Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcell | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised no one in this thread has pointed out the dystopian future this leads to.

Extend out the trendline, and you have everyone writing to each other with ChatGPT enhancement. It is the fallacy of composition applied to semi-professional prose. When we all enhance our writing into the same anodyne prose, it isn't a leg up anymore, it's just the baseline. At the same time, any individual who depends on this tech will see their writing skills atrophy.

In the early days of the internet, many predicted that it would be a pure win for society, with no downsides. By 2022 we have seen the entire story play to completion, and it's much more complicated. The mainstream web is like a giant, tacky Walmart, with everyone hooked on dopamine hits. It's terrible in many ways, and I don't think anyone in 1998 would have predicted the specific ways that the 2022 internet is terrible.

How does ChatGPT projected out 20 years look? I expect like a cross between Tiktok, Walmart and mid-wit Netflix shows.

My prediction is in 2-3 years the cool kids are not speaking in chatgpt output, but in prompts. By greg rutkowski.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

I am less worried about this, because I think this kind of prose enhancement is part useful (in which case we have made the text clearer, people can communicate better, and it’s just a win), and part social signaling. But if everyone is using it, it ceases to be a signal of education / background or if communication skills. It may loop back to very terse, curt prose as a sign of authenticity being desirable, and then gpt-next emulates that, and there is some chasing forever of the most fashionable style. But that’s just people, it doesn’t seem particularly new or worrisome.

I think you're missing the fact that most people cannot write as professionally as ChatGPT and are therefore denied justice and opportunities because they cannot social signal as well as others.

> The mainstream web is like a giant, tacky Walmart, with everyone hooked on dopamine hits.

I would read your sci-fi if you wrote some (and advertised it on your user profile)!

There will be "professional writers" who will use these tools to enhance their creativity. And, there will be general writers who will use these tools to write better.

I'm primarily a coder, and these tools open up immense possibilities for me. I can now turn ideas in reality 500% faster (at least). There will be tons of new general programmers, which is great because it just increases the demand for professionals.

If anything this will lower the unjustified weight people give to articulate speech and prose instead of caring about content.

In general, I agree to your observations. However, the semi-professional prose is a requirement of the legal system (in all countries) influenced by bureaucracy. Namely by the way people like records stored and audits done. It isn't really about leg-ups in this case. It would be in plenty of others.

>Extend out the trendline, and you have everyone writing to each other with ChatGPT enhancement.

How is that dystopian? Now everyone has a speechwriter/ghostwriter, not just presidents and CEOs

blogs and content producers (exist text based) will cease to exist. this could kill Google. instead of asking questions of a search engine, you'll now use gpt, which will mean anyone who counts on search traffic for money will likely need to find a new income stream.

content farms are just going to dry up because there will be no incentive.

I disagree, I see content farming useless SEO copy sites becoming WORSE of an endemic with chatgpt. Prompt it the search query, write it out to a dynamic page, rank high in the search results. This is absolutely going to make search results way worse before any better or make a search engine unneeded.

Strangers talking to each other have to add all the politeness and filler words in how they communicate not because they mean it but for purely utilitarian purposes. This is well understandood from both sides.

I don't believe there is any value in that kind of transparent fakeness so I don't mind humans losing that and if there exists some form of pride in being addressed with fake politeness and respect for doing ticket handling work, people need to lose it and find something better to do in life... because these jobs (and many more similar ones) are going away.

In a few years, we will end up with most of these being automatically processed supplemented by escalation when automatically resolving it is not obvious and random cross checks to control for fraud.

There is absolutely zero reason to not do that. I don't think a significant part of a human's life should be spent processing these tickets. This will free people to do better things. We have WAYYY too much to do.

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