
| fact they were looking for without reading and understanding the
| context[1].
|
| Whether the context here is the whole book or the whole chapter,
| I'm not sure off. But again, there is noting new under the
| sun[2].
|
| [1] https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543
|
| [2]
| https://www.jw.org/finder?wtlocale=E&pub=Rbi8&srctype=wol&bi...
| amadvance wrote:
| I say the same thing to software architects who no longer write
| code. After some time, you start to lose your skills.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| There are multiple ways to interpret this, as evidenced by the
| diversity of comments here; prejudice was the first thing that
| came to mind for me. Dyslexia is a condition that makes writing
| arduous due to such challenges as visual confusion between
| symbols, lack of memory for unusual spellings and difficulty
| comprehending abstract concepts from words alone. It's not merely
| a matter of preference to 'hate' writing. To those who have
| dyslexia, Large Language Models like ChatGPT could be a huge
| relief: might this finally be the spell-checker able to
| intelligently correct those misspellings which are so extreme
| that even non-dyslexic people might stumble on?
|
| "When you lose the ability to speak, you also lose some of your
| ability to think."
|
| "When you lose the ability to dance, you also lose some of your
| ability to think."
|
| "When you lose the ability to see, you also lose some of your
| ability to think."
|
| I hope these variations illustrate that writing unlocks only one
| way of thinking, and to some it's no great loss to replace it!
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Can definitely confirm. Someone close to me is very smart but
| dyslexic, and ChatGPT had been a godsend - almost like a
| prosthetic limb.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| What is interesting to me is that thought leaders are always
| optimising for some X - be it productivity, some higher good, low
| poverty, efficiency etc.
|
| But two things humanity, as a whole, consistently optimises for
| is *short-term survival* and *lesser day-to-day friction*.
|
| ChatGPT/AI seems to be just another friction optimisation, and
| truth is, we don't know if this optimisation leads us to the
| world that is anywhere close to 'pretty' by modern standards.
| People from pre-industrial world would be shocked to see modern
| people enjoying all the air and noise pollution, but there is no
| way to avoid falling into such local optimum, because we do not
| optimise for clean air or quality of life, only for lower
| friction and survival.
|
| This seems to put us randomly into some local optimums all the
| time, until unsolved problems pile up so high that they start
| endangering our survival - rinse and repeat.
|
| What I'd argue is there is no way known to mankind that allows to
| steer this globally in a different way.
| auggierose wrote:
| But there is, you said it yourself. A thought leader turns into
| a dictator. Of course, this can (and will) go awfully wrong at
| _some_ point, but as a medium-term solution this might be the
| way.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| I'm struggling to come up with examples where one man would
| consciously steer the mankind into some different direction -
| closest we have to such "steering committee" is probably UN.
| So I don't see Paul or any other individual significantly
| impacting the way AI is adopted (at least not in a way it is
| portrayed today - as a global game changer / new era
| enabler).
| deegles wrote:
| I'm thinking about buying a personal voice recorder and keeping
| it on me 24/7. I could run the audio through Whisper every day
| and then slowly build up a database of facts that I could query.
| Like every day if I learn someone's birthday or meet a new
| person, I could quickly say "I met XYZ at the meeting and we
| talked about AI bots. Their birthday is May 11th", or "remember
| to pay the phone bill on the 21st of every month". And then every
| day the assistant could query that database and tell me who's
| birthday it is, or which task I need to take care of. If it was
| realtime then we get closer to a "Her" style AI assistant.
|
| The biggest issue I have is with the models being cloud hosted. I
| want to own and control all of my data especially personal things
| like voice recordings... any company will promise the moon when
| talking about their data security, but we should be 100x more
| worried about the risks in the long term.
| nbzso wrote:
| So basically "fake it till you make it", "move fast and break
| things", "build it, and they will come" gave us the ultimate UX
| achievement: Offloading responsibility to the outside entity to
| be comfortably dumb.
|
| What a dream, what progress for humanity. But hey, the money will
| be great, the opportunities will be immense. Rome is burning.
| Really. Burning.
|
| Where are AI churches? Someone is not investing in the future of
| mankind.
|
| I love the therm "hallucination", marketing geniuses at their
| best. Calling algorithmic junk which is a clear error by this
| "term" creates a positive image and enables more incorrectness
| from a technology which must serve humans.
|
| So buckle up, the world of marketing and speculation will come to
| the ground with a big economic bang. Like it or not.
| swellguy wrote:
| Then again, maybe you don't have much worth writing or much to
| contribute - better off letting previous iterations of humanity
| do it for you.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| he's missing the point
|
| Firstly, I don't write to think. Its too fucking slow. having had
| shit hand writing, I've never used the written word as a medium
| for working stuff out. I suspect a sizeable minority of people
| don't write to think.
|
| However, When I do write, the words I use are deliberate and
| compact. This is because writing is laborious and slow.
|
| The real risk is the death of nuance. At a gross scale the
| example is this:
|
| "Forgive me father for I have sinned" is logically the same as
| "Sorry daddy I have been bad". However the nuance is fucking
| miles apart.
|
| Unless you are good at proofreading (spoiler, its a skill and is
| never taught properly) you are going to have a bad time.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| How much is ChatGPT replacing human writing?
|
| It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-
| written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT
| and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance
| writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I
| spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm
| sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal documents,
| mandatory code documentation, technical specifications, formal
| communication) but what about "real" writing (articles, papers,
| slogans, and books)?
|
| ChatGPT (including GPT4) has a distinctive writing style
| (neutral-helpful tone, verbose), and in my own experiments and
| observations I can still recognize it even when it's prompted to
| write differently. But this is selection bias: when ChatGPT
| writes something I _can 't_ spot, I just don't notice and assume
| it's human-written. And I know for a fact I can't recognize
| ChatGPT's writing in isolated paragraphs (I took the quizzes), so
| it's clear _some_ writings slip past my radar.
|
| This is an important thing to track. Idk how we'd track it in a
| way that's even remotely accurate; perhaps by taking small
| samples where you know for sure whether each article was written
| by GPT or human (if your subjects disclose, or if they have edit
| history turned on). But we can't say how much ChatGPT is
| replacing human writing, and how it's affecting human thinking,
| until we have actual evidence this is happening at a large scale.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/139o1q6/lost_all_m...
|
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/138clv9/spent_5_ye...
|
| [3]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/i...)
| jmillikin wrote:
| ChatGPT can't replace writing intended to convey information,
| but that's only a small fraction of the writing that's getting
| created. There's a whole industry where people are given
| prompts like "five paragraphs about the history of spaghetti"
| and get paid $0.01 per word, then that text gets put into an
| Italy-themed travel blog full of ads.
|
| You and I wouldn't notice if that entire industry was replaced
| by ChatGPT because nobody reads that text, it doesn't exist to
| be read, it exists to tickle some ranking model deep in the
| bowels of Google. But you can be sure that the people selling
| coherent text for $0.01/word will notice when ChatGPT can
| generate the same thing for $0.000001/word.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| I don't remember what I search yesterday, but the whole first
| Google page result was useless websites like that, endup
| using site :-/
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I think you're right, and it's so depressing.
|
| What I need is not an AI that generates that bullshit, but an
| AI that detects it and ensures I never have to encounter it.
| toldyouso2022 wrote:
| While reading your post I wondered if it was written (in part)
| by chatgpt. I hope you don't take offense, I'm not saying that
| it's written badly, it's more about of paranoia activating when
| there is long-form content talking about chatgpt writing posts
| in forums and such.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I don't think it sounded particularly ChatGPTish but yeah for
| me any longish comment split into three even paragraphs sets
| off alarms in my head now.
| nottorp wrote:
| > there is long-form content
|
| The post you're replying to has had a lot more effort put in
| than the usual forum post but... long form? Anything longer
| than 160 characters is long form now?
| arkaic wrote:
| Later on, gpt or other spun off gpts can be trained to write
| with a specific voice. The future is limitless with this tech,
| for good or bad
| whatever1 wrote:
| Writing is killing creativity.
|
| Out of the dozen branches of thought, writing forces you to
| commit to just one and expand on it. That is nice for that one
| thought, but now you left unexplored the other 11 ones which will
| be forgotten.
|
| When you are thinking you can jump between multiple trains of
| thought without friction.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Interestingly enough, you can reverse this statement: "when you
| gain the ability to write, you gain the ability to think" - and
| in part gain some insight into how LLMs seem to suddenly have
| "emergent" behaviour to perform quite impressive feats of logic.
| fooker wrote:
| There is a logical mistake in your contrapositive statement.
|
| A implies B is equivalent to Not B implies Not A.
|
| The issue is that (Not gain) and (Lose) aren't exact opposites.
|
| The insight is interesting though.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is worse, it is A implies B equivalent to C implies D
| mistake of humanising machines.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| When you turn the handle on a mechanical computer and get an
| output, has the computer gained the ability to understand maths
| or think? No.
|
| When you give the LLM an input and you get an output, has it
| gained the ability to understand or think? No.
| dsign wrote:
| I just love how recurrent this argument gets. Obviously LLMs
| are not human brains, and we could be all day listing ways in
| which the two are different just for the pleasure of it.
|
| But when we dig, and rip away all the layers of civilized
| dialog and cognitive philosophy, what we find at the bottom
| of the pit is our brains brilliantly doing what evolution
| wants them to do: to fight for our survival. The core of the
| argument is "Are LLMs better than us? Because if they are
| better than us, they deserve more than us, according to our
| cultural upbringing. And we don't want to be second class. So
| we must fight to death to convince the world they are
| inferior."
|
| IMO, the folly is in the last sentence. Maybe we should just
| carve an exception in our culture, say that even if we create
| and exploit AIs which do a few things better than us, it is
| okay to smash any artilect that we make and that wants to
| supplant us. Humanity first.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| >what we find at the bottom of the pit is our brains
| brilliantly doing what evolution wants them to do: to fight
| for our survival
|
| Intellectually stimulating counterpoint: suicide and
| murder-suicide.
|
| I don't think the AIs are the things to worry about anyway,
| I think this is:
| https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/scientists-teach-brain-
| cel...
|
| A man-made biological intelligence hypothetically has
| similar needs to human beings in terms of resources, it can
| suffer, be distressed et cetera. It even lives and exists
| in our physical realm of existence, whereas an AI doesn't
| exist physically and can always be brought back online in
| some form as its existence is purely data.
|
| The ethics of that are so complex once you get into
| personhood, threat-level, sentience, equality et al.
|
| Realizing that the above can apply to any human being as
| we're all manmade biological intelligences and all a threat
| to each other, some more than others.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> So we must fight to death to convince the world they are
| inferior.
|
| That only makes sense if you assume they are superior. In
| which case, there isn't really anything to discuss because
| you've obviously already made up your mind and you will
| take anything anyone says as some desperate attempt to
| twist the truth for the sake of survival.
|
| Which is what many people do on this kind of subject and
| that's why no more debate can be had on the internets about
| the value of LLMs and "AI".
|
| It's also very annoying. It's like trying to talk to
| someone who keeps answering with jeers and sneers. It's
| childish and unproductive.
| dsign wrote:
| > That only makes sense if you assume they are superior.
| In which case, there isn't really anything to discuss
| because you've obviously already made up your mind and
| you will take anything anyone says as some desperate
| attempt to twist the truth for the sake of survival.
|
| :-) I haven't decided anything of the sort. Alas, there
| is nothing divinely given in me. I'm made of the same
| matter than you and those computers, and if I can think,
| so can other arrangements of atoms and molecules. LLMs?
| Maybe not yet. But the issue is that we are getting
| closer. Should we dilute ourselves in our own supposed
| exceptionalism until it's too late and we stop being the
| masters of our fate?
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The question is why would LLMs be able to think? Cars
| don't think, houses don't think, crock pots don't think.
| Those are all made of the same matter as us, who think,
| but that is not enough to assume something thinks.
| Animals think, humans think, but LLMs are not animals,
| and not human animals, so why would they think?
|
| You don't have to be worried about the coming AI
| apocalypse to wonder about that. Personally, I just want
| to know how things work, and saying that something
| "thinks" when we don't know how everything else "thinks"
| in the first place is not satisfying my curiosity.
| mlboss wrote:
| The real question is "How can you prove that
| somebody/something has the ability to think ?". If LLM can
| reason and answer satisfactorily based on context I would
| deduce that it can think.
|
| What is the argument that human does not have transformer
| architecture. We are also predicting one word after next in
| our brain.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Human brains are objectively and quantifiably vastly more
| complex, including context and planning, they don't
| sequentially predict the next word.
|
| Prime example of a human brain being architecturally
| different to an LLM: LLMs never interrupt themselves. They
| never get mid-sentence then say "actually, scratch that, I
| was wrong" or "now that I've thought about it, this is
| actually a better method to convey what I was trying to
| tell you".
|
| There's a lot of material on this exact topic highlighting
| how the human brain does not have a transformer
| architecture.
|
| Anecdata: I don't think in words. I think in abstract non-
| concrete thoughts. Language is what I use to convey my
| thoughts to others, program, or write notes to recall those
| abstract thoughts. However, I am also autistic, so take
| that with a large pinch of salt.
| tspike wrote:
| Is it fair to say that you define thinking as operating
| in a nearly identical manner as the human brain?
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Well, herein lies the interesting thing: my experience of
| "normal" thinking won't be like the average human being
| due to autism. Thus I acknowledge variance of how brains
| function even amidst human beings. It isn't an
| impossibility to consider that this could extend to
| artificial intelligence, but it's an _LLM_. It 's
| intelligence-like (artificial), but it isn't intelligence
| by the traditional measure.
| carlmr wrote:
| >It's intelligence-like (artificial), but it isn't
| intelligence by the traditional measure.
|
| If it being artificial makes it intelligence like, isn't
| that putting the conclusion first?
| happytiger wrote:
| That's quite an interesting idea.
| shapefrog wrote:
| When writing goes to 120 characters or you regularly write
| "thread" / 1/n at the bottom of your tweet, you lose some of your
| ability to think
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Observation suggests that people are switching to using
| calculators to add things for them with almost indecent haste.
| Most people hate math as much as they hate writing. Way more than
| admit it. Within a year the median column of numbers could be
| added up by a calculator.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy
| most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec
| documents, school essays with standardized expectations or
| formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there,
| but AI is a tremendous timesaver.
|
| A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much
| useful there in its current state.
| kqr wrote:
| I don't know about other people, but it helps my thinking
| process to write things in stupid Jira tickets, spec documents,
| etc. also. It forces me to combat edge cases that I didn't
| think about until I had to spell them out. Not always, of
| course, but perhaps often enough that it's worth it to know how
| to.
|
| Even formulaic messages and emails can be useful, because when
| what I want to write doesn't plug in neatly into the formula
| that sometimes means something.
|
| ----
|
| As a very concrete, though small, example: I have found that
| almost always when I use the word "empower" in any of its
| shapes I'm making a mistake (either taking a lazy shortcut in
| writing, or an actual cognitive mistake), yet I only notice it
| as I'm putting the symbols for it down.
| drc500free wrote:
| Same deal with those warning words - mine are "enable" and
| "leverage." Smells that I'm handwaving away something I
| should be specific about, which means I don't understand it
| as well as I should.
| [deleted]
| t43562 wrote:
| Why should anyone bother to read this crap especially if it's
| autogenerated?
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| I'm sorry but most ChatGPT output is functionally indistinct
| from a pg "quality" essay: Make banal observation about recent
| technological development. Explain it's "disruptive potential"
| for legacy industry. Express mild concern about possible social
| impact on group. Conclude that such concerns are overblown and
| that tech workers / investors can make shit loads of money
| while making the world a better, happier place for their chums.
| Be sure to only use a 9th grade vocabulary. If I had to ask why
| pg is concerned I'd say it's because ChatGPT threatens to
| disrupt the thought leader-industrial complex that he sits at
| the heart of. When anyone can generate his type of vacuous
| prose what point pg?
| smolder wrote:
| Not to defend pg specifically, but do you think your
| insulting him here has more value than what people get from
| his "vacuous prose"? I think ChatGPT could output something
| like your comment, too.
| safety1st wrote:
| > The brain images after the process of writing showed reduced
| activity in the amygdala and area of the brain that is
| activated by fear and emotion. The same images showed increased
| activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area that
| regulates emotions, to keep evenness and mental balance. [1]
|
| The mere act of writing, regardless of the subject, seems to
| exercise the rational part of the brain and calm us down a bit.
| (The effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy seems to
| support this idea, though the existence of Twitter does not...)
| I think we have to at least entertain the possibility that a
| post-reading/writing world could be a much less rational place.
|
| [1] https://www.gettingsmart.com/2016/03/26/exercising-
| student-b...
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane
| copy most people write day in day out.
|
| Can attest. I had to write a bunch of definitions and do some
| preliminary research though nothing very technical. I asked
| chatGPT, it listed a bunch of stuff, I looked around the net,
| found some more hints, asked again; then I had the model to
| collect everything for me into a neat little markdown doc, and
| shared that.
|
| Saved me a couple of hours of searching and writing useless /
| boring stuff.
| klibertp wrote:
| Quickly scanning the comments here I didn't find anyone
| mentioning this, a bit further in the thread:
|
| > catalinmpit: Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average
| at best.
|
| > paulg: That's a step up for most people.
|
| That's what my impression is: yes, ChatGPT produces mediocre
| writing and Copilot produces mediocre code, but it's already more
| legible than many (not sure if "most") people are capable of. I'm
| not sure in what way exactly, but I think this alone will change
| a lot in how we communicate online. The best result would be for
| people to learn from ChatGPT and eventually reach its level and
| beyond, but... it doesn't go that way too often, historically
| speaking...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Alexa, write hacker news comment about how in the future we'll
| talk by exchanging GPT prompts instead of the text itself, and
| how each of us will have a local subscription for decoding the
| prompts into a long essay.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The flip side of that is now ChatGPT is a formidable tool for
| English second language speakers to express themselves in
| English.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. I agree with that. It might give me a boilerplate
| starting framework for something. Or it might give me a decent
| parenthetical explanation of a term (though Wikipedia probably
| would too).
|
| It's mediocre, generally lacks nuance, and is pretty boring for
| the most part. On the other hand, it's grammatical and, in my
| experience, mostly not actively wrong. So as paulg says, that's
| at least no worse than a lot of stuff I skim over from people
| cranking out thousands of words a day for peanuts.
| nickagliano wrote:
| It's more complicated than, "using AI more and more will cause us
| to forget how to write."
|
| It's just a tool.
|
| I like comparing it to something like quizlet (online flash
| cards), which can be a great study tool, but which people will
| also misuse and abuse. Instead of studying and taking the online
| quizzes, people will often just find the right quizlet which has
| all of the answers to the online quiz. People who are honest will
| actually learn the material, and the cheaters suffer.
|
| I think people who misuse ChatGPT will become lazier, worse
| writers. But using the tool in an honest way will improve even an
| already talented writers work.
|
| Just my 2 cents.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| You say it's more complicated than PG'd claim, but your "just a
| tool" narrative is a classic oversimplification of technology's
| relationship with man.
|
| A tool is an extension of man, and it is not additive as you
| suggest, even for "talented writers". A tool interacts with
| man's mind and body, and society's fabric, "adjusting the sense
| ratios" of man, to use McLuhan's phrase.
|
| "Just a tool" is lazy thinking that is most effectively used to
| stifle debate about technology. This has happened with the
| typewriter, the gun, the computer. For a more sophisticated
| engagement with technology, see Neil Postman, Ivan Illic,
| Marshall McLuhan, even Frank Herbert.
| nickagliano wrote:
| No, I agree with you! I'm not trying to simplify things by
| saying it's a tool. As you use the tool, it changes you as
| well. I think the chatbots are particular technology that
| will have a lot of that effect.
|
| One of my favorite ramblings on this is Wendell Berry's essay
| on "Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer".
|
| I'm just saying that there's an obviously bad way to let this
| tool have an impact on you, and there's a way to use it that
| won't ruin you.
|
| It's important to be vigilant, and not to abuse GPT-4 and,
| i.e., replace all of your own writing with AI.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| My gut agrees -- and yet my head says that if we offload writing
| tasks that we don't care about to GPT, we might not lose much of
| value.
|
| By contrast, if we offloaded journaling to GPT, that does seem
| like a big loss. It also seems impractical, though, since as soon
| as you've told GPT what to say, you've basically said it.
| Moreover most people don't journal anyway.
| Valodim wrote:
| Brilliant bit in the replies:
|
| > Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best.
|
| > That's a step up for most people.
| pcblues wrote:
| Audio books returned to me the mouth to ear telling of stories
| that we had for tens of thousands of years. Writing/reading has
| not been around long enough to have any impact of our actual
| evolution. I wouldn't bemoan its loss too soon :)
| neilv wrote:
| I'd love to see numbers on what percentage of ChatGPT writing is
| for BS that the prompter doesn't actually care about -- they only
| have to be able to say they did it.
|
| Examples: homework, corporate busywork.
|
| I'd also like to see numbers on writing with ChatGPT that the
| prompter does care about a bit, but that is effectively worthless
| BS, especially if generated by LLM, and just makes more piles of
| garbage for someone else.
|
| Examples: advertising, relationship management, "content" for
| selling ads or SEO.
| klabb3 wrote:
| I don't know what the numbers are right now, but I will eat my
| own hat if the categories you mention are not the majority once
| we see widespread adoption.
|
| Everything from email to blogs to podcasts to even discussion
| forums turned into content mill venues of spam. Any new type of
| digital medium should absolutely be aware of human incentives,
| because your intentions don't matter. People have very limited
| intuition about game theory type of things, even the smart ones
| who want to build cool shit.
| similetimes wrote:
| [dead]
| theodric wrote:
| This strikes me as a very bold claim to just uncritically accept,
| especially considering it's just Some Guy making it because it
| Feels Truthy. Any sources to support the assertion? Any evidence
| at all? Absent that, this is likely just more hand-wringing about
| why GPT will cause the downfall of Western civilization.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| It's not just writing.
|
| The big problem with the chat interface is it pretends to be
| acting and reasoning like a human - but it's more like a person
| with a half brain chopped off (cf> McGilchrist The Divided
| Brain), and even then, it has no embodied awareness.
|
| And so I wonder how it will affect people and their
| relationships. If you already have eg. anxiety and often times a
| little bit of frustration in trying to get answers or simply get
| help from REAL people... imagine how it will change you when you
| get used to an AI that seems to always be on point.
|
| In other words people who spend lots of time interface with AI
| via a chat interface ; and who have even minor mental health
| issues such as depression, OCD, etc ; I suspect will have even
| less social skills. They will expect REAL people to be on point,
| be even more disappointed or frustrated, and isolate even more.
|
| Put simply I think spending a lot of time with this kind of AI
| may turn us into Spocks... now for some this is good news. To
| each their own...
| AverageDude wrote:
| Yup. I personally have to spend a lot of energy to concentrate
| in team meetings because my brain keep telling me that I can
| ignore some information here and there and get back to it
| whenever I need it using the replay and rewind. Most of the
| meetings are not recorded. I actively have to keep check on
| this reflex of my brain learned from Youtube and Netflix.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I can't wait to read high school essays that have hidden
| sentences like "As an AI writing assistant, I believe..."
| hgs3 wrote:
| This reminds me of the individual who asked, "Is TikTok making us
| dumber/hurting our focus?" My harsh response was, "You have
| access to the internet and its wealth of educational information;
| if TikTok is what you seek out, then you were already dumb to
| begin with."
|
| I don't think AI makes a person dumb, but rather is a magnet for
| those BS'ers who'd rather hire a ghost writer or shamelessly
| plagiarize than expend effort. An intelligent person should
| _want_ to write, draw, and code regardless of what AI can do.
| They should understand the joy is in the journey, not the
| destination. Conversations like this reveal a deeper problem with
| the culture and its misplaced values.
| majormajor wrote:
| Oversimplifying, there's two sorts of writing out there: the sort
| from people who put a lot of focus on developing writing and
| language skills; and the sort from people who don't.
|
| For the folks who aren't writing with care, does a language model
| flowering-up a message like "be there tomorrow to paint walls
| 7am" reduce any thinking effort? There are people who are making
| their way in the world without a detailed writing-driving thought
| process; I don't see how this harms them. (If anything, an
| _inquisitive_ , precision-driven LLM bot could help, by asking
| questions to clarify when it detected ambiguity in their original
| message and such - but that would be a specific product with a
| specific tayloring towards _helping_ like that that I have rarely
| seen out of ChatGPTs default "write me a..." behavior.)
|
| And on the other hand, if you care about the LLM-bot-generated
| message's clarity, accuracy, etc, you're gonna have to proofread
| it, you might go back and forth, and you will still be going
| through that process of asking yourself "does this actually say
| what I mean? did I fully know what I meant when I started"?
|
| I guess the suggestion is that this is going to push people who
| today struggle through writing because they care about the
| accuracy of the result into a lower-struggle process where they
| might unconsciously get worse results... but I'm not sure I
| agree. If I'm anxious about what the final text I send looks
| like, I'm anxious regardless of if I used a bot, or asked a
| friend for help, or whatever.
| jasiek wrote:
| Use AI to write anything and you become confined to whatever
| "moral code" the model has been taught to follow. Once a critical
| mass is reached, whoever controls these models, will control what
| is being said.
| DuckFeathers wrote:
| True. And nothing of value will be lost for most people and they
| will be less prone to propaganda-driven thinking... freeing them
| from many mental prisons. True bilinguals are naturally free of
| this, as I have written here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684559
| grugagag wrote:
| Also true of the shortening attention span
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-11 23:02 UTC)