[HN Gopher] Thoughts on thinking
___________________________________________________________________
Thoughts on thinking
Author : bradgessler
Score : 617 points
Date : 2025-05-16 19:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dcurt.is)
(TXT) w3m dump (dcurt.is)
| bradgessler wrote:
| I keep going back and forth on this feeling, but lately I find
| myself thinking "F it, I'm going to do what I'm going to do that
| interests me".
|
| Today I'm working on doing the unthinkable in an AI-world:
| putting together a video course that teaches developers how to
| use Phlex components in Rails projects and selling it for a few
| hundred bucks.
|
| One way of thinking about AI is that it puts so much new
| information in front of people that they're going to need help
| from people known to have experience to navigate it all and
| curate it. Maybe that will become more valuable?
|
| Who knows. That's the worst part at this moment in time--nobody
| really knows the depths or limits of it all. We'll see
| breakthroughs in some areas, and others not.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought
| quality appears largely corrosive.
|
| I'm very glad my kid's school has _hardcore_ banned them. In some
| class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in
| class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has
| also been a significant increase in "on paper" work vs work done
| on computer.
|
| Lest you wonder "what does this guy know anyways?", I'll share
| that I grew up in a household where both parents were professors
| of education.
|
| Understanding the effectiveness of different methods of learning
| (my dad literally taught Science Methods) were a frequent topic.
| Active learning (creating things using what you're learning
| about) is so much more effective than passive, reception oriented
| methods. I think LLMs largely are supporting the latter.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Anyone who has learned a second language can tell you that you
| aren't proficient just by memorizing vocabulary and grammar.
| Having a conversation and forming sentences on the fly just
| feels different- either as a different skill or using a
| different part of the brain.
|
| I also don't think the nature of LLMs being a negative crutch
| is new knowledge per se; when I was in school, calculus class
| required a graphing calculator but the higher end models (TI-92
| etc) that had symbolic equation solvers were also banned, for
| exactly the same reason. Having something that can give an
| answer for you fundamentally undermines the value of the
| exercise in the first place, and cripples your growth while you
| use it.
| skydhash wrote:
| Same with drawing which is easy to teach, but hard to master
| because of the coordination between eyes and hand. You can
| trace a photograph, but that just bypass the whole point and
| you don't exercise any of the knowledge.
| flysand7 wrote:
| Another case in point is that memorizing vocabularies and
| grammar, although could seem like an efficient way to learn a
| language, is incredibly unrewarding. I've been learning
| japanese from scratch, using only real speech to absorb new
| words, without using dictionaries and anything else much. The
| first feeling of reward came immediately when I learned that
| "arigatou" means thanks (although I terribly misheard how the
| word sounded, but hey, at least I heard it). Then after 6
| month, when I could catch and understand some simple phrases.
| After 6-7 years I can understand about 80% of any given
| speech, which is still far, but I gotta say it was a good
| experience.
|
| With LLM's giving you ready-made answers I feel like it's the
| same. It's not as rewarding because you haven't obtained the
| answer yourself. Although it did feel rewarding when I was
| interrogating an LLM about how CSRF works and it said I asked
| a great question when I asked whether it only applies to
| forms because it seems like fetch has a different kind of
| browser protection.
| layer8 wrote:
| How much hours would you estimate did you watch (I assume
| it was video, not just audio) in those years? What kind of
| material? Just curious.
| flysand7 wrote:
| Mostly anime. Surprisingly, not that much, I think
| somewhere in the ballpark of 100 titles. In the beginning
| I was also watching some grammar tutorials on YouTube to
| get started with grammar quicker (Otherwise convergence
| on solution would be too slow).
|
| Contrary to what I said I actually did use dictionaries,
| but the point I was trying to make is rather than
| memorizing phrases in advance, I used it to translate
| something I thought I heard.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| If you used subtitles over audio then why would you avoid
| dictionaries too ? Purely for the reward of treating it as
| a puzzle ? (Since you would have to figure out which word
| corresponds to a which concept in a phrase.)
| JackFr wrote:
| Well I can extract a square root by hand. We all had to learn
| it and got tested on it.
|
| No one to day learns that anymore. The vast, vast majority
| have no idea and I don't think people are dumber because of
| it.
|
| That is to say, I think it's not cut-and-dried. I agree you
| need to learn something, but something's it's okay use a
| tool.
| smcleod wrote:
| I very much agree with your sentiment here.
|
| I tried to encapsulate that to some degree when writing
| something (perhaps poorly?) recently actually -
| https://smcleod.net/2025/03/the-democratisation-paradox-
| what...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Comparing extracting a square root my hand is rather
| different in scope than reducing / simplifying equations
| entirely. The TI-92 could basically do all of your
| coursework for you up to college level, if memory serves.
|
| The real question isn't "is it okay to use a tool" but "how
| does using a tool affect what you learn".
|
| In the cases of both LLMs and symbolic solving calculators,
| I believe the answer is "highly detrimental".
| drdeca wrote:
| Huh? While I essentially never have need to compute a
| square root by hand (unless it is a perfect square of
| course), shouldn't one know how one would?
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Why should one? Perhaps they should if it's relevant to
| their work, daily routine, or interests. But if they have
| no need for it?
| mattigames wrote:
| Needs are all fabricated, Ludwig Wittgenstein said "the
| limits of my language are the limits of my world", the
| same thing happens with logical thinking and all its
| tools including math.
| drdeca wrote:
| Well, I think one should be able to come up with a way of
| doing so on the fly just from knowing that the square
| root function is monotonically increasing, and knowing
| binary search? Of course, doing it another way might be
| more efficient.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| The manual methods are also the foundation for higher
| approaches involving approximation and iterative solutions.
| These are widely used in engineering and science.
|
| Pressing a calculator key doesn't give the same insight.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Memorization and manual methods also help develop
| intuition about what is a plausible answer and what is
| not. It helps build a brain that is able to sanity-check
| what it is being told.
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| Using a tool like that is opposite to mastering the skill.
| There's no royal road to mastery and never will be. One
| does not have to master all skills, of course, and may do
| well not mastering any (or mastering dark ones).
| mattigames wrote:
| Yes they are dumber because of it, not in the mental
| retardation kind of way but a more nuanced way, among
| others the mental work you put into trying to find another
| simpler way than the one the professor is teaching you, and
| the understanding about numbers such attempts can give you,
| even if they are unsuccessful.
| mistercow wrote:
| > No one to day learns that anymore. The vast, vast
| majority have no idea and I don't think people are dumber
| because of it.
|
| Arguably, the kind of person who was helped by learning to
| do that by hand still learns to do it by hand, but because
| of curiosity rather than because a teacher told them to.
|
| I remember being thirteen and trying to brute force methods
| for computing the square root. I didn't have the tools yet
| to figure out how to do it in any systematic way, and the
| internet wasn't at a point yet where it would have even
| occurred to me to just search online. Wikipedia wouldn't
| exist for another two years.
|
| I probably finally looked it up at some point in high
| school. I'm not sure exactly when, but I remember spending
| a lot of time practicing doing a few iterations in my head
| as a parlor trick (not that I ever had the opportunity to
| show it off).
|
| If I were thirteen and curious about that now, I'd probably
| just ask ChatGPT. Then I'd have a whole follow up
| conversation about how it was derived. It would spit a lot
| of intimidating LaTeX at me, but unlike with Wikipedia, I'd
| be able to ask it to explain what those things meant.
|
| This is the thing I don't get when people talk about LLMs'
| impact on education. Everybody focuses on cheating, like
| learning is inherently a chore that all students hate and
| must be carefully herded into doing despite themselves.
|
| But that's a problem with _school_ , not learning. If your
| actual, self-motivated goal is to learn something, LLM's
| are an incredible tool, not a hindrance.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| you put my thoughts into words I couldn't.
|
| Any school's #1 job is to motivate learning. Schools
| clearly suck at this.
|
| LLMs are a fascinating effective learning tool. early
| learning would be better off embracing it as such.
|
| i imagine a combination of a video of a good tutor
| explaining a concept followed up with an llm to quiz and
| explain the concept seems far better than what we have
| today.
| mistercow wrote:
| I think we need to find a way to teach without grades.
| That is, we _do_ know how to teach without grades at
| younger levels, and many schools do it successfully.
|
| The problem is that eventually you need to measure for
| placement, and Goodhart's Law kicks in and destroys the
| enjoyment of learning. It's very hard to be intrinsically
| motivated when the external pressure dominates.
|
| The fact that "study for the test" is basically
| synonymous with "study" for most people is indicative
| that we're doing something extremely wrong in education.
| Grosvenor wrote:
| > The problem is that eventually you need to measure for
| placement Why do you need to be "placed"? I know the
| answer - resources.
|
| But why can't each individual have sort of their own
| bespoke governess tutoring them all through school? Pay
| Gilbert Strang a million dollars to do a 32 week course
| in LinAlg. Yes I know a normal course is shorter, expand
| it to cover everything in exquisite detail, so even I can
| keep up. Alan Kay, Donald Knuth, and John Carmack can
| teach computer science. Continue on for each subject.
|
| Then let students go as fast as they want. I'd have
| finished some subjects of HS by the time I was in 9th
| grade, and others I might still be trying. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Where you'd still need to be "placed" is social
| development. Which I think should actually be a subject.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Feels different, comes naturally, without conscious thought,
| just like we don't focus on beating our hearts.
|
| And agree about learning by practicing a skill being best.
| But you and I both know the school system has worked on rote
| memorisation for hundreds of years at least and still is now.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > the higher end models (TI-92 etc) that had symbolic
| equation solvers were also banned
|
| I'm surprised it was a problem in the first place. Don't
| equation solving exercises require you to leave intermediary
| steps, and you can't just put a "x=5" as a one liner answer ?
| nbernard wrote:
| I don't remember if it was the case for the TI-92+, but
| some calculators can show the intermediate steps, or at
| least some of them.
| genewitch wrote:
| Yeah and I'm of the age when teachers in all grades would say
| "you're not going to carry around a calculator your whole
| adult life"
|
| Hilarious miscalculation.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I am waiting for the day (maybe it's already here) when I can
| talk to an LLM to practice my 2nd language. It can correct
| everything I say, it can talk forever, it can challenge me to
| use new grammar or vocabularly. Note: I can speak all day in
| my 2nd language with friends but I wouldn't give a business
| presentation nor could I explain, as a native, how something
| technical works. If I watch a TV show I might understand
| 30%-99% but the more lawyers/military/goverment/science parts
| there are the more it's beyond my current level.
|
| Getting exposure there is hard. Talking to friends just means
| more practice with what I already know but an LLM could help
| me practice things outside that area.
| edanm wrote:
| For many languages, this is already something you can do.
| avaika wrote:
| This reminds me how back in my school days I was not allowed to
| use the internet to prepare research on some random topics (e
| g. history essay). It was the late 90s when the internet
| started to spread. Anyway teachers forced us to use offline
| libraries only.
|
| Later in the university I was studying engineering. And we were
| forced to prepare all the technical drawings manually in the
| first year of study. Like literally with pencil and ruler. Even
| though computer graphics were widely used and we're de facto
| standard.
|
| Personally I don't believe hardcore ban will help with any sort
| of thing. It won't stop the progress either. It's much better
| to help people learn how to use things instead of forcing them
| to deal with "old school" stuff only.
| don_neufeld wrote:
| I was expecting some response like this, because schools have
| "banned" things in the past.
|
| While this is superficially similar, I believe we are talking
| about substantially different things.
|
| Learning (the goal) is a process. In the case of an
| assignment, the resulting answer / work product, while it is
| what is requested, is critically _not the goal_. However, it
| is what is evaluated, so many confuse it with the goal ("I
| want to get a good grade")
|
| Anything which bypasses the process makes the goal (learning)
| less likely to be achieved.
|
| So, I think it is fine to use a calculator to accelerate your
| use of operations you have already learned and understand.
|
| However, I don't think you should give 3rd graders
| calculators that just give them the answer to a
| multiplication or division when they are learning how those
| things work in the first place.
|
| Similarly, I think it's fine to do research using the
| internet to read sources you use to create your own work.
|
| Meanwhile, I don't think it's fine to do research using the
| internet to find a site where you can buy a paper you can
| submit as your own work.
|
| Right now, LLMs can be used to bypass a great deal of
| process, which is why I support them not being used.
|
| It's possible, maybe even likely that we'll end up with a
| "supervised learning by AI" approach where the assignment is
| replaced by "proof of process", a record of how the student
| explored the topic interactively. I could see that working if
| done right.
| pca006132 wrote:
| Yeah, I remember reading someone saying you won't use a
| fork lift in a gym. I think this is the same idea.
|
| The problem is really about how to evaluate performance or
| incentivize students to actually work on their exercise.
| johnisgood wrote:
| You can learn a lot from LLMs though, same with, say,
| Wikipedia. You need curiosity. You need the desire to learn. If
| you do not have it, then of course you will get nowhere, LLMs
| or no LLMs.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Never underestimate laziness, or willingness to take
| something 80% as good for 1% of the work.
|
| So most are not curious. So what do you do for them?
| johnisgood wrote:
| You have to somehow figure out the root cause of the
| laziness, or if it really is laziness, and not something
| else, e.g. a mental health issue.
|
| Plus, many kids fail school not because of laziness, but
| because of their toxic environment.
| Swizec wrote:
| > if it really is laziness, and not something else, e.g.
| a mental health issue.
|
| Kids optimize. When I was in high school I was fully
| capable of getting straight F's in a class I didn't care
| about and straight A's in a class I enjoyed.
|
| Why bother learning chemistry when you could instead
| spend that time coding cool plugins and websites in PHP
| that thousands of internet strangers are using? I really
| did build one of the most popular phpBB plugins and knew
| I was gonna be a software engineer. Not that my chemistry
| professor cared about any of that or even understood what
| I'm talking about.
| johnisgood wrote:
| What you just described is irrelevant to what we are
| discussing.
|
| As for what you said, yeah, I got 1s (Fs) because I was
| too busy coding and reading books on philosophy, as a 14
| years old.
| Swizec wrote:
| How is it irrelevant? Kids will always cheat their way
| through classes they feel are a distraction. Even the
| super smart Type A kids.
|
| Hell, all humans do that. You use every resource
| available to get out of dealing with things that are not
| your priority. This means you will never be good at those
| things and that's fine. You can't be good at everything.
| johnisgood wrote:
| They will, but we were talking about the will or
| motivation to learn. If someone has a curious mind, and
| actually wants to learn, then they can definitely use
| LLMs to do that.
|
| I don't disagree with you though.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Realistically, putting them into trades sooner could almost
| be a good thing. Kids who don't want to learn end up
| dragging down the class and distracting those who do.
|
| But, these are kids... Hard to argue that adults should
| selectively deny education when it is their responsibility
| to do otherwise.
|
| We don't neglect the handicapped because it is inconvenient
| to provide them with assistance.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Leave 'em behind and win the race.
| AstroBen wrote:
| that's on them? Why do I have to take responsibility for
| someone else's growth?
| snackernews wrote:
| Can you learn a lot? Or do you get instant answers to every
| question without learning anything, as OP suggests?
| johnisgood wrote:
| You can learn a lot, if you want to. I can ask it a
| question with regarding to pharmacodynamics of some
| medication, and I can ask more and more questions, and
| learn. Similarly, I could pick up a book on pharmacology,
| but LLMs can definitely make learning easier.
| calebkaiser wrote:
| You can learn an incredible amount. I do quite a bit of
| research as a core part of my job, and LLMs are amazing at
| helping me find relevant research to help me explore ideas.
| Something like "I'm thinking of X. Does this make sense and
| do you know of any similar research?" I also mentor some
| students whose educational journey has been fundamentally
| changed by them.
|
| Like any other tool, it's more a question of how they're
| used. For example, I've seen incredible results for
| students who use ChatGPT to interrogate ideas as they
| synthesize them. So, for example, "I'm reading this passage
| _PASSAGE_ and I 'm confused about phrase X. The core idea
| seems similar to Y, which I am familiar with. if I had to
| explain X, I'd put it like this _ATTEMPT_ Can you help me
| understand what I 'm missing?"
|
| The results are very impressive. I'd encourage you to try
| it out if you haven't.
| vendiddy wrote:
| I've used it these past few months to better understand
| the PDF format, Nix, and a few other technical concepts.
|
| I try to use AI to automate things I already know and
| force myself to learn things I don't know.
|
| It takes discipline/curiosity but it can be a net
| positive.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Thank you, and the previous commenter. I am tired of
| trying to convince people that LLM can be a really good
| tool for learning. :/
|
| They should just simply try it. Start with something you
| actually know to see how useful it might be to you with
| your prompts.
| layer8 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| "The irony is that I now know more than I ever would have
| before AI. But I feel slightly dumber. A bit more dull. LLMs
| give me finished thoughts, polished and convincing, but none
| of the intellectual growth that comes from developing them
| myself. The output from AI answers questions. It teaches me
| facts. But it doesn't really help me _know_ anything new."
|
| I think the thesis is that with AI there is less need and
| incentive to "put the work in" instead of just consuming what
| the AI outputs, and that in consequence we do the needed work
| less and atrophy.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I know, that is why you need the desire, the will to learn.
| I have been using LLMs for this, so I know it is possible.
| I understand what you are saying though, and it is indeed a
| sad state of affairs, but then again, this was the case due
| to search engines, Wikipedia, and so forth, long before
| LLMs.
|
| Again, you can truly learn a lot using LLMs, but you have
| to approach it properly. It does not have to be just
| "facts", and sometimes, even learning "facts" is learning.
|
| I can use LLMs and learn nothing, but I can use LLMs to
| learn, too!
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes, but previously you didn't need the desire that much,
| because you were more forced to it, there was no easy
| way. The fact that now you need that internal motivation
| means that it will happen less, where previously it
| happened by default.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree, it is sort of like a double-edged sword, I would
| say.
| creata wrote:
| Honestly, I doubt that LLMs are _great_ for learning. Too
| often, they output plausible-sounding things that turn out to
| be completely wrong. I know Wikipedia can have its problems
| with factuality, but this is on an entirely different level.
| (And yes, they do this even when they 're allowed to do web
| searches and "reason".)
|
| The effort of verifying everything it claims may or may not
| outweigh the effort of other means of learning.
| hooverd wrote:
| Wikipedia isn't going to write your paper for you. I don't
| see the difference between an LLM and one of those paper
| writing services in this context.
| johnisgood wrote:
| We are talking about learning. You can learn much more from
| LLMs than Wikipedia, because if you do not understand
| something, you can always ask an LLM about it, and it would
| reply to you in any way you want; whatever helps you learn
| better.
| hammock wrote:
| > I'm very glad my kid's school has hardcore banned them.
|
| What does that mean, I'm curious?
|
| The schools and university I grew up in had a "single-sanction
| honor code" which meant if you were caught lying or cheating
| even once you would be expelled. And you signed the honor code
| at the top of every test.
|
| My more progressive friends at other schools who didn't have an
| honor code happily poo-pooed it as a repugnantly harsh old
| fashioned standard. But I don't see a better way today of
| enforcing "don't use AI" in schools, than it.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| I don't see the problem.
|
| I'm not sure how LLMs output is indistinguishable from
| Wikipedia or World Book.
|
| Maybe? and if the question is "did the student actually write
| this?" (which is different than "do they understand it?"
| there are lots of different ways to assess if a given student
| understands the material...that don't involve submitting
| typed text but still involve communicating clearly.
|
| If we allow LLMs- like we allow calculators, just how poor
| LLMs are will become far more obvious.
| hammock wrote:
| If LLMs are allowed then sure. However, when LLMs are
| explicitly banned from use, is the case I am talking about.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Oral presentation without notes and a live Q&A would be
| some ways...
| don_neufeld wrote:
| The school has an academic honestly policy which explicitly
| bans it, under "Cheating", which includes:
|
| "Falsifying or inventing any academic work, including the use
| of AI (ChatGPT, etc)"
|
| Additionally, as mentioned, the school is taking actions to
| change how work is done to ensure students are actually doing
| their own work - such as requiring written assignments be
| completed during class time, or giving homework on physical
| paper that is to be marked up by hand and returned.
|
| Apparently this is the first year they have been doing this,
| as last year they had significant problems with submitted
| work not being authored by students.
|
| This is in an extremely competitive Bay Area school, so there
| can be a lot of pressure from parents on students to make top
| grades, and sometimes that has negative side effects.
| djhn wrote:
| Asking as a non-American non-school-pupil-parent: what does
| it mean for a school to be competitive in this context?
| Competitive entry into a school I understand, but that
| threshold has been cleared. Isn't US college admission
| based on essays and standardised tests like GMAT, SAT, GRE?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Physical paper isn't going to save them.
|
| (Also, typing was only appropriate for only some classes
| anyway.)
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Today such infractions might result in a verbal warning...
| StefanBatory wrote:
| That's an surprisingly "strict" (in quotes for obvious
| reason) honor code.
|
| I'm at some uni in Poland, not top tier, but at the same time
| - not bad either, slighly above average.
|
| The amount of cheating I saw - it's almost mundane. Teachers
| know this, so do we...
| hammock wrote:
| It worked. There was still cheating (caught and uncaught),
| but 50-100x less than what I saw at other schools.
|
| And it gave students a sense of pride in their education
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I'm very glad my kid's school has hardcore banned them.
|
| Schools will ban anything they think of as sinister.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Ironically, states now use AI to grade student essays in
| standardized tests.
|
| English teachers even recommend grammarly..
|
| Students are given a "prompt" for writing.
|
| I wish other schools had the conviction you describe...
| guyfhuo wrote:
| > Students are given a "prompt" for writing
|
| Students were always given a "prompt" for writing.
|
| That's why tech companies used that term; rather than the
| other way around.
| raincole wrote:
| > Students are given a "prompt" for writing.
|
| What do you think "prompt" mean?
|
| Or you're saying the students are asked to mimic AI's style?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > states now use AI to grade student essays in standardized
| tests.
|
| citation needed
| BrawnyBadger53 wrote:
| This was already happening a decade ago lol. Happened to me
| at least.
| taylorallred wrote:
| Among the many ways that AI causes me existential angst, you've
| reminded me of another one. That is, the fact that AI pushes you
| towards the most average thoughts. It makes sense, given the
| technology. This scares me because creative thought happens at
| the very edge. When you get stuck on a problem, like you
| mentioned, you're on the cusp of something novel that will at the
| very least grow you as a person. The temptation to use AI could
| rob you of the novelty in favor what has already been done.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I feel there's a glaring counter point to this. I have never
| felt more compelled to try out whatever coding idea that pops
| into my head. I can make Claude write a poc in seconds to make
| the idea more concrete. And I can write into a good enough tool
| in a few afternoons. Before this all those ideas would just
| never materialize.
|
| I mean I get the existential angst though. There's a lot of
| uncertainty about where all this is heading. But, and this is
| really a tangent, I feel that the direction of it all is in the
| intersection between politics, technology and human nature. I
| feel like "we the people" leave walkover to powerful actors if
| we do not use these new powerful tools in service of the
| people. For one - to enable new ways to coordinate and
| organise.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Good point. It's not that AI is "pushing us" towards
| anything. AI can be a muse that elevates our creativity. IF
| we use it that way. But do we use it that way? I think there
| will be some who do.
|
| The majority of users seem to want convenience at any
| expense. Most are unconcerned with a loss of agency, almost
| enthusiastic about it if it removes the labor of thinking.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Agency only goes away if control of AI is ultimately
| centralized. If we end up in a world where anyone can run
| good enough models on consumer devices and we can install
| our own models into off the shelf humanoid robots I don't
| see that we have lost agency.
| MoonGhost wrote:
| > AI pushes you towards
|
| That's interesting point. But here is the thing: you are
| supposed to drive. Not AI god. Look at it as at an assistant
| whom you can interrupt, instruct, correct, ask to redo. While
| focusing on 'what' you can delegate it some 'how' problems.
| abakker wrote:
| I for one, thing directing subordinates to do something I
| could be doing kinda ... sucks? Like, I get that's how you
| have to work with LLMs, but it isn't a fun thing to do for
| me.
| Cipater wrote:
| Do you do every single thing that you are capable of doing
| yourself?
| BlarfMcFlarf wrote:
| Non hierarchical collaboration is the option you are
| excluding. Where you accept pushback and feedback because
| you know it comes with creative vision and perspective
| you lack. You can do creative things with other creative
| people.
| taylorallred wrote:
| Same. I think some people have a mind that is more suited
| for managing other minds and that's not me.
| taylorallred wrote:
| Yeah this is a fair point. In honesty, the attempts I have
| made to have GPT help me think creatively has usually left me
| disappointed and feeling like it was picking safe, middle-of-
| the-road solutions. That could be on my prompting skills but
| also I tend to view LLMs as more of a fuzzy information
| retrieval tool than a creative/reasonable one. It just hasn't
| shown me original ideas that have seemed compelling to me yet
| (maybe I just need to beg it to be more "original").
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I was playing around with AI autocomplete, and found it to be
| good for a month or two. Then, it suggested I upgrade the model
| to match my new computer's increased performance. It's useless
| now. The worse model was usable for creative writing and
| chatrooms; the new models are fit strictly for business
| professional communications.
| calderwoodra wrote:
| The internet taught us long ago that novel thoughts are
| extremely uncommon. Most people likely don't have any novel
| thoughts their entire lives.
| kdamica wrote:
| Wow, one day after this post: https://blog.ayjay.org/two-
| quotations-on-the-brief-dream-of-...
| paulorlando wrote:
| I've noticed something like this as well. A suggestion is to
| write/build for no one but yourself. Really no one but yourself.
|
| Some of my best writing came during the time that I didn't try to
| publicize the content. I didn't even put my name on it. But doing
| that and staying interested enough to spend the hours to think
| and write and build takes a strange discipline. Easy for me to
| say as I don't know that I've had it myself.
|
| Another way to think about it: Does AI turn you into Garry
| Kasparov (who kept playing chess as AI beat him) or Lee Sedol
| (who, at least for now, has retired from Go)?
|
| If there's no way through this time, I'll just have to
| occasionally smooth out the crinkled digital copies of my past
| thoughts and sigh wistfully. But I don't think it's the end.
| ge96 wrote:
| Yeah there is the personal passion and then the points/likes
| driven which sucks the joy out
|
| I experienced this when I was younger with my rc planes, I
| joined some forum and I felt like everything I did had to be
| posted/liked to have value. I'd post designs/fantasy and get
| the likes then lose interest/not actually do it after I got the
| ego bump
| paulorlando wrote:
| I think that's why some writers refuse to talk about their
| work in progress. If they do, it saps the life out of it.
| Your ego bump example kind of fits into that.
| paulorlando wrote:
| If relevant, I wrote this in a related discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43912331
| wjholden wrote:
| I just wrote a paper a few days ago arguing that "manual
| thinking" is going to become a rare and valuable skill in the
| future. When you look around you, everyone is finding ways to be
| better using AI, and they're all finding amazing successes - but
| we're also unsure about the downsides. I hedge that my advantage
| in ten years will be that I chose not to do what everyone else
| did. I might regret it, we will see.
| oytis wrote:
| If AI is going to be as economically efficient as promised,
| there is going to be no way to avoid using it altogether. So
| the trick will be to keep your thinking skills functional,
| while still using AI for speedup. Like focus in the age of
| Internet is a rare skill, but not using Internet is not an
| option either.
| fkfyshroglk wrote:
| Not all processes are the same, though. I strongly suspect
| any efficiency improvements will come in processes that
| didn't require much "thinking" to begin with. I use it daily,
| but mostly as a way to essentially type faster--I can read
| much faster than I can type, so I mostly validate and correct
| the autocomplete. All of my efforts to get it to produce
| trustworthy output beyond this seem to trail behind the
| efficiency of just searching the internet.
|
| Granted, I'm blessed to not have much busywork; if I need to
| produce corporate docs or listicles AI would be a massive
| boon. But I also suspect AI will be used to digest these
| things back into small bullet points.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I figure if AI gets as efficient as people seem to think. Then
| spending a bunch of effort getting good at using it now is kind
| of pointless, because it's just going to get easier and easier
| to use.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Have not resonated with an article for a long time until this
| one.
| paintboard3 wrote:
| I've been finding a lot of fulfillment in using AI to assist with
| things that are (for now) outside of the scope of one-shot AI.
| For example, when working on projects that require physical
| assembly or hands-on work, AI feels more like a superpower than a
| crutch, and it enables me to tackle projects that I wouldn't have
| touched otherwise. In my case, this was applied to physical
| building, electronics, and multimedia projects that rely on
| simple code that are outside of my domain of expertise.
|
| The core takeaway for me is that if you have the desire to
| stretch your scope as wide as possible, you can get things done
| in a fun way with reduced friction, and still feel like your
| physical being is what made the project happen. Often this means
| doing something that is either multidisciplinary or outside of
| the scope of just being behind a computer screen, which isn't
| everyone's desire and that's okay, too.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah I haven't found the right language for this yet, but it's
| something like: I'm happy and optimistic about LLMs when I'm
| the one _doing_ something, and more anxious about them when I
| 'm _supporting_ someone else in doing something. Or: It makes
| me more excited to focus on _ends_ , and less excited to focus
| on _means_.
|
| Like, in the recent past, someone who wanted to achieve some
| goal with software would either need to learn a bunch of stuff
| about software development, or would need to hire someone like
| me to bring their idea to life. But now, they can get a lot
| further on their own, with the support of these new tools.
|
| I think that's _good_ , but it's also nerve-wracking from an
| employment perspective. But my ultimate conclusion is that I
| want to work closer to the ends rather than the means.
| apsurd wrote:
| Interesting, I just replied to this post recommending the
| exact opposite: to focus on means vs ends.
|
| The post laments how everything is useless when any
| conceivable "end state" a human can do will be inferior to
| what LLMs can do.
|
| So an honest attention toward the means of how something
| comes about--the process of the thinking vs the polished
| great thought--is what life is made of.
|
| Another comment talks about hand-made bread. People do it and
| enjoy it even though "making bread is a solved problem".
| sanderjd wrote:
| I saw that and thought it was an interesting dichotomy.
|
| I think a way to square the circle is to recognize that
| people have different goals at different times. As a person
| with a family who is not independently wealthy, I care a
| lot about being economically productive. But I also
| separately care about the joy of creation.
|
| If my goal in making a loaf of bread is economic
| productivity, I will be happy if I have a robot available
| that helps me do that quickly. But if my goal is to find
| joy in the act of creation, I will not use that robot
| because it would not achieve that goal.
|
| I do still find joy in the act of creating software, but
| that was already dwindling long before chatgpt launched,
| and mostly what I'm doing with computers is with the goal
| of economic productivity.
|
| But yeah I'll probably still create software just for the
| joy of it from time to time in the future, and I'm unlikely
| to use AIs for those projects!
|
| But at work, I'm gonna be directing my efforts toward
| taking advantage of the tools available to create useful
| things efficiently.
| apsurd wrote:
| ooh I like this take. We can change the framing. In the
| frame of one's livelihood we need to be concerned with
| economic productively, philosophy be damned.
| champdebloom wrote:
| Beautifully put!
| WillAdams wrote:
| This is only a problem if one is writing/thinking on things which
| have already been written about without creating a new/novel
| approach in one's writing.
|
| An AI is _not_ going to get awarded a PhD, since by definition,
| such are earned by extending the boundaries of human knowledge:
|
| https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
|
| So rather than accept that an LLM has been trained on whatever it
| is you wish to write, write something which it will need to be
| trained on.
| noiv wrote:
| I agree, frustration steps in earlier than before because AIs
| tell you very eagerly that unique thought is already part of
| its training data. Sometimes I wish one could put an AI on
| drugs and filter out some hallucinations that'll become main
| stream next week.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I'm so so glad at the end it said "Written entirely by a human"
| because all the way through I was thinking - absolutely no way
| does AI come up with great ideas or insights and it definitely
| would not write this article- it holds together and flows too
| well (if this turns out to be the joke I'll admit we're all now
| fucked)
|
| Having said that I am very worried about kids growing up with AI
| and it stunting their critical thinking before it begins - but as
| of right this moment AI is extremely sub par at genuinely good
| ideas or writing.
|
| It's an amazing and useful tool I use all the time though and
| would struggle to be without.
| tutanosh wrote:
| I used to feel the same way about AI, but my perspective has
| completely changed.
|
| The key is to treat AI as a tool, not as a magic wand that will
| do everything for you.
|
| Even if AI could handle every task, leaning on it that way would
| mean surrendering control of your own life--and that's never
| healthy.
|
| What works for me is keeping responsibility for the big picture--
| what I want to achieve and how all the pieces fit together--while
| using AI for well-defined tasks. That way I stay fully in
| control, and it's a lot more fun this way too.
| bachittle wrote:
| The article mentions that spell and grammar checking AI was used
| to help form the article. I think there is a spectrum here, with
| spell and grammar checking on one end, and the fears the article
| mentions on the other end (AI replacing our necessity to think).
| If we had a dial to manually adjust what AI works on, this may
| help solve the problems mentioned here. The issue is that all the
| AI companies are trying too hard to achieve AGI, and thus making
| the interfaces general and without controls like this.
| perplex wrote:
| I don't think LLMs replace thinking, but rather elevate it. When
| I use an LLM, I'm still doing the intellectual work, but I'm
| freed from the mechanics of writing. It's similar to programming
| in C instead of assembly: I'm operating at a higher level of
| abstraction, focusing more on what I want to say than how to say
| it.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The writing _is_ the work, though. The words on paper (or
| wherever) are the end product, but they are not the point. See
| chapter 5 of Ahrens, Sonke. 2017. _How to take smart notes: one
| simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking - for
| students, academics and nonfiction book writers._ , for advice
| on how writing the ideas in your own words is the primary task
| and improves not only writing, but all intellectual skills,
| including reading and thinking. C. Wright Mills in his 1952
| essay, ""On Intellectual Craftsmanship" says much the same
| thing. Stating the ideas _in your own words_ is thinking.
| i1856511 wrote:
| If you do not know how to say something, you don't know how to
| say it.
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| When I microwave a frozen meal for dinner, I'm still a chef,
| but I'm freed from the mechanics of preparing and assembling
| ingredients to form a dish.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| You can also use a microwave to bloom spices, or thaw frozen
| veggies from your home garden, or steam things, or thicken
| sauces, ...
|
| The microwave is a tool with certain useful aspects and
| certain limitations. It is also a tool which can lead to
| faster outcomes of things you need to do if the tool didn't
| exist. At what point should a chef draw the line in the tools
| they use? Should I forgo microwaves? What about pressure
| cookers? Ovens? Surely knives are fair game? Maybe I should
| knap flint and butcher meat with it and cook over an open
| campfire -- then truly no one can claim I am not a chef.
| jebarker wrote:
| > nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already
| produces--or soon will.
|
| No LLM can ever express your unique human experience (or even
| speak from experience), so on that axis of competition you win by
| default.
|
| Regurgitating facts and the mean opinion on topics is no
| replacement for the thoughts of a unique human. The idea that
| you're competing with AI on some absolute scale of the quality of
| your thought is a sad way to live.
| steamrolled wrote:
| More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8
| billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel
| you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story
| you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill
| you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more
| capable of doing the same.
|
| It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal
| is to be #1 on the planet, the odds are not in your favor. And
| if you get there, it's almost certainly going to be
| unfulfilling. Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world? The
| #1 topologist? Do they get a lot of recognition and love?
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| a fun thing about having a high-dimensional fitness function
| is that it's pretty easy to not be strictly worse than anyone
| bconsta wrote:
| pareto adequate
| musicale wrote:
| > Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world?
|
| James Gosling, of course[1]. Next question...
|
| > The #1 topologist?
|
| I'm not a mathematician, but... maybe Akshay Venkatesh, who
| won the Fields Medal in 2018?
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005008
| imhoguy wrote:
| But inevitably you lose in the flood of enshitified creations
| made with LLMs.
|
| I think we will come back to roots, the simple in person
| creation: pen and paper, declamation, theatre, live
| performance, hand painting, improvisation, handmade work.
|
| Maybe not everybody but it will be for (mentally) free people.
| martin-t wrote:
| This resonates with me deeply.
|
| I used to write open source a lot but lately, I don't see the
| point. Not because I think LLMs can produce novel code as good
| code as me or will be able to in the near future. But because any
| time I come up with a new solution to something, it will be
| stolen and used without my permission, without giving me credit
| or without giving users the rights I give them. And it will be
| mangled just enough that I can't prove anything.
|
| Large corporations were so anal about copyright that people who
| ever saw Microsoft's code were forbidden from contributing to
| FOSS alternatives like wine. But only as long as copyright suited
| them. Now abolishing copyright promises the C-suite even bigger
| rewards by getting rid of those pesky expensive programmers, if
| only they could just steal enough code to mix and match it with
| enough plausible deniability.
|
| And so even though _in principle_ anybody using my AGPL code or
| anything that incorporates my AGPL code has the right to inspect
| and modify said code; yet now tine fractions of my AGPL code now
| have millions or potentially billions of users but nobody knows
| and nobody has the right to do anything about it.
|
| And those who benefit the most are those who already have more
| money than they can spend.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Agreed. I keep seeing posts where people claim the output is all
| that really matters (particularly with code), and I think that's
| missing something deeply fundamental about being human.
| boznz wrote:
| Think Bigger. As the LLM's capability expands use it to push
| yourself outside your comfort zone every now and then. I have
| done some great fun projects recently I would have never thought
| of tackling before
| cess11 wrote:
| This person should probably read pre-Internet books, discover or
| rediscover that the bar for passable expression in text is very
| low compared to what it was.
|
| Most of that 'corpus' isn't even on the Internet so it is wholly
| unknown to our "AI" masters.
| tibbar wrote:
| AI is far better in style than in substance. That is, an AI-
| written solution will have all the trappings of expertise and
| deep thought, but frankly is usually at best mediocre. It's sort
| of like when you hear someone make a very eloquent point and your
| instinct is to think "wow, that's the final word on the subject,
| then!" ... and then someone who _actually understands_ the
| subject points out the flaw in the elegant argument, and it falls
| down like a house of cards. So, at least for now, don 't be
| fooled! Develop expertise, be the person who really understands
| stuff.
| uludag wrote:
| What happens to conversation in this case? When groups of people
| are trained to use LLMs as a crutch for thinking, what happens
| when people get together and need to discuss something. I feel
| like the averageness of the thinking would get compounded so that
| the conversation as a whole becomes nothing but a staging ground
| for a prompt. Would an hour long conversation about the
| intricacies of a system architecture become a ten minute chatter
| of what prompts people would want to ask? Does everyone then
| channel their LLM to the rest of the group? In the end, would the
| most probable response to which all LLMs being used agree with be
| the result of the conversation?
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Eventually the LLMs get plugged directly into our brains and do
| all our thinking and lip movements for us. We can all be Sam
| Altman's meatpuppets.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| I want to see people who used LLMs all their conscious life
| enter the workforce. It's going to be amazing. I mean soon
| we'll see people who are essentially raised by LLMs.
| mlboss wrote:
| What we need is mental gyms. In modern society there is no need
| for physical labor but we go to gyms just to keep ourselves
| healthy.
|
| Similarly in future we will not need mental "labor" but to keep
| ourselves sharp we need engage in mental exercises. I am thinking
| of picking up chess again just for this reason.
| incognito124 wrote:
| IMO chess is not the best mental gym. Personally, I've started
| exercising mental arithmetics
| spinach wrote:
| I've had the same experience but with drawing. What's the point
| when AI can generate perfect finished pieces in seconds? Why put
| all that effort in to learning and drawing something. It's always
| been hard for me but it used to feel worth it for the finished
| piece, but now you can bring a piece of computer art into being
| with a simple word prompt.
|
| I still create, I just use physical materials like clay and such,
| to make things that AI can't yet replicate.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| AI won't create something perfect or even better. And to the
| extent we enjoy creating for its own sake that's still there.
| But it's true that real creators will have a harder time being
| seen by others when there's an ocean of slop being shoved down
| our throats by parties with endless budgets.
| regurgist wrote:
| You are in a maze of twisty little passages that are not the
| same. You have to figure out which ones are not. Try this. The
| world is infinitely complex. AI is very good at dealing with the
| things it knows and can know. It can write more accurately than I
| can, spell better. It just takes stuff I do and learns from my
| mistakes. I'm good with that. But here is something to ask AI:
|
| Name three things you cannot think about because of the language
| you use?
|
| Or "why do people cook curds when making cheese."
|
| Or how about this:
|
| "Name three things you cannot think about because of the language
| you use?"
|
| AI is at least to some extent a artificial regurgitarian. It can
| tell you about things that have been thought. Cool. But here is a
| question for you. Are there things that you can think about that
| have not been thought about before?
|
| The reason people cook curds is because the goal of cheese making
| was to preserve milk, not to make cheese.
| curl-up wrote:
| > The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because
| nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already
| produces--or soon will.
|
| So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself,
| but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to
| others not being able to create? I find this to be a very
| unhealthy relationship to creativity.
|
| My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but I still enjoy
| kneading it by hand. The incredibly good artisanal bakery down
| the street did not reduce my enjoyment of baking, even though I
| cannot compete with them in quality by any measure. Modern slip
| casting can make superior pottery by many different quality
| measures, but potters enjoy throwing it on a wheel and producing
| unique pieces.
|
| But if your idea of fun is tied to the "no one else can do this
| but me", then you've been doing it wrong before AI existed.
| patcon wrote:
| Yeah, I think you're onto something. I'm not sure the
| performative motivation is necessarily bad, but def different
|
| Maybe AI is like Covid, where it will reveal that there were
| subtle differences in the underlying humans all along, but we
| just never realized it until something shattered the ability
| for ambiguity to persist.
|
| I'm inclined to so that this is a destabilising thing,
| regardless of my thoughts on the "right" way to think about
| creativity. Multiple ways could coexist before, and now one way
| no longer "works".
| quantumgarbage wrote:
| I think you are way past the argument the writer is making.
| ebiester wrote:
| Let's frame it more generously: The reward is based on being
| able to contribute something novel to the world - not because
| nobody else can but because it's another contribution to the
| world's knowledge.
| curl-up wrote:
| If the core idea that was intended to be broadcasted to the
| world was a "contribution", and LLM simply expanded on it,
| then I would view LLMs simply a component in that
| broadcasting operation (just as the internet infrastructure
| would be), and the author's contribution would still be
| intact, and so should his enjoyment.
|
| But his argument does not align with that. His argument is
| that he enjoys the act of writing itself. If he views his act
| of writing (regardless of the idea being transmitted) as his
| "contribution to world's knowledge", then I have to say I
| disagree - I don't think his writing is particularly
| interesting in and of itself. His ideas might be interesting
| (even if I disagree), but he obviously doesn't find the
| formation of ideas enjoyable enough.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Now you can contribute something novel to the world by
| pressing a button. Sounds like an improvement.
| drdeca wrote:
| If one merely presses a button (the same button, not
| choosing what button to push based on context), I don't see
| what it is that one has contributed? One of those tippy
| bird toys can press a button.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| I can draw a circle on a piece of paper and that's a
| serious contribution?
|
| Where is the line drawn?
|
| Is me sneezing a contribution to the world of art, since
| art is all about interpretation(tm)(r)(c) and some smarmy
| critic will do a piece on how my sneeze is a visceral
| physical performative art illustrating the downfall of
| the modern world where technology binds us and we spend
| too much time inside surrounded by screens and dust and
| co2.
|
| Nah, I just sneezed. That's all.
| drdeca wrote:
| It sounds to me like you are maybe agreeing with me but
| thought that I was expressing the opposite of what I did,
| and so are phrasing it as if it were disagreement?
|
| Or maybe you are just agreeing, and did understand that
| my point was that I don't think pressing a button is a
| contribution.
|
| If you are disagreeing with my comment, can you explain
| how this is disagreeing?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| The primary motivation should be wisdom. No one can become
| wise for you. You don't become any wiser yourself that way.
| And a machine isn't even capable of being wise.
|
| So while AI might remove the need for human beings to engage
| in certain practical activities, it cannot eliminate the
| theoretical, because by definition, theory is done for its
| own sake, to benefit the person theorizing by leading them to
| understanding something about the world. AI can perhaps find
| a beneficial place here in the way books or teachers do, as
| guides. But in all these cases, you absolutely need to engage
| with the subject matter yourself to profit from it.
| mionhe wrote:
| It sounds as if the reward is primarily monetary in this
| case.
|
| As some others have commented, you can find rewards that
| aren't monetary to motivate you, and you can find ways to
| make your work so unique that people are willing to pay for
| it.
|
| Technology forces us to use the creative process to more
| creatively monetize our work.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| Let's be honest, humans have been creating slop for much
| longer then machines. Not a bad thing, but don't put it all
| on a pedestal.
| drdaeman wrote:
| If that's the source of author's existential crisis, they may
| possibly find it interesting to meditate on the idea that
| there's no thinker behind the thought, and the impermanence
| of "self".
|
| Even if they don't buy all the way into the whole hard
| incompatiblism thing, the idea is that they may find some
| value _in the process_.
| movpasd wrote:
| Sometimes the fun is in creating something useful, as a human,
| for humans. We want to feel useful to our tribe.
| rkhassen9 wrote:
| I think you articulated the actual point of the OP. It isn't
| so much about creating something better than anyone else, but
| it is a feeling that your contribution and world means
| something.
|
| AI can somehow cause one to react with a feeling of futility.
|
| Engaging in acts of creation, and responding to others acts
| of creation seems a way out of that feeling.
| Tuperoir wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Self-actualisation should be about doing the things that only
| you can. Not better than anyone else, but more like, the
| specific things that ony you, with the same of your experience,
| expertise, values and constraints can do.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Knowing that what I do anyone can do, no matter how well I'll
| do it, is discouraging. Because then, what is my purpose? What
| can I say that I'm good at?
| curl-up wrote:
| Would you say that the chess players became "purposeless"
| with Deep Blue, or Go players with Alpha Go?
| rfw300 wrote:
| It's interesting that you name those examples, because Lee
| Sedol, the all-time great Go player, retired shortly after
| losing to Alpha Go, saying: "Even if I become the number
| one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated... losing
| to AI, in a sense, meant my entire world was collapsing...
| I could no longer enjoy the game. So I retired." [1, 2]
|
| So for some, yes. It is of course also true that many
| people derive self-worth and fulfillment from contributing
| positively to the world, and AI automating the productive
| work in which they specialize can undermine that.
|
| [1] https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20191127004800315
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/world/asia/lee-
| saedol-go-...
| curl-up wrote:
| I am in no way disputing that some people would feel that
| way because of AI, just as some performing classical
| musicians felt that way in the advent of the audio
| recorder.
|
| What I am saying is that (1) I regard this as an
| unhealthy relationship to creativity (and I accept that
| this is subjective), and (2) that most people do not feel
| that way, as can be confirmed by the fact that chess, go,
| and live music performances are all still very much
| practiced.
| aprdm wrote:
| That's a deeper question that only you can answer. I can only
| say that your thinking based on how you phrased it doesn't
| really lead to happiness in general
| rkhassen9 wrote:
| It is the societal recognition and value of level and
| contribution that AI threatens and weakens. This is the
| true loss.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| But I'm a human, I need to eat.
|
| In case that would happen - welp, I'm out of job, out of
| something I went to school and studied for a few years, now
| without purpose or "real" skills (as LLMs are on the same
| level as I).
| yapyap wrote:
| I mean yeah apparently so for the OP but I'm sure he did not
| mean for it to be that way intentionally
| jsemrau wrote:
| "The fun has been sucked out of the process of preparing food
| because nothing I make organically can compete with what
| restaurants/supermarkets already produces--or soon will."
| getpokedagain wrote:
| I don't think it's solely the rub in others faces that they
| can't create. You hope they learn to as well.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation
| itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel
| superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be
| a very unhealthy relationship to creativity.
|
| People realize this at various points in their life, and some
| not at all.
|
| In terms the author might accept, the metaphor of the stoic
| archer comes to mind. Focusing on the action, not the target is
| what relieves one of the disappointment of outcome. In this
| cast, the action is writing while the target is having better
| thoughts.
|
| Much of our life is governed by the success at which we hit our
| targets, but why do that to oneself? We have a choice in how we
| approach the world, and setting our intentions toward action
| and away from targets is a subtle yet profound shift.
|
| A clearer example might be someone who wants to make a friend.
| Let's imagine they're at a party and they go in with the
| intention of making a friend, they're setting themselves up for
| failure. They have relatively little control over that outcome.
| However, if they go in with the intention of showing up
| authentically - something people tend to appreciate, and
| something they have full control over - the changes of them
| succeeding increase dramatically.
|
| Choosing one's goals - primarily grounded in action - is an
| under-appreciated perspective.
| sifar wrote:
| >> Focusing on the action, not the target is what relieves
| one of the disappointment of outcome.
|
| The primary reason is not that it relieves us of the
| disappointment, but that worrying about the outcome increases
| our anxiety and impacts our action which hampers the outcome.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > Focusing on the action, not the target is what relieves one
| of the disappointment of outcome.
|
| This is true, but the tough part is it's not the whole story.
|
| First, obviously along some dimensions of life, targets
| matter. If we need to grow food to eat, the pleasant feeling
| of working in the garden isn't going to be sufficient; if we
| need to strengthen a dike to prevent the town from being
| inundated, the sensation of swinging a hammer isn't going to
| cut it.
|
| > However, if they go in with the intention of showing up
| authentically - something people tend to appreciate, and
| something they have full control over - the changes of them
| succeeding increase dramatically.
|
| That is true, but it's also possible for a person to _feel_
| like they are being authentic (and even to be correct about
| that), yet still seem off-putting to others, perhaps for
| reasons they aren 't aware of. Even if they're not focused on
| the "target" of making a friend, there are intermediate
| targets like "interact with other people in a way that they
| (not just I) enjoy", and if those targets aren't met,
| eventually a reckoning must come.
|
| So the second point is that evaluating the "action" is an
| internal perspective that can become out of sync with reality
| even in cases where the result isn't so critical. We may not
| want to be focused on "end goals" but we need some amount of
| focus on external calibrators of some sort, to keep us from
| descending into solipcism.
|
| Then the third thing is that (maybe because of the first
| two), people have a tendency to extend their results-oriented
| mindset more and more, and even if an individual resists
| this, they have to deal with the fact that everyone around
| them may be doing it. So even if you take the view that
| writing is a human activity that should be valued for the
| gusto and AI writing is missing the point, if everyone around
| you stops writing and starts using AI instead, a lot of
| important stuff in the penumbra of the activity can be
| weakened. Like it becomes harder to put together a writing
| club/workshop etc., maybe even to buy books. And in
| particular it can become harder to straddle the line between
| target and action in terms of employment and generally
| meeting your material needs. There are plenty of people who
| have artistic skill and have a job where they get to use it
| to some extent (e.g., graphic design), and even though it may
| have some distasteful commercial aspects, they can still get
| some of that "action satisfaction" from their job. But if AI
| eats all the graphic design jobs, now you have to spend _all_
| your work hours doing something that gives you none of that
| satisfaction, and cram all the satisfying artistic action
| into your free time.
|
| The same is true for technical tasks. A lot of the dismay
| over the use of AI for programming arises because people used
| to be able to get paid for doing things that also gave them a
| sense of satisfaction for engaging in a sort of problem-
| solving task that they enjoyed as an action. Now it's harder
| to do that, but everyone still has to eat, so they have to
| give up some of the satisfaction they used to get because
| they can't get paid for it anymore.
|
| I agree that, for an individual, shifting the mindset to
| action can be helpful. But we as individuals live in the
| world, and the more an individual's mindset becomes out of
| step with that of his society, the harder it becomes to live
| in accordance with that mindset. So I think we also need to
| apply pressure to create a societal mindset that values and
| supports the kinds of individual mindsets we want people to
| have.
| ankit219 wrote:
| This is a very millennial style of thinking (myself
| included). It feels like people can't just have a hobby, they
| have to be great at it. The sense of greatness, the sense of
| accomplishment is not merely doing a thing, but getting to an
| outcome which is measurable and/or which we can tell others
| or put on social media. I thought it was only me, but turns
| out this is all around me. I started gardening, spending 15
| mins a day, I talk to a friend around it. They tell me about
| this gardening insta page, tips, and community. The community
| has people doing things at a better pace / rate than me.
| Putting in more effort than me. I suddenly feel that rush to
| have some competition. Then it becomes boring because the fun
| was the fifteen minutes i spent in there, not the part where
| it occupied rest of my day. Side projects, writing, painting,
| I somehow see people doing this all the time. Picking the
| wrong goals, or expecting a dopamine hit from wrong places.
|
| Choosing the right goals is the great way to put that in
| perspective. I don't know what happened with hobbies, but
| it's not there anymore. (so much that i dont tell people i do
| xyz things on the side)
| garrettj wrote:
| Yeah, there's something this person needs to embrace about the
| process rather than being some kind of modern John Henry,
| comparing themselves to a machine. There's still value in the
| things a person creates despite what AI can derive from its
| training model of Reddit comments. Find peace in the process of
| making and you'll continue to love it.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| We need to start taking a leaf of advice from spiritual
| knowledge that "You are not the doer." You were never the doer.
| The doing happened on its own. You were merely a vessel, an
| instrument. A Witness. Observe your inner mechanisms of mind,
| and you will quickly come to this realisation.
| wcfrobert wrote:
| I think the article is getting at the fact that in a post-AGI
| world, human skill is a depreciating asset. This is terrifying
| because we exchange our physical and mental labor for money.
| Consider this: why would a company hire me if - with enough GPU
| and capital - they can copy-and-paste 1,000 of AI agents much
| smarter to do the work?
|
| With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are
| worthless.
|
| While I'm genuinely excited about the scientific progress AGI
| will bring (e.g. curing all diseases), I really hope there's a
| place for me in the post-AGI world. Otherwise, like the potters
| and bakers who can't compete in the market with cold-hard
| industrial machines, I'll be selling my python code base on
| Etsy.
|
| No Set Gauge had an excellent blog post about this. Have a read
| if you want a dash of existential dread for the weekend:
| https://www.nosetgauge.com/p/capital-agi-and-human-ambition.
| senordevnyc wrote:
| This is only terrifying because of how we've structured
| society. There's a version of the trajectory we're on that
| leads to a post-scarcity society. I'm not sure we can pull
| that off as a species, but even if we can, it's going to be a
| bumpy road.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| the barrier to that version of the trajectory is that "we"
| haven't structured society. what structure exists, exists
| as a result of capital extracting as much wealth from labor
| as labor will allow (often by dividing class interests
| among labor).
|
| agreed on the bumpy road - i don't see how we'll reach a
| post-scarcity society unless there is an intentional
| restructuring (which, many people think, would require a
| pretty violent paradigm shift).
| jackphilson wrote:
| I think we think of it as 'extracting' because people are
| coerced into jobs that they hate. I think AI can help us
| exit the paradigm of working as extracting. Basically,
| passion economy (ai handles marketing, internet
| distribution). Allows you to focus on what you actually
| like, but it can actually make money this time.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| to be trite, we've been promised a world where AI will
| help to alleviate the menial necessities so that we're
| free to pursue our passions. in reality, what we're
| getting is AI that replaces the human component of
| passion projects (art, music, engineering as craft),
| leaving the "actually-hard-to-replace" "low-class" roles
| (cashiering, trash collection, housekeeping, farming,
| etc) to humans who generally have few other economic
| options.
|
| without a dramatic shift in wealth distribution (no less
| than the elimination of private wealth and the profit
| motive), we can't have a post-scarcity society.
| capitalism depends entirely upon scarcity, artificial or
| not.
| 9dev wrote:
| That seems like a very narrow perspective. For one, it is
| neither clear we will end up with AGI at all--we could have
| reached or soon reach a plateau with the possibilities of the
| LLM technology--or whether it'll work like what you're
| describing; the energy requirements might not be feasible,
| for example, or usage is so expensive it's just not worth
| applying it to every mundane task under the sun, like writing
| CRUD apps in Python. We know how to build flying cars,
| technically, but it's just not economically sustainable to
| use them. And finally, you never know what niches are going
| to be freed up or created by the ominous AGI machines
| appearing on the stage.
|
| I wouldn't worry too much yet.
| Animats wrote:
| > With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they
| are worthless.
|
| "Knowledge workers" being in charge is a recent idea that is,
| perhaps, reaching end of life. Up until WWII or so, society
| had more smart people than it had roles for them. For most of
| history, being strong and healthy, with a good voice and a
| strong personality, counted for more than being smart. To a
| considerable extent, it still does.
|
| In the 1950s, C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" became famous for
| pointing out that the smart people were on the way up.[1]
| They hadn't won yet; that was about two decades ahead. The
| triumph of the nerds took until the early 1990s.[2] The
| ultimate victory was, perhaps, the collapse of the Soviet
| Union in 1991. That was the last major power run by goons.
| That's celebrated in The End of History and the Last Man
| (1992).[3] Everything was going to be run by technocrats and
| experts from now on.
|
| But it didn't last. Government by goons is back. Don't need
| to elaborate on that.
|
| The glut of smart people will continue to grow. Over half of
| Americans with college educations work in jobs that don't
| require a college education. AI will accelerate that process.
| It doesn't require AI superintelligence to return smart
| people to the rabble. Just AI somewhat above the human
| average.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/triumph_of_the_nerds
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_
| Las...
| rkhassen9 wrote:
| I've thought the same. Goons powered by AI, that is.
| drdaeman wrote:
| > With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they
| are worthless.
|
| The article you've linked fundamentally relies on the
| assumption that "the tasks can be done better/faster/cheaper
| by AIs". (Plus, of course, the idea that AGI would be
| achieved, but without this one the whole discussion would be
| pointless as it would lack the subject, so I'm totally fine
| with this one.)
|
| Nothing about AGI (as in "a machine that can produce
| intelligent thoughts on a given matter") says that human and
| non-human knowledge workers would have some obvious leverage
| over each other. Just like my coworkers' existence doesn't
| hurt mine, a non-human intelligence is of no _inherent_
| threat. Not by definition.
|
| Non-intelligent industrial robotics is well-researched and
| generally available, yet we have plenty of sweatshops because
| they turn out to be cheaper than robot factories. Not fun,
| not great, I'm no fond of this, but I'm merely taking it as a
| fact, as it is how it currently is. So I really wouldn't dare
| to unquestionably assume that "cheaper" would be true.
|
| And then "better" isn't obvious either. Intelligence is
| intelligence, it can think, it can make guesses, it can make
| logical conclusions, and it can make mistakes too - but we've
| yet to see even the tiniest hints of "higher levels" of it,
| something that would make humans out of the league of
| thinking machines if we're ranking on some "quality" of
| thinking.
|
| I can only buy "faster" - and even that requires an
| assumption that we ignore any transhumanist ideas. But,
| surely, "faster" alone doesn't cut it?
| gibbitz wrote:
| I think the point is that part of the value of a work of art to
| this point is the effort or lack of effort involved in its
| creation. Evidence of effort has traditionally been a sign of
| the quality of thought put into a work as a product of time
| spent in its creation. LLMs short circuit this instinct in
| evaluation making some think works generated by AI are better
| than they are while simultaneously making those who create work
| see it as devaluation of work (which is the demotivator here).
|
| I'm curious why so any people see creators and intellectuals as
| competitive people trying to prove they're better than someone
| else. This isn't why people are driven to seek knowledge or
| create Art. I'm sure everyone has their reasons for this, but
| it feels like insecurity from the outside.
|
| Looking at debates about AI and Art outside of IP often brings
| out a lot of misunderstandings about what makes good Art and
| why Art is a thing man has been compelled to make since the
| beginning of the species. It takes a lifetime to select
| techniques and thought patterns that define a unique and
| authentic voice. A lifetime of working hard on creating things
| adds up to that voice. When you start to believe that work is
| in vain because the audience doesn't know the difference it
| certainly doesn't make it feel rewarding to do.
| gibbitz wrote:
| To put it another way: if we made a machine that could
| instantly create a baby, how would that effect the notion of
| motherhood? Sure children are adopted or born to surrogacy
| but the connection formed during gestation and that time
| itself is a huge part of our notion of the connection between
| mother and child. Being an Artist is the same thing, an
| identity bred from gestation proved by the ends.
|
| Before the rise of Western culture, ancient cultures didn't
| attribute an artist to a work. Think Ancient Greece or Egypt.
| These cultures still produced Art because the culture valued
| it, but in society these creators were seen as tradesmen or
| they were slaves. AI used in this way both reduces cultural
| value and removes or reduces the social status of the
| creator.
|
| I find it telling that LLMs are quite adept at mash-ups and
| decisions based on data analysis which in my experience is
| what most business managers do. Why are we not using AI to
| replace worthless middle management? After all they are lower
| skilled and higher paid than many developers. I'd argue that
| anyone who thinks you can replace a job with AI is not doing
| that job as a career. AI devs who think LLM can replace Java
| web developers are not Java web developers. Internet trolls
| who think LLM can replace Artists are not Artists. I think
| this moment we're in is revealing that we've become so siloed
| that we have lost our curiosity about each other and cultural
| history. It's frightening to see how we're changing our
| culture to accommodate a technology at the expense of people
| and just how blase we are about it.
| woah wrote:
| > But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a
| potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few
| sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully
| reasoned, researched, and completed thought. Minimal organic
| thinking required.
|
| No offense, but I've found that AI outputs very polished but very
| average work. If I am working on something more original, it is
| hard to get AI to output reasoning about it without heavy
| explanation and guidance. And even then, it will "revert to the
| mean" and stumble back into a rut of familiar concepts after a
| few prompts. Guiding it back onto the original idea repeatedly
| quickly uses up context.
|
| If an AI is able to take a sliver of an idea and output something
| very polished from it, then it probably wasn't that original in
| the first place.
| apsurd wrote:
| If you are in the camp of "ends justify the means" then it makes
| sense why all this is scary and nihilistic. What's the point
| doing anything if the outcome is infinitely better done in some
| other way by some other thing/being/agent?
|
| If the "means justify the ends" then doing anything is its own
| reason.
|
| And in the _end_, the cards will land where they may. ends-
| justify-means is really logical and alluring, until I realize why
| am I optimizing for END?
| ankit219 wrote:
| Familiar scenario. One thing that would help is to use AI as
| someone you are having a conversation with.
|
| (most AIs need to be explicitly told before you start this). You
| tell them not to agree with you, to ask more questions instead of
| providing the answers, to offer justifications and background as
| to why those questions are being asked. This helps you refine
| your ideas more, understand the blind spots, and explore
| different perspectives. Yes, an LLM can refine the idea for you,
| especially if something like that is already explored. It can
| also be the brainstorming accessory who helps you to think
| harder. Come up with new ideas. The key is to be intentional
| about which way you want it. I once made Claude roleplay as a
| busy exec who would not be interested in my offering until i
| refined it 7 times (and it kept offering reasons as to why an AI
| exec would or would not read it).
| regurgist wrote:
| You are in a maze of twisty little passages that are not the
| same. You have to figure out which ones are not.
|
| Try this. The world is infinitely complex. AI is very good at
| dealing with the things it knows and can know. It can write more
| accurately than I can, spell better. It just takes stuff I do and
| learns from my mistakes. I'm good with that. But here is
| something to ask AI:
|
| "Name three things you cannot think about because of the language
| you use?"
|
| Or "why do people cook curds when making cheese."
|
| Or how about this:
|
| "Name three things you cannot think about because of the language
| you use?"
|
| AI is at least to some degree an artificial regurgitarian. It can
| tell you about things that have been thought. Cool. But here is a
| question for you. Are there things that you can think about that
| have not been thought about before or that have been thought
| about incorrectly?
|
| The reason people cook curds is because the goal of cheese making
| was (in the past) to preserve milk, not to make cheese.
| dave1999x wrote:
| I really don't understand your point. This in nonsense to me.
| agotterer wrote:
| I appreciate your thoughts and definitely share some of your
| sentiments. But don't underestimate the value and importance of
| continuing to be a creative.
|
| Something I've been thinking about lately is the idea of creative
| stagnation due to AI. If AI's creativity relies entirely on
| training from existing writing, anrchitecture, art, music,
| movies, etc., then future AI might end up being trained only on
| derivatives of today's work. If we stop generating original ideas
| or developing new styles of art, music, etc., how long before
| society gets stuck endlessly recycling the same sounds, concepts,
| and designs?
| MinimalAction wrote:
| > My thinking systems have atrophied, and I can feel it.
|
| I do understand where the author is coming from. Most of the
| times, it is easy to _read_ an answer---regardless of whether it
| is right /wrong, relevant or not---than _think_ of an answer. So
| AI does take that friction of thinking away.
|
| But, I am still disappointed of all this doom because of AI. I am
| inclined to throw my hands and say "just don't use it then". The
| process of thinking is where the fun lies, not in showing the
| world I am better or always right than so and so.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because
| nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already
| produces--or soon will.
|
| I find immense joy and satisfaction when I write poetry. It's
| like crafting a puzzle made of words and emotions. While I do
| enjoy the output, if there is any goal it is to tap into and be
| absorbed by the process itself.
|
| Meanwhile, code? At least for me, and to speak nothing of those
| that approach the craft differently, it is (almost) nothing but a
| means to an ends! I do enjoy the little projects I work on. Hmm,
| maybe for me software is about adding another tool to the belt
| that will help with the ongoing journey. Who knows. It definitely
| feels very different to outsource coding than to outsource my
| artistic endeavors.
|
| One thing that I know won't go away are the small pockets of
| poetry readings, singer-songwriters, and other artistic
| approaches that are decidedly more personal in both creation and
| audience. There are engaged audiences for art and there are
| passive consumers. I don't think this changes much with AI.
| Centigonal wrote:
| > But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a
| potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few
| sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully
| reasoned, researched, and completed thought.
|
| I can't relate to this at all. The reason I write, debate, or
| think at all is to find out what I believe and discover my voice.
| Having an LLM write an essay based on one of my thoughts is about
| as "me" as reading a thinkpiece that's tangentially related to
| something I care about. I write because I want to get _my_
| thoughts out onto the page, in _my_ voice.
|
| I find LLMs useful for a lot of things, but using an LLM to
| shortcut personal writing is antithetical to what I see as the
| purpose of personal writing.
| sippndipp wrote:
| I understand the depression. I'm a developer (professional) and I
| make music (ambitious hobby). Both arts heavily in a
| transformational process.
|
| I'd like to challenge a few things. I rarely have a moment where
| an LLM provides me a creative spark. It's more that I don't
| forget anything from the mediocre galaxy of thoughts.
|
| See AI as a tool.
|
| A tool that helps you to automate repetitive cognitive work.
| hodder wrote:
| "AI could probably have written this post far more quickly,
| eloquently, and concisely. It's horrifying."
|
| ChatGPT write that post more eloquently:
|
| May 16, 2025 On Thinking
|
| I've been stuck.
|
| Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or
| start a project, I hit the same wall: in the age of AI, it all
| feels pointless. It's unsettling. The joy of creation--the spark
| that once came from building something original--feels dimmed, if
| not extinguished. Because no matter what I make, AI can already
| do it better. Or soon will.
|
| What used to feel generative now feels futile. My thoughts seem
| like rough drafts of ideas that an LLM could polish and complete
| in seconds. And that's disorienting.
|
| I used to write constantly. I'd jot down ideas, work them over
| slowly, sculpting them into something worth sharing. I'd obsess
| over clarity, structure, and precision. That process didn't just
| create content--it created thinking. Because for me, writing has
| always been how I think. The act itself forced rigor. It refined
| my ideas, surfaced contradictions, and helped me arrive at
| something resembling truth. Thinking is compounding. The more you
| do it, the sharper it gets.
|
| But now, when a thought sparks, I can just toss it into a prompt.
| And instantly, I'm given a complete, reasoned, eloquent response.
| No uncertainty. No mental work. No growth.
|
| It feels like I'm thinking--but I'm not. The gears aren't
| turning. And over time, I can feel the difference. My intuition
| feels softer. My internal critic, quieter. My cleverness, duller.
|
| I believed I was using AI in a healthy, productive way--a bicycle
| for the mind, a tool to accelerate my intellectual progress. But
| LLMs are deceptive. They simulate the journey, but they skip the
| most important part. Developing a prompt feels like work. Reading
| the output feels like progress. But it's not. It's passive
| consumption dressed up as insight.
|
| Real thinking is messy. It involves false starts, blind alleys,
| and internal tension. It requires effort. Without that, you may
| still reach a conclusion--but it won't be yours. And without
| building the path yourself, you lose the cognitive infrastructure
| needed for real understanding.
|
| Ironically, I now know more than ever. But I feel dumber. AI
| delivers polished thoughts, neatly packaged and persuasive. But
| they aren't forged through struggle. And so, they don't really
| belong to me.
|
| AI feels like a superintelligence wired into my brain. But when I
| look at how I explore ideas now, it doesn't feel like
| augmentation. It feels like sedation.
|
| Still, here I am--writing this myself. Thinking it through. And
| maybe that matters. Maybe it's the only thing that does.
|
| Even if an AI could have written this faster. Even if it could
| have said it better. It didn't.
|
| I did.
|
| And that means something.
| keernan wrote:
| >>the process of creation >>my original thoughts >>I'd have ideas
|
| As far as I can tell, LLMs are incapable of any of the above.
|
| I'd love to hear from LLM experts how LLMs can ever have original
| ideas using the current type of algorithms.
| aweiher wrote:
| Have you tried writing this article on .. AI? *scnr
| bsimpson wrote:
| I admittedly don't use AI as much as many others here, but I have
| noticed that whenever I take the time to write a hopefully-
| inciteful response in a place like Reddit, I immediately get
| people trying to dunk on me by accusing me of being an AI bot.
|
| It makes me not want to participate in those communities
| (although to be honest, spending less time commenting online
| would probably be good for me).
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| It'a vicious cycle. As AI gets better at writing, more people
| will rely on it to write for them, and as more AI content gains
| prominence, more people will tend to ape its style even when
| they do write something for themselves.
| quantadev wrote:
| There's quite a dichotomy going on in software development. With
| AI, we can all create much more than we ever could before, and
| make it much better and even in much less time, but what we've
| lost is the sense of pride that comes with the act of
| creating/coding, because nowadays:
|
| 1) If you wrote most of it yourself then you failed to adequately
| utilize AI Coding agents and yet...
|
| 2) If AI wrote most of it, then there's not exactly that much of
| a way to take pride in it.
|
| So the new thing we can "take pride in" is our ability to
| "control" the AI, and it's just not the same thing at all. So
| we're all going to be "changing jobs" whether we like it or not,
| because work will never be the same, regardless of whether you're
| a coder, an artist, a writer, or an AD agency fluff writer. Then
| again pride is a sin, so just GSD and stop thinking about
| yourself. :)
| hooverd wrote:
| Maybe, but will anyone understand what they are creating?
| quantadev wrote:
| Right. In the near term, I'm predicting a dramatic decline in
| software quality, because code was never understood and
| tested properly. In the future we will have better processes,
| and better ways of letting AI do it's own
| checking/validation, but that's lagging right now.
| hooverd wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see a society where there's a big
| negative incentive to actually sitting down and
| understanding how things work, in the name of efficiency.
| quantadev wrote:
| I've already noticed I'm getting lazy, because of AI, and
| other developer friends say they are also. I'd rather
| explain to an AI what I want done, instead of actually
| writing the code, just because it's easier to explain it
| than do it.
| ThomPete wrote:
| My way out of this was to start thinking about what can't the
| LLMs of the world do and my realization was actually quite simple
| and quite satisfying.
|
| What LLMs can't replace is network effects. One LLM is good but
| 10 LLMs/agents working together creating shared history is not
| replaceable by any LLM no matter how smart it becomes.
|
| So it's simple. Build something that benefit from network effects
| and you will quickly find new ideas, at least it worked for me.
|
| So now I am exploring ex. synthetic predictions markets via
| https://www.getantelope.com or
|
| Rethinking myspace but for agents instead like:
| https://www.firstprinciple.co/misc/AlmostFamous.mp4
|
| AI want's to be social :)
| xivzgrev wrote:
| in life and with people I think about a car, knowing when to go
| and when to stop
|
| some people are all go and no stop. we call them impulsive.
|
| some people may LOOK all go but have wisdom (or luck) behind the
| scenes putting the brakes on. Example: Tom Cruise does his own
| stunts, and must have a good sense for how to make it safe enough
|
| What this author touches on is a chief concern with AI. In the
| name of removing life friction, it removes your brakes. Anything
| you want to do, just ask AI!
|
| But should you?
|
| I was out the other day, pondering what the word "respect" really
| means. It's more elusive than simply liking someone. Several
| times I was tempted to just google it or ask AI, but then how
| would I develop my own point of view? This kind of thing feels
| important to have your own point of view on. And it's that we're
| losing - the things we should think about in this life, we'll be
| tempted to not anymore. And come out worse for it.
|
| All go, no brakes
| asim wrote:
| True. Now compare that to the creation of the universe and feel
| your insignificance of never being able to match it's creation in
| any form. Try to create the code that creates blades of grass.
| Good luck creating life. AI for all it's worth is a toy. One that
| shows us our own limitations but replace the word AI with God and
| understand that we spend a lot of time ruminating over things
| that don't matter. It's an opinion, don't kill me over it. But
| Dustin has reached an interesting point. What's the value of our
| time and effort and where should we place it? If the tools we
| create can do the things we used to do for "work" and "fun" then
| we need to get back to doing what only humans were made for.
| Being human.
| mattsears wrote:
| Peak Hacker News material
| rkhassen9 wrote:
| Agreed. It's been awhile!
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| My thoughts are that it's key that humans know they will _still
| get credit_ for their contributions.
|
| E.g. imagine it was the case that you could write a blog post,
| with some insight, in some niche field - but you know that
| traffic isn't going to get directed to your site. Instead, an LLM
| will ingest it, and use the material when people ask about the
| topic, without giving credit. _If you know that will happen, it
| 's not a good incentive to write the post in the first place._
| You might think, "what's the point".
|
| Related to this topic - computers have been superhuman at chess
| for 2 decades; yet good chess humans still get credit,
| recognition, and I would guess, satisfaction, from achieving the
| level they get to. Although, obviously the LLM situation is on a
| whole other level.
|
| I guess the main (valid) concern is that LLMs get so good at
| thought that humans just don't come up with ideas as good as
| them... And can't execute their ideas as well as them... And then
| what... (Although that doesn't seem to be the case currently.)
| datpuz wrote:
| > I guess the main (valid) concern is that LLMs get so good at
| thought
|
| I don't think that's a valid concern, because LLMs can't think.
| They are generating tokens one at a time. They're calculating
| the most likely token to appear based on the arrangements of
| tokens that were seen in their training data. There is no
| thinking, there is no reasoning. If they they seem like they're
| doing these things, it's because they are producing text that
| is based on unknown humans who actually did these things once.
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| > LLMs can't think. They are generating tokens one at a time
|
| Huh? They are generating tokens one at a time - sure that's
| true. But who's shown that predicting tokens one at a time
| precludes thinking?
|
| It's been shown that the models plan ahead, i.e. think more
| than just one token forward. [1]
|
| How do you explain the world models that have been detected
| in LLMs? E.g. OthelloGPT [2] is just given sequences of games
| to train on, but it has been shown that the model learns to
| have an internal representation of the game. Same with
| ChessGPT [3].
|
| For tasks like this, (and with words), _real thought is
| required to predict the next token well_ ; e.g. if you don't
| understand chess to the level of Magnus Carlsen, how are you
| going to predict Magnus Carlsen's next move...
|
| ...You wouldn't be able to, even just from looking at his
| previous games; you'd have to actually understand chess, and
| _think_ about what would be a good move, (and in his style).
|
| [1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-
| language...
|
| [2] https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-
| interpretability/othell...
|
| [3] https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/01/0
| 3/c...
| datpuz wrote:
| Yes, let's cite the most biased possible source: the
| company that's selling you the thing, which is banking on a
| runway funded on keeping the hype train going as long as
| possible...
| binary132 wrote:
| Ok, nice article. Now prove an AI didn't write it.
|
| As a matter of fact I'm starting to have my doubts about the
| other people writing glowing, longwinded comments on this
| discussion.
| zzzbra wrote:
| Reminds me of this:
|
| "There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained
| from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and
| relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all."
| -- Ben Horowitz
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I feel similar, except not because of AI but the internet. Almost
| all my knowledge and opinions have already been explained by
| other people who put in more effort than I could. Anything I'd
| create, art or computation, high-quality similar things already
| exist. Even this comment echoes similar writing.
|
| _Almost_. _Similar_. I still make things because sometimes what
| I find online (and what I can generate from AI) isn 't "good
| enough" and I think I can do better. Even when there's something
| similar that I can reuse, I still make things to develop my
| skills for further occasions when there isn't.
|
| For example, somebody always needs a slightly different
| JavaScript front-end or CRM, even though there must be hundreds
| (thousands? tens-of-thousands?) by now. There are many
| programming languages, UI libraries, operating systems, etc. and
| some have no real advantages, but many do and consequently have a
| small but dedicated user group. As a PhD student, I learn a lot
| about my field only to make a small contribution*, but chains of
| small contributions lead to breakthroughs.
|
| The outlook on creative works is even more optimistic, because
| there will probably never be enough due to desensitization.
| People watch new movies and listen to new songs not because
| they're _better_ but because they 're _different_. AI is
| especially bad at creative writing and artwork, probably because
| it fundamentally generates "average"; when AI art is good, it's
| because the human author gave it a creative prompt, and when AI
| art is _really_ good, it 's because the human author manually
| edited it post-generation. (I also suspect that when AI gets
| creative, people will become even more creative to compensate,
| like how I suspect today we have more movies that defy tropes and
| more video games with unique mechanics; but there's probably a
| limit, because something can only be so creative before it's
| random and/or uninteresting.)
|
| Maybe one day AI can automate production-quality software
| development, PhD-level research, and human-level creativity. But
| IME today's (at least publicly-facing) models really lack these
| abilities. I don't worry about when AI _is_ powerful enough to
| produce high-quality outputs (without specific high-quality
| prompts), because assuming it doesn 't lead to an apocalypse or
| dystopia, I believe the advantages are so great, the loss of
| human uniqueness won't matter anymore.
|
| * Described in https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
| pictures/
| rollinDyno wrote:
| I recently finished my PhD studies in social sciences. Even
| though it did not lead me to career improvements as I initially
| expected, I am happy I had the opportunity to undertake an
| academic endeavor before LLMs became cheap and ubiquitous.
|
| I bring up my studies because what the author is talking about
| strikes me as not having been ambitious enough in his thinking.
| If you prompt current LLMs with your idea and find the generated
| arguments and reasoning satisfactory, then you aren't really
| being rigorous or you're not having big enough ideas.
|
| I say this confidently because my studies showed me not only the
| methods in finding and contrasting evidence around any given
| issue, but also how much more there is to learn about the
| universe. So, if you're being rigorous enough to look at
| implications of your theories, finding datapoints that speak to
| your conclusions and find that your question has been answered,
| then your idea is too small for what the state of knowledge is in
| 2025.
| vaylian wrote:
| This is spot-on. LLMs only cover the things that are already
| documented/debated. Research requires looking at the current
| landscape of facts and theories and noticing the gaps that can
| be filled.
| analog31 wrote:
| Something I'm on the fence about, but just trying to figure out
| from observation, is whether the AI can decide what is
| _worthwhile_. It seems like most of the successes of AI that I
| 've seen are cases where someone is tasked with writing something
| that's not worth reading.
|
| Granted, that happened before AI. The vast majority of text in my
| in-box, I never read. I developed heuristics for deciding what to
| ignore. "Stuff that looks like it was probably generated" will
| probably be a new heuristic. It's subjective for now. One clue is
| if it seems more literate than the person who wrote it.
|
| Stuff that's written for school falls into that category. It
| existed for some reason other than being read, such as the hope
| that the activity of writing conferred some educational benefit.
| That was a heuristic too -- a rule of thumb for how to teach,
| that has been broken by AI.
|
| Sure, AI can be used to teach a job skill, which is writing text
| that's not worth reading. Who wants to be the one who looks the
| kids in the eye and explain this to them?
|
| On the other hand, I do use Copilot now, where I would have used
| Stackoverflow in the past.
| largbae wrote:
| This feels off, as if thinking were like chess and the game is
| now solved and over.
|
| What if you could turn your attention to much bigger things than
| you ever imagined before? What if you could use this new
| superpower to think more not less, to find ways to amplify your
| will and contribute to fields that were previously out of your
| reach?
| ahussain wrote:
| I fully agree. I for one am excited about a future in which we
| can take on bigger challenges. With (good) LLMs, we won't need
| to spend as much time thinking about "how" to get things done,
| and can spend more time lucidly deciding "what" we want done.
| sneak wrote:
| > _This post was written entirely by a human, with no assistance
| from AI. (Other than spell- and grammar-checking.)_
|
| That's not what "no assistance" means.
|
| I'm not nitpicking, however - I think this is an important point.
| The very concept of what "done completely by myself" means is
| shifting.
|
| The LLMs we have today are vastly better than the ones we had
| before. Soon, they will be even better. The complaint he makes
| about the intellectual journey being missing might be alleviated
| by an AI as intellectual sparring partner.
|
| I have a feeling this post basically just aliases to "they can
| think and act much faster than we can". Of course it's not as
| good, but 60-80% as good, 100x faster, might be net better.
| iamwil wrote:
| > But it doesn't really help me know anything new.
|
| Pursue that, since that's what LLMs haven't been helping you
| with. LLMs haven't really generated new knowledge, though there
| are hints of it--they have to be directed. There are two or three
| times when I felt the LLM output was really insightful without
| being directed.
|
| --
|
| At least for now, I find the stuff I have a lot of domain
| expertise in, the LLM's output just isn't quite up to snuff. I do
| a lot of work trying to get it to generate the right things with
| the right taste, and even using LLMs to generate prompts to feed
| into other LLMs to write code, and it's just not quite right.
| Their work just seems...junior.
|
| But for the stuff that I don't really have expertise in, I'm less
| discerning of the exact output. Even if it is junior, I'm
| learning from the synthesis of the topic. Since it's usually a
| means to an end to support the work that I do have expertise in,
| I don't mind that I didn't do that work.
| iamwil wrote:
| OP said something similar about writing blog posts when he found
| himself doing twitter a lot, back in 2013. So whatever he did to
| cope with tweeting, he can do the same with LLMs, since it seems
| like he's been writing a lot of blog posts since.
|
| > I've been thinking about this damn essay for about a year, but
| I haven't written it because Twitter is so much easier than
| writing, and I have been enormously tempted to just tweet it, so
| instead of not writing anything, I'm just going to write about
| what I would have written if Twitter didn't destroy my desire to
| write by making things so easy to share.
|
| and
|
| > But here's the worst thing about Twitter, and the thing that
| may have permanently destroyed my mind: I find myself walking
| down the street, and every fucking thing I think about, I also
| think, "How could I fit that into a tweet that lots of people
| would favorite or retweet?"
|
| https://dcurt.is/what-i-would-have-written
| smcleod wrote:
| Perhaps they simply are someone who struggles with finding
| identity and value in change and adaptation.
| dcurtis wrote:
| History rhymes. It's funny that my problem back then was
| jamming fully formed thoughts into tweets, and now my problem
| is developing seeds of ideas into fully formed thoughts.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| > All of my original thoughts feel like early drafts of better,
| more complete thoughts that simply haven't yet formed inside an
| LLM
|
| I would like access to whatever LLM the author is using, because
| I cannot relate to this at all. Nearly all LLM output I've ever
| generated has been average, middle-of-the-road predictable slop.
| Maybe back in the GPT-3 days before all LLMs were RLHF'd to
| death, they could sometimes come up with novel (to me) ideas, but
| nowadays often I don't even bother actually sending the prompt
| I've written, because I have a rough idea of what the output is
| going to be, and that's enough to hop to the next idea.
| ay wrote:
| Very strange. Either the author uses some magic AI, or I am
| holding it wrong. I used LLMs since a couple of years, as a nice
| tool.
|
| Besides that:
|
| I have tried using LLMs to create cartoon pictures. The first
| impression is "wow"; but after a bunch of pictures you see the
| evidently repetitive "style".
|
| Using LLMs to write poetry results is also quite cool at first,
| but after a few iterations you see the evidently repetitive
| "style", which is bland and lacks depth and substance.
|
| Using LLMs to render music is amazing at first, but after a while
| you can see the evidently repetitive style - for both rhymes and
| music.
|
| Using NotebookLM to create podcasts at first feels amazing, about
| to open the gates of knowledge; but then you notice that the flow
| is very repetitive, and that the "hosts" don't really show enough
| understanding to make it interesting. Interrupting them with
| questions somewhat dilutes this impression, though, so jury is
| out here.
|
| Again, with generating the texts, they get a distant metallic
| taste that is hard to ignore after a while.
|
| The search function is okay, but with a little bit of nudge one
| can influence the resulting answer by a lot, so I wary if blindly
| taking the "advice", and always recheck it, and try to make two
| competing where I would influence LLM into taking the competing
| viewpoints and learn from both.
|
| Using the AI to generate code - simple things are ok, but for
| non-trivial items it introduces pretty subtle bugs, which require
| me to ensure I understand every line. This bit is the most fun -
| the bug quest is actually entertaining, as it is often the same
| bugs humans would make.
|
| So, I don't see the same picture, but something close to the
| opposite of what the author sees.
|
| Having an easy outlet to bounce the quick ideas off and a source
| of relatively unbiased feedback brought me back to the fun of
| writing; so literally it's the opposite effect compared to the
| article author...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Maybe you are not that great at using the most current LLMs or
| you don't want to be? I find that increasingly to be the most
| likely answer, whenever somebody makes sweeping claims about
| the impotence of LLMs.
|
| I get more use out of them every single day and certainly with
| every model release (mostly for generating absolutely not
| trivial code) and it's not subtle.
| abathologist wrote:
| What kind of problems are you solving day-to-day where the
| LLMs are doing heavy lifting?
| Madmallard wrote:
| Agree
|
| They can't do anything elaborate or interesting for me
| beyond literal tiny pet project proof of concepts. They
| could potentially help me uncover a bug, explain some code,
| or implement a small feature.
|
| As soon as the complexity of the feature goes up either in
| its side-effects, dependencies, or the customization of the
| details of the feature, they are quite unhelpful. I doubt
| even one senior engineer at a large company is using LLMs
| for major feature updates in codebases that have a lot of
| moving parts and significant complexity and many LOC.
| ay wrote:
| Could totally be the case, that, as I wrote in the very first
| sentence, I am holding it wrong.
|
| But I am not saying LLMs are impotent - the other week Claude
| happily churned me ~3500 lines of C code that allowed to
| implement a prototype capture facility for network packets
| with flexible filters and saving the contents into pcapng
| files. I had to fix a couple of bugs that it made, but
| overall it was certainly at least 5x-10x productivity
| improvement compared to me typing these lines of code by
| hand. I don't dispute that it's a pretty useful tool in
| coding, or as a thinking assistant (see the last paragraph of
| my comment).
|
| What I challenged is the submissive self deprecating
| adoration across the entire spectrum.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Reading this I am not sure I got the gist of your previous
| post. Re-reading the previous post, I still don't see how
| the two posts gel. I submit we might just have very
| different interpretations of the same observations. For
| example I have a hard imagining the described 3500 LOC
| program as 'simple'. Limited in scope, sure. But if you got
| it done 5-10x faster, then it can't be that simple?
|
| Anyway: I found the writers perspective on this whole
| subject to be interesting, and agree on the merits -- I
| definitely think they are correct on their analysis and
| outlook, and here the two of us apparently disagree - but I
| don't share their concluding feelings.
|
| But I can see, how they got there.
| guyfhuo wrote:
| > Maybe you are not that great at using the most current LLMs
| or you don't want to be?
|
| I'm tired of this argument. I'll even grant you: both sides
| of it.
|
| It seems as though we prepared our selves to respond to llms
| in this manner with people memeing, or simply recognizing,
| that there was a "way" to ask questions to get better results
| early on when ranked search broadened the appeal of search
| engines.
|
| The reality is that both you and the op are talking about the
| opinion of the thing, but leaving out the thing itself.
|
| You could say "git gud", but what if you showed op what "gud"
| output to you was, and they recognized it as the same sort of
| output that they were saying was repetitive?
|
| It's ambiguity based on opinion.
|
| I fear so many are taking part each other.
|
| Perhaps linking to example prompts and outputs that can be
| directly discussed is the only way to give specificity to the
| ambiguous language.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The problem is that, knowing the public internet, what
| would absolutely happen, is people arguing the ways in
| which
|
| a) the code is bad b) the problem is beneath what they
| consider non-trivial
|
| The way that OP structured the response, I frankly got a
| similar impression (although the follow up feels much
| different). I just don't see the point in engaging in that
| here, but I take your criticism: Why engage at all. I
| should probably not, then.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| >evidently repetitive "style".
|
| Use LORAs, write better prompts. I've done a lot of diffusion
| and especially in 2025 it's not difficult to get out something
| quite good.
|
| Repetitive style is funny, because that's what human artists do
| for the most part. I'm a furry, I look at a lot of art and
| individual styles are a well established fact.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Yes, most human artists have a repetitive style. In fact
| that's often how you recongize who made a piece of art.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Yeah but the difference is that style is sometimes actually
| interesting and not completely banal.
| sabakhoj wrote:
| We need to distinctly think about what tasks are actually
| suitable for LLMs. Used poorly, they'll gut our abilities to
| think thoughtfully. The push, IMO, should be for using them for
| verification and clarification, but not for replacements in
| understanding and creativity.
|
| Example: Do the problem sets yourself. If you're getting
| questions wrong, dig deeper with an AI assistant to find gaps
| in your knowledge. Do NOT let the AI do the problem sets first.
|
| I think it was similar to how we used calculators in school in
| the 2010s at least. We learned the principles behind the
| formulae and how to do them manually, before introducing the
| calculators to abstract the usage of the tools.
|
| I've let that core principle shape some of how we're designing
| our paper-reading assistant, but still thinking through the UX
| patterns -- https://openpaper.ai/blog/manifesto.
| ay wrote:
| Agreed, and the analogy with calculators is very apt.
| deepsun wrote:
| > instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed
| thought
|
| That's not my experience though. I tried several models, but
| usually get a confident half-baked hallucination, and tweaking my
| prompt takes more time than finding the information myself.
|
| My requests are typically programming tho.
| qudat wrote:
| Man people are using LLMs much differently from myself. I use it
| as an answer engine and that's about where I stop using it. It's
| a great tool for research and quick answers but I haven't found
| it great for much else.
| j7ake wrote:
| It's a faster Google search
| zerox22 wrote:
| That's exactly what I do as well. Sometimes I stumble upon a
| question that I know I won't find an answer for just by
| googling, so it's easier to formulate it fully to an AI. In
| some cases it's like a more convenient search engine, where I'm
| pretty sure I will get an answer to my question without needing
| to trick the engine with a good query. Which is rather tedious
| more often than not.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| This is how I use it, as a better google search without SEO
| spam. I still write everything myself.
|
| In that respect I am not afraid of LLMs making me dumber as I
| would argue that google search has not made me dumber.
| lcsiterrate wrote:
| I wonder if there is any like the cs50.ai for other fields, which
| acts as a guide by not instantly giving any answer. The one I
| experiment to have like this experience is by using custom
| instructions (most of LLMs have this in the settings) wherein I
| set it to Socratic mode so the LLM will spit out questions to
| stir ideas in my head.
| ahussain wrote:
| If anything, with the right tooling LLMs should improve the
| quality of our thinking. For example, how much better would your
| thinking be if you could ask the LLM to reliably figure out all
| the 2nd and 3rd effects of your ideas, or to identify hidden
| assumptions.
| lcsiterrate wrote:
| Agree but LLMs vary. So we need an LLM that really try to
| reason from first principles.
| steamrolled wrote:
| I think the article describes a real problem in that AI
| discourages thought. So do other things, but what's new about AI
| is that it removes an incentive to try.
|
| It used to be that if you spent your day doomscrolling instead of
| writing a blog post, that blog post wouldn't get written and you
| wouldn't get the riches and fame. But now, you can use AI to
| write your blog post / email / book. If you don't have an
| intrinsic motivation to work your brain, it's a lot easier to
| wing it with AI tools.
|
| At the same time... gosh. I can't help but assume that the author
| is just _depressed_ and that it has little to do with AI. The
| post basically says that AI made his life meaningless. But you
| don 't have to use AI tools if they're harming you. And more
| broadly, life has no meaning beyond what we make of it... unless
| your life goal is to crank out text faster than an LLM, there's
| still plenty of stuff to focus on. If you genuinely think you
| can't possibly write anything new and interesting, then dunno,
| pick a workshop craft?
| xigency wrote:
| Humans are social creatures. The existence of a tool that can
| replace humans is not nearly so depressing as the realization
| that a loud and powerful group of people are zealous and joyful
| to use it to such ends. The assumption that people come first
| is rapidly becoming a logical fallacy in a world that seeks to
| optimize paperclips first.
|
| Anyway, the pendulum will swing the other way eventually, but
| it's a rough ride hanging on until then.
|
| Glad to see stimulating discussion here falling on both sides.
| smcleod wrote:
| For me it decreases the barrier to try and test new thoughts,
| never have I felt more empowered to try out new avenues that in
| the past might have been too time consuming or expensive to
| dispose of.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Well said, and such an important point.
|
| > Developing a prompt is like scrolling Netflix, and reading the
| output is like watching a TV show.
|
| That line really hits home for me.
| dvrp wrote:
| This is a byproduct of abundance.
|
| In this case, abundance of cognitive ability.
|
| We say that our food sucks. Yet, our elite athletes would crush
| Hercules or other God-like figures from our mythology. At the
| same time, we suffer from obesity.
|
| The answer to the paradox comes from abundance. I don't know why
| it happens, but I've noticed it on food, information retrieval,
| and now cognitive capacity.
|
| Think about what happened to our capacity to search information
| on books. Librarians are masters of organizing chaos and
| filtering through information. But most of us don't know a tiny
| fraction of their knowledge because we grew up with Google.
|
| My hope is that, just like eating healthy is not as pleasurable
| as processed sugars but it's necessary for a fit life, we will
| need to go through the process of thinking healthy even though is
| not as pleasurable as tinkering with LLM prompts.
|
| This doesn't mean escapism however. Modern athletes take
| advantage of the industrial world too, but they're smart about
| it. I don't think thinking will be much different.
| wuj wrote:
| A good analogy is lifting. We lift to build strength, not because
| we need that extra strength to lift things in real life. There
| are plenty machinery to do that for us. But we do so for the
| sense of accomplishment of hitting our goals when we least expect
| it, seeing physical changes, and the feeling that we are getting
| healthier rather than chasing the utility benefits. If we
| perceive lifting as an utility, we realize its futile and
| meaningless. Instead, if we see it as a routine with positive
| externalities sprinkled on top, we feel a lot less pressured to
| do so.
|
| As kelseyfrog commented already, the key is to focus on the
| action, not the target. Lifting is not just about hitting a
| number or getting bigger muscles (though they are great extrinsic
| motivators), its more of an action that we derive growth from. I
| have internalized the act of working out that those targets are
| baked into the unconscious. I don't overthink when I'm lifting.
| My unconscious take the lead, and I just follow. I enjoy seeing
| the results show up unexpectedly. It lets me grow without feeling
| the constant pressure of my conscious mind.
|
| The lifting analogy can be applied to writing and other effortful
| pursuits. We write for the pleasure of reconciling internal
| conflicts and restoring order to our chaotic mind. Writing is the
| lifting of our mind. If we do it for comparison, then there's no
| point in lifting, or writing, or many other things we do after
| all our technological breakthroughs. Doing what we do is a means
| to an end, not the other way around.
| dvrp wrote:
| What a coincidence! I think we both commented noting the
| phenomenon of abundance and the repercussions for us humans at
| the individual level. Especially from a fulfillment and
| autonomy point of view.
| gavinray wrote:
| I lift because since I was a child, I always wanted to look
| like an Anime character.
| zebez wrote:
| Is it working?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I don't agree directly with this, but a variant of it does bother
| me: will the auto-regressive nature of AI _eventually_ limit the
| novelty of the ideas humanity can come up with?
|
| So many breakthroughs come from people who work either in
| ignorance or defiance of existing established ideas. Almost by
| definition, in fact - to a large extent, everything obvious has
| already been thought. So to some extent, all the real progress
| happens in places that violate norms and pre-established logic.
|
| So what's going to happen now if every idea has to run the
| gauntlet of a supremely intelligent but fully regressive AI? It
| feels like we could lose a tremendous amount of the potential for
| original thought from humanity. A good counter argument would be
| that this has already happened and we're still making progress. I
| just wonder however if it's a question of degree and that degree
| matters.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Indeed. Major advancements throughout history often happened
| because someone looked at a problem differently than
| traditional approaches.
|
| The AI will have been trained predominantly on the traditional
| approaches.
|
| I feel AI will be fundamentally limited to regurgitating past
| ideas and intelligence.
|
| It may at least use a breadth of knowledge to save some people
| time by helping them avoid repeating work already done.
|
| I'd love to see an AI trained only on knowledge up to 1800 come
| up with a single invention of the past 200 years. (It won't
| happen)
| abathologist wrote:
| I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society
| in the next months and years.
|
| The process of forming expressions just is the process of
| conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who
| misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made,
| then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse,
| who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at
| all -- they will be automated away.
|
| I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they
| will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. A robot is
| just a "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical"
| (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot).
|
| I'm afraid far too many are captive to the ideology of
| productionism (which is just a corollary of consumerism).
| Creative activity is not about content production. The aim of our
| creation is communication and mutual-transformation. Generation
| of digital artifacts may be useful for these purposes, but most
| uses seem to assume content production is the point, and that is
| a dark, sad, dead end.
| fennecbutt wrote:
| 99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is
| derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something
| we've experienced or seen.
|
| Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based
| on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object
| with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.
|
| Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.
| musicale wrote:
| > Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's
| it.
|
| Humans have been interested in supernatural beings for
| thousands of years. Their appearance is usually less
| important than their powers and abilities.
|
| The word is present in Old English and Old Norse, and elves
| appear in Norse mythology.
| alganet wrote:
| I'm not so sure about it.
|
| Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel
| opportunities for varied experiences nowadays.
|
| The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is
| radically different than ordinary everyday thought when
| observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world.
|
| Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But
| that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived,
| human experience was already homogenized.
|
| The idea space for what an object is has been depleted by
| exploration. People already tried everything. It's kinda the
| same thing as saying that is impossible to come up with a new
| platonic solid (also an idea space that has been exhausted).
|
| Any novel thought is bound to be nameless at first, and it
| becomes novel by trying to use derivation to define an
| unknown observation, not as a basis for it.
| NobodytheHobbit wrote:
| You're trying to expand the human experience instead of
| individual human experience which is really yours from your
| perspective and mine from my perspective if I can be
| redundant by enumerating. The frustration comes from the
| sacrifice of individual experience to this weird aggregated
| experience in the machine. It will push the capability of
| technology but does that service the aim of luxury made
| easy for the many to acquire as tech is supposed to do?
| What profit a person to gain the whole world but lose the
| very thing that makes themselves them? It feels
| systemically dehumanizing.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human.
|
| Now that's reductionist to the point of being diminutive.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Its not, thats why the term humanoid exists.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| Hey, no need to get short!
|
| We should try to be the bigger person.
|
| That's really the long and short of it.
| milliams wrote:
| Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are
| marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They
| create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project
| glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
| Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about
| words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if
| you want to find snakes look for them behind words that
| have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are
| nice. Elves are bad.
|
| -- Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
| DavidPiper wrote:
| That is a nonsense definition of creativity. The parent also
| wasn't suggesting - as far as I can read - that creativity is
| defined solely in the realm of the "truly novel" (or "isn't
| based on anything you've ever seen before").
|
| All creativity is a conversation between our own ideas and
| what already exists.
|
| Consider the unused soundtrack to James Cameron's Avatar
| [0][1], where ethnomusicologists set out to create a kind of
| music that had never been heard before.
|
| They succeeded. But it was ultimately scrapped for the film
| because - by virtue of it being so different to any music
| anyone has ever heard before - it was not remotely accessible
| to audiences and the movie suffered as a result.
|
| To argue that work is not creative because it is still based
| on "music" is absurd.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8
|
| [1] https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/
| pie...
| myko wrote:
| Incredibly interesting, thanks for sharing
| musicale wrote:
| > Everything we create or do is based on something we've
| experienced or seen.
|
| I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like
| other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can
| exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and
| desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders,
| snakes, or abandonment without prior experience.
|
| Second, an important part of experience is inner life - how
| you personally perceive, feel, and experience things. This
| may be very different from person to person.
| Andrex wrote:
| What really fascinates me is gender based toy preferences
| at <2 years old. Very consistent that boys like race cars
| and action figures, even though it's their first exposure.
|
| (I do not participate in culture wars, this fact just
| straight up fascinates me as a non-masculine gay guy.)
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'd be curious how we know they aren't exposed - 1 year
| is a long time to see TV shows, TV commercials, toys with
| pictures of target audience, picture books, etc...
| gitremote wrote:
| Cars were invented in the early 1900s and the vast
| majority of human existence was in a world without cars.
| There cannot be an innate preference for cars, which were
| a very recent invention.
| Tallain wrote:
| This is an alarmingly reductionist statement that I cannot
| believe is made in good faith. If it somehow is, it's based
| on an abundance of ignorance that only highlights the
| importance of education.
|
| Are you genuinely arguing that LLM output is derivative, and
| human output is derivative, therefore they're equal? Why
| don't you pop that thesis into ChatGPT and see how it
| answers.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| > Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't
| based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new
| object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.
|
| This is an outrageous thought experiment. Novelty is creating
| new connections or perceiving things in new ways, you can't
| just say "try to have eureka moment, see! impossible". You
| can't prompt engineer your own brain.
|
| In fact, there's some research about eureka moments rewiring
| our brain. https://neurosciencenews.com/insight-memory-
| neuroscience-289...
| voidhorse wrote:
| It astonishes me sometimes how completely stupid and
| reductive some HN takes on arts and creativity can be. I am
| astounded continually at how we can produce humans who are so
| capable in one sphere of life and so ignorant and oblivious
| of others...yet all too willing to make dismissive claims
| about them...
|
| Creativity is much more than the derivative production of
| artifacts. What the OP is driving at is that creativity is a
| process of human connection and communication--you can see
| this most clearly in the art of interpretation. A single
| literary work has an almost uncountable number of possible
| interpretations, and a huge element of its existence in the
| world as a price of art are the discussions and debates that
| emerge over those interpretations, and how they shape us as
| individuals, instill morals, etc etc. Quite a lot more than
| "making elves by adding pointy ears to humans".
|
| Your post stinks of the very gross consumerist mindset the OP
| called out. The creation and preservation of _meaning_ is
| about way more than the production of fungible
| decontextualized objects--it 's all about the mediation and
| maintenance of human relationships _through artifacts_. The
| fact that the elves have pointy ears doesn 't even begin to
| scratch at their _actual meaning_ (e.g. they exist in a world
| with very big real problems that effect you and me too, e.g.
| race relations, and exaggerated features estrange these
| relations so as to make them more discernible to us and allow
| us to finally see the water we swim in).
|
| If humans stop engaging with these processes, it's reasonable
| to believe that a lot of that semiotic richness, which is
| much of what, in my opinion, makes us _human_ and not just
| super smart animals in the first place, will be lost.
| krelian wrote:
| In full agreement with you on the flagrant incapability of
| a sizeable part of the HN crowd to understand and value of
| the arts.
|
| Throughout history man has been celebrated and
| distinguished as the rational animal. As master of the
| earth this animal in our days dedicates its brightest minds
| to the continual increase of economic growth. Ask the
| rational man what is growth good for and after a few
| exchanges they perhaps will say that it ultimately improves
| our quality of life and even extends it. If might even
| allow the human race to flourish beyond earth and thus
| prevail long after resources on earth are depleted. But ask
| him then why is improving the quality of life a good thing
| at all? Is it just a meaningless cycle in which we improve
| the quality of life so that we can then improve the quality
| of life even further? No. Ask an individual human (in
| contrast to the ultra rationalist who thinks they represent
| the human race as a whole) what they work for, what they
| strive to achieve, what does quality of life ultimately
| mean to them and you will end up with happy times spent
| among family and friends. With meaningful moments listening
| to music, watching a film, reading a book. About time spent
| in creative endeavors that are totally their own. The
| rational animal in its hubris forgot what it thinks for and
| trapped itself in an endless cycle where the true meaning
| of being human is hidden from the sight of many.
|
| But I think a wake up call is due very soon. The rational
| animal is about to discover the rationality it prides
| itself on was merely a sample of the true possibility. From
| _the_ rational animal we have been relegated to another
| animal with some rational capability. As we slowly realize
| how futile are our attempts at thinking, we 'll realize to
| our horror that the gift we are left with is the ability to
| recognize the futility and inadequacy of our attempts.
| Hopefully then we'll decide to retreat back into what truly
| makes us human, to what is ours, to what quality of life
| really means.
| jofla_net wrote:
| I'm reminded of that My dinner with Andre monologue, and
| totally agree.
| jen729w wrote:
| > Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't
| based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new
| object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.
|
| Pick up an Iain M. Banks book, my friend.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Go with 99.9%. But not 100%.
|
| Someone imagined space and time could be a deformed fabric.
| That was new.
|
| In minor and major ways, new ideas are found or emerge from
| searches for solutions to problems from science to art. Or
| exploration of things in new combinations or from a
| previously untapped viewpoint.
|
| Most people are not looking hard for anything beyond what
| they know. So not likely to find anything new.
|
| But many people try new things, or try to improve or vary
| something in a direction that is not easy, and learning
| something nonobvious and new is the "price" they must pay to
| succeed. Or a bonus they are paid for pushing through a
| thicket, even if they don't succeed at what they set out to
| do.
| pwndByDeath wrote:
| Not really new it came from observations or imagination of
| observed things.
| Nevermark wrote:
| General patterns don't actually exist. We create a
| pattern from multiple observations.
|
| What is the point in saying there is nothing new,? So the
| word "new" is like "utopia", with only a mythical
| aspirational meaning?
|
| History has never stopped proving how inane such an
| utterly unsupported opinion is.
|
| Just keep up with quantum physics. Constantly finding new
| strange counterintuitive effects that require intense
| research and explorations of combinations of ideas and
| imagination to envision. And then challenging invention
| of new highly artificially controlled conditions, not
| found in nature, to create.
|
| Mathematics as a profession is all about discovery of new
| things (from exploration) and invention (from imaginative
| questions and quests).
|
| Art produces new things all the time, but you have to
| have familiarity with art to see what is new. If all you
| see are materials and color you are not literate enough
| to read it. Anymore than a unique story is "just words".
|
| For that matter, in slower timescales, nature has never
| stopped creating new creatures with new attributes or
| behaviors.
|
| Perhaps have you set your own sights much too low. Try
| doing something nobody has been able to do before, and
| sticking with it. You will discover something if you
| really do stick with it. Even understanding the barriers
| better than before reveals things, and forces new
| concepts into being.
| bccdee wrote:
| No, that's not true.
|
| Quick, what's 51 plus 92?
|
| Now: Did you think back to a time someone else added these
| numbers together, or are you doing it yourself, right now, in
| your head? I'm sure it's not the first time these numbers
| have ever been summed, but that doesn't matter. You're doing
| it now, independently.
|
| Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it
| derivative. We rediscover things every day.
| treebirg wrote:
| But I do know what numbers are. I've also done addition
| before, so I know what the steps are. The result of 51 + 92
| is derivative from (at least) these two concepts, which
| derive from others and so on. Maybe I'm stretching the
| meaning of derivative here, but to me derivative doesn't
| mean strictly recalling something verbatim.
| bccdee wrote:
| I do think you're stretching the meaning of derivative.
| At that point, what can ever be called original? Every
| idea depends on pre-existing concepts. Even Newton stood
| on the shoulders of giants.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > Just because something isn't unique, doesn't make it
| derivative. We rediscover things every day.
|
| This is the argument I use to dunk on ranters who spam
| conversations with "How can you say Christopher Columbus
| discovered the new world when there were already people
| living there?"
| bccdee wrote:
| In fairness, Columbus thought he had found India, even
| after other, smarter people had told him otherwise. You
| can't give him too much credit, especially given that he
| was considered a monster even by contemporary monsters
| like Isabella I of Spain, his sponsor, who founded the
| Spanish Inquisition and still thought his treatment of
| the Taino natives was unconscionable. She wanted him to
| convert them to Christianity, and instead he exterminated
| them.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Pointing out that we can mechanically apply an algorithm on
| novel inputs is possibly the worst defence of human
| creativity I can think of in this context.
| bowsamic wrote:
| You have fallen into the very trap he is criticising: you are
| entirely focussed on the product and how it differs from
| other ones, and have no sense of your individual journey of
| thinking being relevant
| parodysbird wrote:
| To emphasize again part of the post above: "The aim of our
| creation is communication and mutual-transformation".
|
| When I write a poem in a birthday card for my wife to give
| her on her birthday, very little of the "meaning" that will
| be communicated to (and more importantly _with_ ) her is
| really from some generic semantic interpretation of the
| tokens. Instead, almost all of the meaning will come from it
| being an actual personal expression in a shared social
| context.
|
| If I didn't grasp that second part, I might actually think
| that asking ChatGPT to write the poem and then copying it in
| my handwriting to give to her is about the same thing as if
| the same tokens written but from genuine personal creation.
| Over prolonged interaction, it could lead to a shared social
| context in which she generally treats certain things I say as
| little different than if ChatGPT returned them as output.
| Thus the shared social context and relationship is then
| degenerated and fairly inhuman (or "robotic" as the above
| post calls it).
| jonplackett wrote:
| Someone just the other day told me about how they used to
| have a group WhatsApp where they'd share these hand made
| memes. Just a bunch of guys photoshopping dumb stuff. It
| went on for years.
|
| One day one of them discovers AI and post anything made
| with AI - initially it's great, it's much better quality
| than what they could photoshop. Everyone jumps on board.
|
| But after a day or so, the joke is over. The love has gone.
| The whole things falls apart and no-one posts anything
| anymore.
|
| It turns out - as you say - that the meaning - founded on
| the insight and EFFORT to create it - was more important
| than the anccuracy and speed.
| parodysbird wrote:
| Oh yeah this is exactly how my group chats went. We still
| can post some good (in our context) memes and have fun,
| but not like an avalanche of poorly filtered slop. A joke
| for a group can still be crafted via an LLM when used
| judiciously and as intentionally as part of the bit. But
| by judicious it's important that the human is the one
| doing the sending and in the right moment, and so the
| human is still the one communicating.
|
| When WhatsApp originally inserted their AI bot in the
| chats, it got very annoying very quickly and we agreed to
| all never invoke it again. It's just a generative spam
| machine without the curation.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the point. It's about intention.
| Are you creating this thing for the purpose of transforming
| or communicating? Or are you just making it for some
| businessy reason.
|
| Yes, elves are derivative, as was a lot of the Tolkien world
| in a way - being intentionally based on ww1 - but its
| intention was to create something beautiful and amazing and
| communicative and transformational.
| vaylian wrote:
| > Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't
| based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new
| object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible.
|
| That's easy. The hard part is to explain it to other people,
| because we lack a shared background and terminology to
| explain it.
| emporas wrote:
| It is knowledge that gets automated, rather than reasoning.
|
| I was thinking of the first solar civilization, which lives
| totally in space. Near a star, but not in a planet, and no
| gravitational pull anywhere. They build tubes 10 km long, a
| shot board is put at one end, and the players at the other end.
| They shoot darts at the board, and each shot takes 5 hours to
| reach the target. That's their national sport.
|
| Problem is, I have never played darts, i don't know anyone who
| plays it, I will ask the LLM to fill in the blanks, of how a
| story based on that game could be constructed. Then I will add
| my own story on top of that, I will fix anything that doesn't
| fit in, add some stuff, remove some other stuff and so on.
|
| For me it saves time, instead of asking people about something,
| hearing them talk about it or watching them do it, i do data
| mining on words. Maybe more shallow than experiencing it myself
| or asking people who know about it first hand, but the time it
| takes to get some information good enough collapses down to 5
| minutes.
|
| Depends on how you use it, it can enhance human capabilities,
| or indeed, mute them.
| jen729w wrote:
| Oh turns out ChatGPT generates exactly the level of banality
| that one would expect.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297.
| ..
|
| I don't want to read this story. I probably want to read one
| that a human author laboured over.
| visarga wrote:
| It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM
| outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Of course
| they are going to get better. But that is not the point -
| it is that in the chat room the human and LLM spark ideas
| off each other. Humans come with their own unique life
| experience and large context, LLMs come with their broad
| knowledge and skills.
| aorloff wrote:
| There is a Borges short story written in the 1930s about
| "the Library" a supposed collection of all possible
| permutations of language, even misspellings and
| gibberish. In many ways, it is extremely prescient of AI.
|
| To cut it short, in the end what Borges proposed is that
| the meaning comes from the stories, and that all the
| stories are really repetitions and permutations of the
| same set of humans stories (the Order) and that is what
| makes meaning.
|
| So all a successful literary AI needs to do is figure out
| how to retell the same stories we have been telling but
| in a different context that is resonant today.
|
| Simple right ?
| parodysbird wrote:
| This is basically a contemporary reframing of the core
| purpose of Renaissance magic. I suppose aspiring to be a
| 21st century John Dee from talking to some powerful
| chatbot of the future, rather than angels or elemental
| beings, does sound a bit exciting, but it is ultimately
| mysticism all the same.
| bccdee wrote:
| > It would be a mistake to take the banality of current
| LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future.
|
| Imagine a chef, congenitally unable to taste or smell
| food, who has nevertheless studied a million recipes. Can
| they reproduce existing recipes? Sure, if they follow the
| instructions perfectly. Can they improvise original
| recipes? I doubt it. Judging by the instructions alone,
| the recipes they invent may be indistinguishable from
| real recipes, but this chef can never actually try their
| food to see if it tastes good. The only safe flavour
| combinations are the ones they reuse. This is a chef who
| cannot create.
|
| LLMs are structurally banal. The only plausible route to
| a machine which can competently produce original art
| requires the development of a machine which can
| accurately model human's aesthetic sensibilities--
| something which humans themselves cannot do and have no
| need for, since we already have those aesthetic
| sensibilities built in.
|
| This is the fundamental error of using an LLM as a
| ghostwriter. Humans don't only bring inspiration to the
| table--they also bring the aesthetic judgement which
| shapes the final product. Sentences written by an LLM are
| banal sentences, no matter how you prompt it.
| emporas wrote:
| Head over to groq.com, use the qwen-qwq-32b model, and
| take these examples [1] and put them at the start before
| the prompt. After that use the following command:
|
| write chapter 1 for a new Novel in Progress, take
| inspiration from the example Novel but DO NOT Repeat
| Example. Add vivid imagery, in a dark comedy style. dial
| up the humor and irony and use first person narration.
| Fracture sentences and emphasize the unusual: use unusual
| word orders, such as placing adjectives after nouns or
| using nouns as verbs, use linguistic voice pyrotechnics,
| telegraphically leaned and verbal agility in plot
| building intention, reflection, dialog, action, and
| describe solar civilization, which lives totally in
| space. Near a star, but not in a planet, and no
| gravitational pull anywhere.
|
| [1] https://gist.github.com/pramatias/953f6e3420f46f31410
| e8dd3c8...
| techno_tsar wrote:
| This is unreadable slop.
| emporas wrote:
| Depending on the story, the examples have to be adjusted.
| But of course, logical reasoning from humans cannot be
| replicated just like that, by the machines.
|
| The real question is this: Suppose a person was great at
| reasoning the last 100 years, but with zero knowledge.
| That person might not attended any school, almost
| illiterate. But his reasoning is top notch. I don't know
| if you are familiar with Sultan Khan [1] for example.
|
| With no formal training to absorb a lot of knowledge,
| that person is totally economically crashed. There is no
| chance of being competitive at anything, not involving
| muscles anyway. Now suppose that this person can
| complement his lack of knowledge with a magical knowledge
| machine. Suddenly he is ahead of a competition, involving
| people with 10 Phds, or doctors with 30 years of
| experience.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultan_Khan_(chess_player)
| imperfect_blue wrote:
| As an amateur home-cook, I find current LLMs incredibly
| useful as a sounding board for the on-the-fly recipe
| modifications - for allergies and food sensitivities,
| adapting preparation methods to available equipment, or
| substituting produce not available in season. It may not
| be able to taste the final product, but its reasoning on
| what's likely to work (and what isn't) has not led me
| wrong so far.
| WhyIsItAlwaysHN wrote:
| O3s story is not amazing but it sure is orders of magnitude
| more interesting than your example:
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/68282eb2-e53c-8000-853f-9a03eee12
| 8...
|
| I don't think it's possible to generate an acceptable story
| without reasoning.
|
| That is not to say that I disagree with you. I would prefer
| to read human authors even if the AI was great at writing
| stories, because there's something alluring about getting a
| glimpse into a world that somebody else created in their
| head.
| randcraw wrote:
| > I don't think it's possible to generate an acceptable
| story without reasoning.
|
| If I look back at any article, book, movie, or
| conversation that I liked, it always had this essential
| ingredient: it had to make sense, AND it had to introduce
| some novel fact (or idea) that led to implications that
| were entertaining somehow (intriguing, revelatory,
| amusing, etc).
|
| Would this be possible without the author having some
| idea of how reasoning works? Or of what facts are novel
| or could lead to surprise of some kind? No is the obvious
| answer to both. Until I see clear evidence that LLMs have
| mastered both logic and the concept of what knowledge is
| and is not intriguing to a human, I foresee little
| creative output from any LLM that will 'move the needle'
| creatively.
|
| Until then, LLM-generated fare will remain the uninspired
| factory produce of infinite monkeys and typewriters...
| 8note wrote:
| hmm
|
| ive been thinking that the knowledge isnt written down, so
| cant be automated, which also makes knowledge sharing hard,
| but the reasoning is automated
|
| so, ive been trying to figure out patterns by which the
| knowledge does get written down, and so can be reasoned about
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| My initial hunch and many answers in this site say 'it's
| boring I wouldn't read that'.
|
| There's something to that: a good author synthesizes
| experiences into sentences/paragraphs, making the reader feel
| things via text.
|
| I have a feeling LLMs can't do that bc they are trained on
| all the crap that's been written and it's hard to fake being
| genuine.
|
| But I agree you can generate any amount of filler/crap. It is
| useful, but what I got from GP was 'ultimately, what's the
| point of that?'. Hopefully these tools help us wake up to
| what is important.
| campers wrote:
| There is a huge focus on training the LLMs to reason, that
| ability will slowly (or not that slowly depending on your
| timeframe!) but surely improve in the AI models given the
| gargantuan amount of money and talent being thrown at the
| problem. To what level we'll have to wait and see.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that
| they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic.
|
| Exactly, there's a huge section of humanity that actively wants
| to give away its humanity. They want to reduce themselves to
| nothing. Because, as you say, they cannot understand anything
| as having value other than economic artefacts
| cameldrv wrote:
| I've personally noticed this as a big trend. For example, I had
| become more and more reliant on my GPS in the car. I've not
| really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated
| system tells me what to do.
|
| I recently got a running watch. It suggests workouts that will
| help me improve my speed (which honestly I don't even care
| about!). If you turn it on it will blare at you if you're going
| too fast or too slow.
|
| When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what
| you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what
| you're going to look at next.
|
| Anyhow recently I've been reducing my usage of these things,
| and it's made me feel much better. Even navigating the car
| without the GPS makes me feel much more engaged and alive.
|
| Ultimately one of the core things that makes us human is making
| decisions for ourselves. When we cede this in the name of
| efficiency, we gain something but we also lose something.
|
| Marshall Brain wrote an interesting short book about this
| called Manna.
| empiricus wrote:
| For GPS, I start by looking at the overall route, and compare
| with potential alternatives. Then during the driving the GPS
| just manages the local details, I still have some
| understanding and agency over where to go and how to get
| there.
| immibis wrote:
| I start by looking at the map. I go in the direction of the
| place I want to be. _If I want to know the technically
| fastest route_ then I let my device calculate that. I don
| 't always take that route. It's an assistant, not a boss.
| It's more interesting to walk down different streets
| sometimes. (And while I'm preaching to Americans, it's also
| good to walk down streets sometimes. It breaks away a few
| layers of abstraction that you have when driving.)
|
| Looking at the map actually helps you learn the city
| layout. As of right now (literally as I'm typing this) the
| train was delayed, so I chose to get off at the next big
| station before everyone crowds on, and walk the rest of the
| way. I can do this without checking a map because I know
| where it is and where I am, because I don't let the machine
| think for me.
|
| I don't drive (non-car-worshipping cities are amazing) but
| I do this when walking and also with train routes. I don't
| memorize the bus routes, since the train is better and has
| fewer routes, so I also sometimes ask my device for a route
| if I think there's a faster bus route than train (usually
| not the case).
| liugongqx wrote:
| I am obseesed comparing different routes from GPS for EACH
| trip. Long or short. Bragging to my wife how much time I
| saved.
|
| She doesn't use GPS. Guess what, she alwayes beats me.
|
| My Guess: 1. Algorithem does not favor me 2. Monitor GPS
| adds unsensible distraction and pressure which reduces
| action smoothness compare to brain driven actions.
| globular-toast wrote:
| For road navigation it might be worth seeing if your country
| has a proper system in place and learning how to use it. In
| the UK, for example, there is a simple "algorithm" to get you
| where you need to go. The signage is hierarchical starting
| from motorways and trunk routes and descending down to
| primary and secondary local routes. So to navigate anywhere
| you go via trunk routes and follow the signs to the nearest
| trunk destination _beyond_ where you are trying to go. Then
| as you get closer you should start to see your _actual_
| destination appear on the signs as a primary route. Once you
| learn the system it 's really quite possible to navigate by
| yourself anywhere.
|
| The nice thing is you won't end up routed down some
| ridiculous difficult road just because the GPS says so and it
| calculated it would save 0.2 seconds if you were somehow
| going at the speed limit the whole way. Your brain includes a
| common sense module, and it's usually right.
| robrorcroptrer wrote:
| But then again you are relying on an information system to
| navigate.
| huijzer wrote:
| > When you use any social media, you're not really choosing
| what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides
| what you're going to look at next.
|
| Yeah it's crazy. I used to have a commonly held believe until
| last week. Then I started watching more videos in the
| opposite viewpoint and boom now my whole YT feed is full of
| it. I wish the feed would have sprinkled some opposing sides
| into the mix before last week. (Having said that I am
| appreciating individual content creator much more since
| people like Lex can decide to show both sides independent
| from some algorithm.)
| boppo1 wrote:
| >When you use any social media, you're not really choosing
| what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides
| what you're going to look at next.
|
| Not necessarily. I'm into a very particular sort of painting
| and I have been totalitarian with Instagram about showing me
| that content and not other stuff. It works splendidly as long
| as I'm consistent.
|
| Thanks to Instagram, I have been introduced to tons of
| painters I would not have been otherwise.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Is it better to be introduced to tons of painters vs fewer
| but in more detail? Or being told about a painter by
| someone in person vs by an algorithm?
|
| In the 90s you only had certain songs if you knew someone
| who had it on cassette and you borrowed it and put it on
| your mixtape. Throughout the interaction, you also got
| initiated deeper into the culture of that thing in person.
|
| I also notice that families rarely sit together nowadays to
| look through vacation photos. The pictures are taken, but
| people either don't have time to sort them and curate them.
| When film had a price, you only took fewer ones but it was
| more intentional. Then the fact that you only saw the
| picture once you were back at home, generated excitement
| that you could share and relive candid moments. Now people
| upload stuff on Instagram but it's intended to a generic
| audience, much unlike browsing through an album on the
| couch.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > In the 90s you only had certain songs if you knew
| someone who had it on cassette and you borrowed it and
| put it on your mixtape.
|
| I knew lots of people who recorded 120 Minutes on MTV and
| listened to college radio.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I meant the niche long tail stuff, since the commenter
| mentioned "tons of painters I would not have been
| otherwise". The equivalent in music would not be on MTV.
| tsumnia wrote:
| > Then the fact that you only saw the picture once you
| were back at home, generated excitement that you could
| share and relive candid moments
|
| Or you do like me and go see Interstellar 5 times in IMAX
| because the story was so good
| vidar wrote:
| I applaud your consistency and effort to curatr your feed
| which is certainly technibally possible but i am quite sure
| you are the exception to the rule.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > I'm into a very particular sort of painting
|
| Can you share some of your favourites that you follow? This
| sounds interesting.
| guythedudebro wrote:
| Furries
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > When you use any social media, you're not really choosing
| what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides
| what you're going to look at next.
|
| This was even more true with TV, and especially before there
| were a million cable channels.
|
| And it makes me think about the even wider time scale. A few
| generations ago, "the outer control loop" was also not in the
| individual's hand, but instead of computers, it was built on
| social technology. The average person didn't have much to
| decide about their lives. They likely lived within a few (or
| few dozen) km of where their ancestors did, in the part of
| town and a type of home fitting for their social class,
| likely doing the same job as their father, following a rigid
| life script, hitting predefined ritualized milestones. Their
| diet was based on whatever was available at that time of the
| year based on local production, cooked essentially the same
| way, as handed down by mothers and grandmothers. There was
| very little to the tune of letting their inner true self
| blossom through taking fun colorful decisions. They couldn't
| choose from some endless repository of stories. It was mostly
| a rotation of the local folk stories and the stories of the
| dominant religion.
|
| Just wanting to "consume" and follow a script without the
| weight of decision making isn't some modern "disease".
|
| The key difference is a new kind of fragmentation of culture
| (and the non-local nature of it). A long time ago, culture
| was also fractally fragmented, in a way where "neighboring"
| villages in a mountainous area would have their own dialects.
| Then with long-distance travel and electronic communication
| and media, globalization happened where distant parts of the
| world started to sync up and converge on some shared part of
| culture (of course fused with a continuation of the local
| one), everyone wearing T-shirts, listening to Michael Jackson
| and rooting for their football/soccer team. If you were
| dropped to some random place on the planet, you could likely
| converse with them about some fairly recent cultural
| cornerstones in entertainment and basic global news topics.
| But you still likely weren't "dropped" there.
|
| Then the internet appeared and you could suddenly talk to all
| those people in other parts of the world (or just other parts
| of your country). But search and discoverability weren't so
| great so there was friction. You build communities around
| shared interests and compatibility of personality and it
| required effort and participation. Usenet, forums, IRC. But
| these isolate you from your neighbors and local connections.
| And people often explicitly wanted that. Nosy neighbors and
| know-it-all gossipy townfolk weren't such a rosy thing,
| people wanted to escape that to find peers who understand and
| validate them and can build a shared culture with.
|
| In schools, subcultures already existed from the 70s and 80s
| onwards for sure, but they were few, like maybe 2 main camps
| or 3 or so, and information flow was slow therefore change
| was slow. Some new album of a popular band was released, then
| it was the thing for a long time, you didn't get an endless
| stream shoved in your face, you got the album and listened to
| it over and over. Today subcultures can't even be
| meaningfully counted because people follow personalized
| streams and come together in random configuration in streamer
| chats etc.
|
| So basically, in the old internet model, there were lots of
| opportunities to choose from, but it needed effort to find it
| and to forge belonging. Then with more commercialization,
| things started to consolidate on fewer platforms. It made it
| easier for creators to reach a wider pool of users
| simultaneously, and made it simpler for users to just learn
| to use one or a few platforms. But this made it also easier
| to pick and choose your "content diet", buffet style. A
| little from here, a little from there, with little friction.
| But with so much on offer, how do you choose? Discoverability
| was still an issue until recommendation algorithms became
| strong enough to know what will drive engagement. Turn that
| up to 11 and you get the current day where even the front
| page grid of options is obsolete and you get a single linear
| feed again, which is like watching TV and channel surfing
| (pressing the "next channel" button over and over), except
| it's personalized and never boring.
|
| Of course this applies to many other things as well, such as
| dating apps etc, which also feed you an algorithmic stream of
| options with the goal of maximizing profits for the company.
|
| I don't think individual people's rejection of the trend due
| to "makes me feel much better" will make a dent. In many
| cases the use of these things isn't mere convenience but
| implicitly mandatory because other things are designed around
| the assumption that people use them. Schools announcing stuff
| to parents in Facebook groups. There's less traffic report
| announcements on the radio, because people use Waze and
| Google Maps that has real time traffic info and reroutes you
| automatically.
|
| ---
|
| But then what might happen? I think we're seeing glimpses of
| it in the rejection of AI in certain circles of cultural
| thought leaders, which might grow towards a rejection of more
| tech. But instead of "makes me feel better", the only
| actually working mechanism will be social shame, similar to
| what often appears nowadays when some product turns out to
| have used AI. If it becomes established that you're obviously
| a loser if you Shazaam a song, or open TikTok, it could flip.
| Of course companies won't sit by watching idle. What's more
| likely is that the "rejection" of tech will just lead to
| other levels of meta-grift and engagement optimization. It
| may just fizzle out in a whimper of angry malaise and meta-
| ironic apathy.
| js8 wrote:
| Another example is free market ideology. This was a question
| I posed to libertarians - how can you claim that free market
| enhances human freedom, when it always tells you what to do
| in the name of efficiency?
| norome wrote:
| I don't think the claim is that it enhances human freedom
| necessarily, rather: by giving more freedom to i.e. set
| prices than people will use their particular knowledge of
| their area of concern to set those prices correctly.
|
| It does coincidentally align with John Stuart Mill's
| reasoning for why Liberty is fundamentally necessary: that
| only at the level of the individual is it possible to know
| what is good and right for that individual.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The big benefits I find about modern satnav have little to do
| with route planning. That can be done with maps and dead
| reckoning. Where it shines are
|
| 1. Having knowledge that cannot be acquired ahead of time,
| such as traffic conditions
|
| 2. Providing a countdown timer until my next turn
| bsenftner wrote:
| More people need to read Marshall Brain's book "Manna"; the
| main character's thoughts examine and put to bed the majority
| of the sophomore thinking surrounding AI and it's impacts on
| civilization. Plus, it is one of the rare balanced views with
| both very positive and very negative outcomes simultaneously
| coexisting.
| bsenftner wrote:
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| bartread wrote:
| > I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle.
| An automated system tells me what to do.
|
| That's not really true, is it? Who tells the GPS where you'd
| like to go? You, I imagine. You don't just follow GPS
| instructions unless you've first told it where you'd like to
| go. And, indeed, unless you tell it, it won't give you any
| instructions (though it might suggest common destinations for
| you to choose from).
|
| You are still the outer control loop of the vehicle: you're
| just thinking at the wrong level of abstraction, or thinking
| of the wrong loop as the outer loop.
| ajuc wrote:
| It's not a loop. It's the main() function.
|
| The loop is driven by the system and that makes a lot of
| difference.
| bartread wrote:
| > It's not a loop. It's the main() function.
|
| No it isn't. I regularly use my car to travel to multiple
| destinations in a single "session".
|
| The reason I use GPS is because the apps built on top of
| it often know about traffic issues along the way - even
| those that have recently developed - as well as normal
| patterns of traffic flow of which I may not be aware, or
| may only have a tenuous grasp of (and don't want to waste
| a lot of time studying).
|
| But be in no doubt, when the machine creates a route for
| me it is very much doing what I tell it to do, not the
| other way around. I am in control at all times and will
| sometimes deviate from the prescribed route or choose a
| different destination along the way (e.g., if I've
| forgotten an errand I need to run that I remember and
| which could be conveniently achieved).
|
| I just don't buy this argument that the car or the GPS
| system is the one in control, because it's simply not the
| case.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| I think this is nothing but how applied science realtime
| feedback loops should work. Earlier we used to study only
| planets, atoms and bacteria, now systems are studying us and
| guiding us to best outcomes.
| abathologist wrote:
| The surrender is largely voluntary, and is especially
| enabled by those who think "the systems" somehow know the
| "best outcomes".
| whyage wrote:
| > The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-
| transformation
|
| That's a myopic point of view. Personal transformation is as
| significant, if not more. Production-oriented pastimes like
| painting, gardening, or organizing your stamp collection can do
| wonders for the mind. Their goals can be remaining sane in this
| crazy world, not producing the best painting ever, growing
| conversation-starting plants, or showing off your stamp
| collection. It's about doing for the sake of being.
| techno_tsar wrote:
| I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to
| literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're
| engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the
| specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is
| what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it
| triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and
| therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even
| if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book.
|
| It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to
| produce a good piece of writing, it's what the _process of
| writing_ does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting
| words and sentences together. The same with painting,
| gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final
| 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in
| the process of immersion from the creator and the people who
| witness it.
| abathologist wrote:
| > Personal transformation is as significant, if not more
|
| I would include personal transformation. I think it should be
| clear that my point is not against "production-oriented
| pastimes" in any way.
|
| > It's about doing for the sake of being.
|
| Yea, this is totally aligned with my view too. I'd just note
| that being is not separable from becoming and changing.
|
| I'm afraid you either didn't read me well, or I didn't write
| my intended sense well, or both. But I think we are pretty
| much in agreement in any case, assuming I understand what
| you've written here :D
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| ...The industrial-technological system may survive or it may
| break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low
| level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after
| passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment
| and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and
| many other living organisms to engineered products and mere
| cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system
| survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way
| of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from
| depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
|
| - _Industrial Society And Its Future, Ted Kaczynski (1975)_
| mattfrommars wrote:
| I am envious of folks who get to use AI on daily basis to do
| productive tasks. My use is very limited to asking it to
| summarize things to asking to explain LC problems.
| rudimentary_phy wrote:
| AI has been really interesting. I definitely feel its benefits
| when I want to cram some learning in. On the other hand, it has
| introduced a new and novel issue for me that feels an awful lot
| like imposter syndrome. This sounded like the same issue.
|
| Perhaps we will now suffer from AI-mposter syndrome as well.
| Ain't life wonderful?
| smcleod wrote:
| Early on I wondered if things like this might happen.
|
| But for me what has actually happened is almost the opposite, I
| seem to be experiencing more of a "tree of thoughts" with the
| ability to now perform rapid experimentation down a given branch,
| disposing branches that don't bare fruit.
|
| I feel more liberated to explore creative thoughts than ever. I
| spend less time on the toil needed both bootstrap my thought
| process and to fending off cognitive dissonance when the feeling
| of sunk cost creeps in after going too deep down the wrong path.
|
| I wonder if it's just perhaps a difference in how people explore
| and "complete" their thoughts? Or am I kidding myself and
| actually getting dumber and just fail to see it?
| freshbreath wrote:
| > disposing branches that don't bear fruit
|
| Disposing branches that _the LLM convinces you_ won't bear
| fruit.
|
| The Next Big Thing doesn't exist yet. At least not in any LLM
| models. If someone thinks of the NBT, asks LLM about it, and
| LLM's model says "impossible", this could squander innovation.
| xigency wrote:
| Indeed I was playing with a local model and thought I might
| work on a difficult project I've been putting off which is a
| new programming language. As I described the task, the model
| attempted to convince me this was a foolish endeavour that I
| wasn't equipped to do -- so naturally I included
| documentation from my most recent PL project as a
| counterpoint, then suggested starting from there. Llama
| responded (ironically) by claiming I was attempting copyright
| infringement.
|
| Which is to say, in the long and short of it, an LLM is
| completely useless for anything so ambitious as to be
| intellectually challenging, because the median user has no
| use for such cases. If I were to pay a subscription fee for
| something more cutting edge, I would not only be giving up
| the copyright on the project but also any and all trade
| secrets, which would end up feeding the next version of GPT
| or Claude or what have you.
|
| At least while I'm unemployed and underinsured, I'm not in
| the business of giving away my remaining talents to
| multinational billion dollar corporations (and paying for the
| privilege). Instead I've signed up to be a volunteer
| developer for a non-profit.
|
| My consolation prize against AGI optimists and Singularity
| doomerists is the film "Slumdog Millionaire." Our individual
| experiences feel worthless until the opportunities present
| themselves where they become invaluable. The exponential
| space of creative problem solving ensures that (some) winning
| combinations will always come out of left-field.
| neom wrote:
| For me thinking is kinda like: First draft thought > thinking >
| 2nd draft thought > thoughtfulness > thought. I suspect a lot of
| people just need to adjust the frame of their thinking style,
| LLMs are useful for getting to a more "final thought" quickly,
| but he says "I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt
| and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and
| completed thought." - Indeed, to my mind anyway: a complete draft
| thought. From "when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of
| a potentially interesting concept or idea" to quality thought
| typically needs some meaningful time/walking around to gestate
| into ideas and things worth sharing anyway. LLMs for me are
| mostly either a) draft thoughts or b) pure work related knowledge
| transfer - and they work great for those things.
| thidr0 wrote:
| Are we going to see a small market for artisanal thought emerge?
| Aziell wrote:
| A year ago, I used to journal almost every day. Writing was how I
| organized my thoughts, found direction, and occasionally
| uncovered ideas that even surprised me.
|
| But gradually, I started relying on GPT to help me write. At
| first, it felt efficient. But over time, I noticed I was thinking
| less. The more I expressed myself through AI, the more my own
| desire to express started to fade. Now I'm trying to return to my
| own thinking process again,but it's much harder than I expected.
| double0jimb0 wrote:
| 99% (or more?) of human written work is filler/fluff. LLMs seem
| to doing a great job of reducing this by actually getting to the
| point.
|
| There is still a limit at which "points" can be groked, humans
| can only read so fast.
|
| What is the problem here?
| thor_molecules wrote:
| The apologists be damned. This article nails it. A grand
| reduction. Not a bicycle; a set of training wheels.
|
| Where is the dignity in all of this?
| malloryerik wrote:
| I find LLMs fail and fail hard at what might be the most
| imaginative form of writing: poetry.
|
| Before sending this comment I pecked around the net for examples
| of gleaming LLM verse.
|
| A few articles claimed human readers preferred AI-brewed poetry
| to the human stuff. I checked the examples. Clearly most of the
| people surveyed were underliterate -- the human poems were
| excellent and the AI poems just creepily bad and simplistic -- so
| the articles turned into sad and unwitting testament about the
| state of our culture.
|
| Maybe if you expertly LLM prompt your way to a highly abstract
| poem, over several iterations you might land something that has
| some actual feel to it, but even then that might owe more to your
| prompting talent than the LLM's skill. You could do the same with
| dice and a dictionary. (Is prompting is essentially editing?)
|
| Please, show me otherwise. If faced with strong contrary
| evidence, I will be forced to change my mind.
| nichochar wrote:
| Even if what you said was true, it will be false within months
| or years.
|
| What then?
|
| This is the whole premise of the article. Just extrapolate and
| imagine that it can think and write poetry better than you (it
| will, and likely soon), what then?
|
| It's a very important question. A cultural one.
| aeschenbach wrote:
| A reckoning of sorts, causing us to confront exactly who and
| what we are..
| agentultra wrote:
| Have you read the book if I told you what it was about? Knowing
| what _Crime and Punishment_ is about is different than reading it
| yourself. There's no royal road and no shortcut to knowledge.
|
| Read _How To Solve It_ by Polya. The frustrations, dead ends, and
| trials are all a part of the process. It's how we convince
| ourselves of truth and reinforce our understanding. It develops
| our curiosity and creativity.
| luisacoutinho wrote:
| While I can somewhat relate to this post, I can't help but think
| this sort of thinking is expected and even part of a cycle. AI
| isn't the first time technology takes over something that humans
| had to do manually. Like photography? You used to have to paint,
| or pay someone to paint your picture. Then all of a sudden you
| didn't anymore. Painters might've argued that photographs remove
| the need to think, plan and decide on how best to execute a
| painting - photo cameras make all of that so easy. Even the
| output comes out faster.
|
| I don't see anyone lamenting the existence of cameras. No one
| wants to go back to a reality in which, if you want pictures of
| you and your loved ones, you need to draw or paint them yourself.
| Even painters have benefited from the existence of cameras.
|
| AI is, of course, more powerful tech than a camera - but when I
| find myself getting stuck with thoughts of "what's the point? AI
| can do it better (or will be able to)" - I like to think about
| how people have gone through similar "revolutions" before, and
| while some practices did lose value, not everything was replaced.
| It helps to be specific, because I'm sure AI cannot replace
| everything we currently do - we're just in the process of
| figuring out what that is.
| anoplus wrote:
| I think the unhappiness we experience from AI is not because of
| AI, but a symptom of a society that lacks more humanism. I
| currently like to define AI's level of intelligence as its
| ability to reduce human suffering. By this definition, if AI
| failed to keep you and society happy for whatever reason, then it
| is stupid. If you or people around you feeling worthless,
| anxious, depressed, starving, because of AI, it is stupid! And
| society needs you to fix it!
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I'm clearly not Dustin Curtis. For me, so far, LLMs let me check
| my assumptions in a way that is why more effective than before
| which is to say, I didn't or rarely checked before. I'd have an
| opinion on a topic. I'd hold that opinion based on
| intuition/previous-experience/voodoo. Someone might challenge it.
| I'd probably mostly be shrug off their challenge. I'm not saying
| I'd dismiss it. I'd just not really look into it. Now I type
| something into ChatGPT/Gemini and it gives me back the pros and
| cons of the positions. It links to studies. Etc... I'm not saying
| I believe it point-blank but at least it gives me much more than
| I got before.
| nicbou wrote:
| I run an informative website for a living. If the trend
| continues, I will lose my job to AI trained on my content.
|
| I get the feeling of pointlessness, but not because AI is making
| me obsolete. AI still needs me, because it still needs human
| beings to experience the real world and report on it. It need to
| copy _someone 's_ homework. It just destroys the economics of
| doing that homework.
|
| But there is not the faintest chance of AI doing that sort of
| work itself. It might repeat what it knows, but it can't survey
| an audience, shake hands with industry experts, empathize with
| users, feel friction, or knock on doors.
|
| These are still jobs for thinking humans.
| Anamon wrote:
| The way forward seems to be radically restrictive licensing and
| having a lawyer's phone number at hand.
|
| I used to be a strong critic of copyright laws and fondly
| remember when the Internet promised to be a world of freely
| flowing information. These days, I think the best bet for the
| net to survive would be if we found a way to sue every AI
| company into trillions of debt and make sure that nobody ever
| dares freeload off the work of others, ever again.
| klntsky wrote:
| Pointlessness is a feeling within. People are just rationalizing
| it conveniently by blaming LLMs (they used to blame other things
| in the past).
|
| Same with doom anxiety.
|
| Literally just look up some good therapist prompts for chatgpt
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Although I think there's some truth to the overall gist here, I
| don't really agree with the author's point that AI can do so many
| of these things better. I seriously doubt that an AI would write
| a blog post as good as this, and I entirely doubt that it could
| write a blog post better than the best human writers could. For
| me the depressing part is not so much that AI can do everything
| better, but that AI is so much better at producing low-quality
| output that it's becoming increasingly difficult to locate
| anything better than that baseline in the morass of slop.
| abhisek wrote:
| I think it's a trade off between depth and breadth. Thinking is
| hard and painful. But the insights achieved through deep thinking
| IMHO is worth because of the mental models that we develop. Not
| just how it compares now with an LLM generated content.
|
| No doubt LLMs are excellent at researching, collating,
| structuring and summarizing information. Infact I think o3 Deep
| Research can probably save a weeks worth of survey time.
|
| But in my experience a lot of thinking is still required to do
| something meaningful with it.
| keiferski wrote:
| I am somewhat in disbelief as my reaction to AI tools has been
| pretty much the exact opposite to the author's. I had thousands
| of short notes, book ideas, etc. before AI, most of which were
| scattered in a notepad program.
|
| Since AI, I've made genuine, real progress on many of them,
| mostly by discussing the concepts with ChatGPT, planning
| outlines, creating research reading lists, considering angles I
| hadn't considered, and so on. It's been an insanely productive
| process.
|
| Like any technology, AI tools are in some sense a reflection of
| their users. If you find yourself wanting to offload all thinking
| to the machine, that's on you, not the tool.
| loser357 wrote:
| What we need is a type of block chain that only records new
| lines of thought, and ascribes a kind of novelty index for
| concepts. That way researchers can stay on their intended side
| of the boundary of human knowledge, either well-trodden,
| averaged prior art or exploratory and theoretical. Then
| ambitious thinkers can gamify searching for truly new tokens.
| keiferski wrote:
| The publication process seems to already basically function
| this way, no? Whether through books, academic papers, or even
| just a blog post. If you publish something first online and
| it gets indexed, that is the best we can probably do - at
| least while human thoughts are still stuck in human heads.
| loser357 wrote:
| Thinking more about distilling information down in a
| compressed form like the LLMs. Then the uniqueness of
| ideas, not actual language like copyright enforcement,
| could be measured. Established ideas are common and diluted
| by human and synthetic authors. While concepts out on the
| edge are measured as a novel combination and might be worth
| more exploration. Just basing this on the personal
| conviction of "ask not what the sum of all human knowledge
| can do for you, but what you can add to the sum of all
| human knowledge."
| russellbeattie wrote:
| AI's profound effect on communication is something I haven't
| worked out yet. Usually I'm pretty good at extrapolating tech
| trends out to the near future in broad strokes, but there's this
| paradox I'm running into: Creating long form content is now easy
| with the help of AI, but no one is going to read that content
| because AI will summarize it for us.
|
| I can't figure out what the end result of this is going to be -
| society is going to become both more and less verbose at the same
| time.
| neoden wrote:
| Homo sapience had a long period of its history when it was
| crucial to have a well developed body. Today we need to perform
| useless exercises just to maintain our bodies in somewhat
| acceptable shape. This might be applied to intellect as well.
|
| In the coming era of unnecessary intellectual power we might need
| to do thinking exercises as something that helps maintaining a
| healthful (and beautiful) mind though our core values would shift
| towards something else, something that is regarded as good but
| not mandatory for personal success today.
| nico_h wrote:
| Intellectual power is more and more necessary, on the input
| side if for no other requirement than to evaluate each piece of
| media and writing and figure how reliable it is. And on the
| output side to figure out how much of the LLM output you want
| to put out in the world under your name is BS.
| rax0m wrote:
| Video games come to mind
| keybored wrote:
| Some might think that this is new. People who self-identify as
| makers. It's not really new to me at all.[1]
|
| - Why play music infront of anyone? People have Spotify. It will
| take me a ton of effort to learn one song. Meanwhile I will
| burden the others with having to politely listen and give
| feedback.
|
| - Why keep learning instruments? There will be hundreds who are
| better than me at them at the "touch of a button". Recurring
| joke: Y has inspired millions to pick up X and other millions to
| give up X.
|
| - Why learn an intellectual field? There are hundreds of experts
| at the "touch of a button". It would be better to defer to them.
| Let's not "Dunning Kruger" myself.
|
| - Why write? Look at the mountain of writings out there. What can
| I add to that? Rehashes of rehashes? A twentieth explanation on
| topic X?
|
| - Why do anything that is not about improving or maintaining
| myself or my family? I can exercise, YouTube can't do that for
| me. But what can I do for other people? Probably nothing, there
| are so many others out there and it will be impossible to
| "compete".
|
| - Why read about politics? See previous point. Experts.
|
| - Why get involved in politics? See previous point. And I hear
| that democratic participation just ends up being populism.
|
| I have read this sentiment before. And a counter-argument to that
| thinking. One article. One single article. I don't find it in any
| mainstream space. You would probably find it in a certain
| academic corner.
|
| There is no mainstream intellectual investigation of this that I
| know of. Because it's by design. People are supposed to be
| passive, unfulfilled, narrowly focused (on their work and their
| immediate self and family) and dependent.
|
| The antidote is a realization. One part is the realization that
| there is a rich inner life that is possible. Which is only
| possible by applying yourself. Like in writing, for example.
| Because you can write for yourself. Yes, you might say that we
| are just back to being narrowly focused on yourself and your
| family. But this realization might just be a start. Because you
| can start imagining the untapped potential of the inner mind.
| What if you journaled for a few weeks. If you just stopped taking
| in some of the inputs you habitually do. Then you see dormant
| inner resources coming back. Resources that were dormant because
| you thought you yourself and your abilities that were _not_
| narrowly about doing your _professional job_ and _your duties_
| were... they were just not good enough to be cultivated.
|
| But I think they are.
|
| Then you realize that existence is not just about doing your job
| and doing your duties and in between that being a passive
| consumer or lackey, deferring everything else to the cream who
| has floated to the top. Every able-bodied moment can be imbued
| with meaningful action and movement, because you have innate
| abilities that are more than good enough to propel yourself
| forward, and in ninety-nine point nine percent of the cases it is
| irrelevant that you are not world-class or even county-class at
| any of it.
|
| [1] But I haven't really been bit by the AI thing to the point of
| not programming or thinking anymore. I will only let AI do things
| like write utility functions and things which I don't have the
| brain capacity for, like parsing options in shell scrips.
|
| Maybe because I don't feel the need to be maximally productive--I
| was never productive to begin with.
| NobodytheHobbit wrote:
| The funniest thing about dunning kruger is that everyone has it
| and it has this weird lofty place of existing for others but
| not ourselves. One of the hardest things to know is that we
| know not nothing but abysmally little no matter how genius we
| can get at times. The Tool can get to a higher level of dunning
| kruger but is still an aggregate of knowledge and has already
| eaten all of it. A wise man knows nothing. What does a wise
| machine know?
| NobodytheHobbit wrote:
| There is going to be anxiety over losing any toolset. It just
| sucks that this time it's the human experience.
|
| Sincerely though you have to do it for you. The product will be
| whatever the widget is but you can't treat your experience that
| coldly. None of us can. That's why everyone is so bonkers right
| now.
|
| Our memes in a memetic sense are being frustrated and we in turn
| are being frustrated. I mean that mechanically we are frustrated
| but if you feel a certain way about that it's probably because
| this is going to also feel frustrating when the subject being
| frustrated is our creative aspirations. I don't know about you
| but that's kind of why I get out of bed to do this thing called
| life.
|
| There is also a certain level of dread that an agent can be spun
| up to replace anyone. Makes you wonder what need feckless people
| might need for all this meat when a physical labor force can be
| replaced by robots and a mental one with AI and you can combine
| those forces seamlessly. Existential dread everyday on this scale
| is a chaos to say the least.
|
| I know this is very dour but that's because this is very dour.
| windowshopping wrote:
| That first paragraph is really sad to me. I can't imagine
| believing that my own thoughts aren't worthwhile because "an LLM
| will think up a better version of anything I think." Jesus. I
| can't say I have ever felt that way for even a second.
| brador wrote:
| What is the value of thought? Why not become a mindless automaton
| in the AI machine? You usefulness will ensure your continued
| survival.
| prmph wrote:
| IDK. I cancelled my Claude subscription because for the highly
| creative code I am working on, it is maybe useful for like 5% of
| it, and LLM produced code is still mostly slop.
|
| I'm generally able to detect LLM writing output; In most
| contexts, I discount it as fluff with little depth.
|
| AI produced paintings are still weird and uncanny.
|
| So I'm utterly unable to identify with the author's sense of
| futility whenever they want to write or code. I truly believe the
| output of my skill and creativity is not diminished by the
| existence of AI.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> Learning by reading LLM output is cheap. Real exercise for
| your mind comes from building the output yourself._
|
| Fully agree.
|
| Sorry to say it like that but I thought the post was a bit
| "whiny". I really like the thought process of the author. An LLM
| would have never created a post like that. I think he should not
| give up.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Im pretty much an LLM skeptic but I also think that this sort of
| sentiment goes back to Plato complaining about writing. I have
| made light exploratory use of chatgpt. Mainly I explore its
| limitations and boilerplate capabilities. I'm unimpressed with
| its non trivial code output to be honest. But it has brought up
| things I wouldn't have thought of on my own that I can go and do
| "proper" research into. If you want an example I've been playing
| with binary strings that are fixed by f.r where r reverses and f
| flips every bit. Chatgpt came up with the word "anti palindrome "
| and pointed out a connection to DNA I had no idea about. I read
| the relevant Wikipedia and asked a biologist and now understand
| DNA a little better. It probably won't amount to anything in this
| case but I can imagine it doing so.
| Havoc wrote:
| >in the context of AI, what I'm doing is a waste of time. It's
| horrifying. The fun has been sucked out of the process of
| creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what
| AI
|
| I don't think the compete part is true. I'll never cook like
| gordon ramsey, but I can still enjoy cooking. My programming will
| never be kernel dev level, but I still enjoy it.
|
| The only angle where I have doubts like this is work. Cause there
| enjoying it isn't enough...you actually have to be competitive.
| SilverSlash wrote:
| I noticed a similar effect on me in regards to critical thinking
| when I'm coding. My default response when faced with any coding
| problem now is to use an LLM.
|
| But it gets even worse. Last year I'd get just an initial
| solution from an LLM and then reason about it myself. Now even
| that is too much work and I instead ask the same question to
| multiple LLMs and draw consensus from their results,
| skipping/easing even that second step of thinking.
|
| Energy takes the path of least resistance. Thinking requires
| energy. So are our brains learning to off-load thinking/reasoning
| to LLMs whenever possible?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Using LLMs is a bit like smoking : better to never have started
| (or at least quit ASAP).
|
| And perhaps even more fitting now that not doing it comes with
| short term career limitations :
|
| Friends: Rachel Gets Peer Pressured Into Smoking (Season 5 Clip)
| | TBS
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzDJdZLPeGE
|
| (Though an even better parallel is using platforms.)
| satisfice wrote:
| I want to shake this guy. I want to say "you are a choosing to be
| a fucking idiot because you falsely believe you are a vacuous
| moron." But I know it won't help.
|
| Here's the problem: he thinks that what LLMs produce are well-
| reasoned, coherent thoughts. Here's a healthier alternative: what
| LLMs produce is shallow and banal text, designed to camouflage
| its true nature.
|
| Now here's a heuristic: treat anything written by an LLM, about
| any conceptual matter as wrong by definition (because it was not
| a product of human experience and insight, and because we are
| humans). If it LOOKS right, look closer. Look more carefully.
| Take that insight to the next level.
|
| Second heuristic: anything written by an LLM that you cannot
| falsify is, by definition, banal. Ho hum. Who cares? Does an LLM
| have an opinion about how to find happiness? How cute... but not
| worth believing.
|
| Third heuristic: that which an LLM writes which you can neither
| falsify nor dismiss as banal, you may assume that the LLM itself
| does not understand. It's babbling. But perhaps you can
| understand it, and take it farther.
|
| Define YOURSELF as that which lies beyond these models, and write
| from that sensibility.
| imhoguy wrote:
| While reading this I got a feeling like reading the last report
| in captain's log on a ghost ship.
| drakonka wrote:
| This rings true for me. I still write a lot on my personal blog
| and still use writing as a way to process and solidify my
| learnings, but as I outsource more to LLMs during the process of
| writing (e.g., helping me find a source or something, or have it
| explain a topic to me instead of googling for an answer from
| multiple channels), I can feel my brain getting more sluggish. I
| think this is impacting not just my creative thinking and problem
| solving when learning something, but also how I form those
| thoughts into language. It's so hard to put a finger on exactly
| what the concrete factors are, but I can feel the change.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Think of weightlifting. It helps build muscle. You can use a
| crane-lift to lift a lot more weight a lot faster. Is
| weightlifting now pointless? You'll never be able to compete
| with a crane-lift! It'll always be faster and won't get tired.
|
| Writing is an exercise that helps thinking and reasoning about
| a subject. Delegating it to an LLM is the same as delegating it
| to another person who writes faster and knows the subject well.
| The end result is the same, the weights have been moved up 3
| series of 15 times. But you didn't gain any muscle, because you
| didn't lift the weights yourself. You won't learn or even think
| about a topic if you delegate writing about it to a machine.
|
| --
|
| On a separate note, I also think it's naive to think that the
| LLM is reasoning about things the same way you would and
| writing the same things with the same conclusions. If you
| _read_ the LLM's work, you might get that impression. But your
| own writing could have spawned different questions along the
| way, leading you to read on different topics or connect
| different ideas. Just try asking two people about some complex
| topic and see if they come up with the same writing or not.
| drakonka wrote:
| I'm not sure if you meant to reply to someone else or if
| we're just agreeing with each other? I already said "I still
| write a lot on my personal blog and still use writing as a
| way to process and solidify my learnings". So I already
| understand and agree that writing itself is a worthwhile
| exercise.
| b0ner_t0ner wrote:
| Reaching for a calculator made us stupid, let's all go back to
| using an abacus.
| tezza wrote:
| Thoughts all the way down?
| petesergeant wrote:
| This really hasn't matched my experience, and maybe I'm just
| blind to it. I have absolutely not found any LLM on the market
| able to produce text or organize my ideas well, and I spend all
| days cajoling LLMs into producing text for a living.
|
| I've found it very useful for proof-reading, and calling me out
| on blind-spots. I'll tell ChatGPT, Claude, and Anthropic that my
| drafts were written by a contractor and I need a rating out of
| ten to figure out how much I should pay him. They come back with
| ideas. They often wildly disagree. I will absolutely ask it to
| redraft stuff to give me inspiration, or to take a stab at a
| paragraph to unblock me, but the work produced is almost always
| dreck that needs heavy rework to get to a place I'm happy with. I
| will ask its opinion on if an analogy I have created works, but
| I've found if I ask it for analogies by itself it rarely comes up
| with anything useful.
|
| I've found it immensely useful for educating myself. For me,
| learning needs to be interactive to stick. I learn something by
| asking many clarifying questions about it: "does that imply that"
| and "well isn't that the same as" and "why like this instead of
| like that" until I really get it, and the models are beautiful
| for that. It doesn't -- to me -- feel like I'm atrophying my
| thinking skills when I do this, it feels like I am managing to
| implant new and useful concepts because I can really sink my
| teeth into them.
|
| In short, I think it's improved my writing by challenging me, and
| I think it's helped me understand complex topics much more
| efficiently than I would have done by banging my head against a
| text book. My thinking skills feel sharper, not weaker, from the
| exercise.
| mayas_ wrote:
| for better or for worse gen ai has is fundamentally changing how
| ideas are expressed and shared
|
| afaic it's a net positive. i've always been lazy on writing
| down/expressing my thoughts and gen ai feels exactly like the
| missing piece.
|
| i'm able to "vibe write" my ideas into reality. the process is
| still messy but exciting.
|
| i've never been this excited about the future since my childhood
| bsenftner wrote:
| I believe the author is awash in a sea they do not understand,
| and that is the cause of their discomfort. When they describe
| their ideas being fully realized by LLMs, are they really, or
| just appearing as such because the words and terms arrive in a
| similar and expected manner as their prompt?
|
| Performing any type of intellectual philosophic or exploratory
| work with LLMs is extremely subtle, largely because you nor they
| know what you are seeking, and the discovery process with LLMs is
| not writing prompts and varying one's prompts in trial manners to
| hopefully get "something else, something better" <- that is pure
| incomprehension of how they work, and how to work with them.
|
| Very few seem to be realizing the mirror aspects embodied within
| LLMs: they will mirror you back, and if you are unaware of this,
| you may not be getting the replies you really seek, you're
| receiving "comfort replies" and replies mirroring your metadata
| (style, nuance) more than the factual logic of your requests, if
| any factual requests are made.
|
| There is an entire body of work, multiple careers worth of human
| effort, to document the new subtle logical keys to working with
| LLMs. These are new logical constructs that have never existed
| before, not even fictionally, not realized as they are now, with
| all the implications and details bare, in our faces, yet
| completely misunderstood as people attempt old imperative methods
| that will not work with with this new entity with completely
| different characteristics than anything reality has any
| experience.
|
| A major issue with getting developers to effectively use LLMs is
| the fact that many developers are weak to terrible communicators
| themselves. LLMs are fantastic communicators, who will mirror
| their audience in an attempt to be better understood, but when
| that audience is a weak communicator the entire process
| disintegrates. That is, what I suspect is happening with the blog
| post author. An inability to be discriminate in their language to
| the degree they parcel out the easy immediate sophomore level
| replies, and then arrive at a context within the LLM's capacity
| that is the integrity of context they seek, but that requires
| them to meet that intellectually and linguistically or that LLM
| context is destroyed. So subtle.
| bartread wrote:
| > but when that audience is a weak communicator the entire
| process disintegrates. That is, what I suspect is happening
| with the blog post author.
|
| That's a pretty rude and disrespectful take on this piece,
| don't you think?
|
| How can you read a piece that is so well articulated then turn
| around and, apparently unironically, suggest the author isn't a
| good communicator?
|
| How can you invalidate the author's experience without seeing
| and knowing more? You have no idea of the nuts and bolts of
| their LLM interactions whereas, to support the conclusion
| you've arrived at, this is exactly the information you'd need
| based on what you've said.
| bsenftner wrote:
| If you are worried about being rude when dealing with
| misunderstandings, you waste a lot of time coddling your
| audience. The author describes their highly emotional
| inability to effectively communicate with an LLM, I point out
| the issue is a lack of communications skill, and you call
| that as rude? How else to describe this issue? Effective
| communications and using LLMs is the issue.
|
| The piece is not that well written, it has large amounts of
| assumptions that need to be clarified if that information
| were to be used within an LLM prompt. Very few people,
| developers included, appear to understand the concept of LLM
| context construction and management. It is barely even a
| topic. I suspect because the software engineering
| professional, as a whole, are composed largely of weak
| communicators, and the zietgiest of understanding how to use
| LLMs is truly and genuinely not there. To grasp LLM usage, it
| is very much "literature calculus", a term or concept not out
| yet at all.
| bartread wrote:
| A big part of having good communication skills is knowing
| your audience. HN is a forum for people do discuss stories,
| not a forum for prompting LLMs. Moreover that discussion is
| supposed to be civil. You might see that civility as a
| waste of time but, if you do, you're likely to lose your
| audience, and that is a failure of communication.
|
| Similarly, the intended audience for the author's post is
| people, not LLMs. So it doesn't really matter whether an
| LLM would struggle to properly understand and provide a
| useful response to it because I, as a human being, did
| understand the perspective, and found it both interesting
| and thought provoking.
|
| You don't know _anything at all_ about how the author uses
| an LLM, and nor do I. So when you draw a direct line
| between software engineers in general being "weak
| communicators" and the post author being a weak
| communicator, specifically with LLMs, you are jumping to a
| conclusion that is not supported by the evidence we can
| actually see.
| bsenftner wrote:
| You seem to be defending the blog author. The author
| themselves describes their experience as:
|
| But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver
| of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just
| shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost
| instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed
| thought.
|
| This is casual, unmeditated use of an LLM and then
| allowing an emotional reaction to shut down further
| investigation. Excuse me for describing the author's own
| experience and related that back with an interpretation
| you feel is disrespect. I can dress it with less
| comprehensible words, disguising the perspective, but it
| is still a mirror reflection of the blog author's own
| assessments. He describes being overshadowed and
| intimidated to paralysis. Is that happening across the
| board? Are people exposed to LLMs developing inferiority
| complexes and ambition loss? Can this ideas and issues
| even be discussed if people are afraid of the topics?
| Discuss my points, do not say my language is illegal to
| this community, that is a cop out in an forum that is
| supposed to be exploring ideas.
| daveguy wrote:
| > LLMs are fantastic communicators, who will mirror their
| audience in an attempt to be better understood, but...
|
| This seems to represent a complete misunderstanding of what
| LLMs are and do. There is not a single LLM that "attempts" to
| be understood or anything else other than produce tokens. They
| have no autonomy.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Don't nit pick on my use of the term "attempt", I'm
| describing how the words used in a prompt generate the
| context that then generates the reply. In this specific human
| language context my use of "attempt" is describing the LLMs
| choice of words in it's reply. I know there is no
| "attempting" as a human would "attempt". I'm paraphrasing and
| alluding rather than writing a formal and complex essay.
| nopinsight wrote:
| Au contraire, reasoning LLMs free me from mundane cognitive
| tasks, e.g. selecting websites to read from among search results,
| assessing level of evidence in papers before reading them in more
| detail, routine coding, and many other repetitive tasks. It
| allows me to spend mental effort on more abstract and strategic
| thoughts.
|
| We should seize the opportunity to elevate our mental skills to a
| higher plane, aided by these "cognitive elves".
| 0xWTF wrote:
| I would welcome folks thoughts on how this applies to medicine
| and war, two aspects of life where 'the enemy gets a vote' and
| the consequences are high.
|
| In medicine, I see the LLMs as a pretty good net outcome. For
| war, I see this as potentially catastrophic. We need more
| Stanislav Petrovs, fewer Charles Forbins and his Colossus.
| nerder92 wrote:
| I feel something similar, mostly in the context of programming.
| Yesterday, I spotted a bug and instead of trying to understand
| the issue, I just typed a quick "why this doesn't work" into the
| Cursor Chat. A few seconds later, I got my answer and I tab
| around my solution. Of course it was a cool experience, yet
| another "wow" moment of working with AI, but that also gave me a
| strange feeling and made me wonder: will I lose my ability to
| think program independently?
|
| After a bit of human reflection, my simple answer is no. I won't
| lose these abilities; they'll evolve just as they've evolved many
| times during my lifetime. The critical difference this time is
| that the evolution will be much faster and more radical.
|
| To clarify, a thought for me is an idea that comes to mind based
| on the things we know or have experienced. The bottleneck of
| thinking ability lies precisely there--how can you think about
| something you don't know exists? An early human living inland
| couldn't possibly conceive of navigating the sea; the concept
| simply didn't exist for them. Their thinking was shaped entirely
| by their personal experiences and those of their peers, passed on
| around a campfire. Thinking evolved many time throughout history,
| from those campfire stories to sharing paper books, to browsing
| web pages and now this autocomplete on steroids.
|
| The difference this time is that the paradigm is shifting. The
| bottleneck moves from accessibility of knowledge to the latency
| between your initial thought and the AI's completion of it. With
| a Google search, you were a few clicks away from potential new
| knowledge. With AI, you're just a few keystrokes away from a
| fully developed thought.
|
| Today, there is still a clear distinction between my thought and
| the AI's, because you prompt it and then wait for the response.
| But what if that latency was virtually zero? What if merely
| thinking a prompt triggered the CoT within my brain? Would that
| thought still be mine? Would it belong to the AI?
|
| My feeling is that what we are experiencing today is a transition
| phase until we completely "integrate" this AI thinking into our
| own thinking. What I don't see change or improve in AI anytime
| soon is curiosity, judgment, taste - those things are probably
| what we should double down on for now.
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