When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
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With prose it's all your manual work again to check. If your text is mundane it might be trivial but for anything a pg would write I guess an AI is pretty useless in its current state.
Structural Alignment: Modifying Transformers (like GPT) to Follow a JSON Schema
My go-to example is if conditions. When I start with the first case, it almost always figures out the rest of the cases correctly.
But I can understand why some workflows may be a liability rather than help. Similar to chatgpt sometimes allusinate code with reserved words that don't exist in the language (but exists in others), or uses old code from a deprecated api / version of your framework.
In other words, somtimes the cleaning process can take as much time, as just writing the code yourself.
The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving databases here for the foreseeable—still writing things by hand for the foreseeable, and loving every moment.
Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing the thing. It was working, and everything.
I made a comment wondering if Chat GPT 4 with the vision extension could solve the same problem. One of the devs that had worked on the aforementioned AI (for years!) mentioned that yes, yes it can.
Game over.
Those years of effort had just been replaced with a one-sentence English-language prompt that starts with "Please output a table from..."
If this doesn't blow your mind, then... I don't know how to help you understand just how much has changed, virtually overnight.
OmniPage Ultimate is an entire workflow that's turn-key and ready-to-go.
Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet.
Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries.
You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds.
A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on individual rows, interleaved with the headings. Even if I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess up the alternating row interleave. E.g.:
Overview
Hardware
SKU
A2
Zone
2
Software
Operating System
Windows
Image
Licensed
Yes
Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time and effort would you have to invest to solve this style of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject, fix up the formatting.
Years of effort?
Decades?
Whilst to the untrained eye, sure, the NGINX config looked great, but it didn't function, and it didn't include the URL rewrites as instructed, hallucinated a bunch of rewrites that didn't exist and would serve no purpose, and despite refining the prompts over many days, and consulting with self-proclaimed "prompt engineers", it still didn't give the expected output.
It's neat. Reliable? Not in my experiences for my needs, but I am genuinely glad you're making it work for what you need, that's definitely cool, provided it doesn't hallucinate in an unnoticed capacity. It's a lot of trust to place in an LLM.
The trick is to know what they can and can't do, and use them where they're useful enough.
Someone here on HN quipped that ChatGPT is "isn't intelligent" because it couldn't come up with a revolutionary new battery chemistry.
Like... what are you expecting? A god?
LLMs are useful when you can validate the output yourself. Similarly, they're useful when the output doesn't have to be precise but the inputs are English.
For example, they're awesome "filters" for human input as measured against human metrics. "Is the following text rude? Output YES or NO only?" is very useful and works well enough, right now.
They're also useful when you need to iterate to find something, or when your search parameters are incredibly vague but have a narrow Venn diagram intersection.
I've been using ChatGPT as a replacement for the /r/tipofmytongue sub-Reddit. It knows everything well enough to be able to interactively find what I'm looking for to an extent that is super-individual-human, and in some ways beyond what even a very large collection of humans can achieve.
In my opinion, the mental model you should use when evaluating LLMs-vs-Human capability: When asked a question, the LLM has to answer without being able to iterate, back-track, or even use a scratch pad such as pen&paper or a text editor. Basically it's the same as an "oral exam", where you have to stand in the middle of a room and get grilled by a professor to determine your knowledge on a subject.
Don't compare "human with tools and unlimited time" to "LLM with no tools and seconds of time". Compare "human being interrogated in an empty room" and then it is much more clear where an LLM rates.
GPT 4 is definitely super-human in some areas, such as general knowledge and translation between languages.
No human knows as much, or can speak as many languages.
Ask yourself this: can any human, when asked to "invent something", just do it, then and there?
Can you share the prompt and your expected output? I'm interested to see where it goes wrong.
TL;DR. I start by asking it to generate sentences where subject-object inversion yields a meaningful sentence where the verb's meaning is shifted metaphorically. For instance "I smoke the cigarette vs the cigarette is smoking me". After some back and forth it comes up with:
The painter captures the landscape vs. The landscape captures the painter. The gardener shapes the garden vs. The garden shapes the gardener. The chef creates the dish vs. The dish creates the chef.
Maybe that will change your mind.
And how well does it do them? Correct me if I'm wrong, but for the time being all you know about its ability to replace that other MS tool is a "yes, yes it can" by a MS dev? Don't you want to withhold judgement until after you've spent some time actually using ChatGPT to do OCR?
This is like saying you could do CAD via ChatGPT, sure, but it's an objectively crappy experience versus an actual piece of CAD software with an appropriate UX.
Using different pieces of software isn't a problem for most adults.
For now I'd treat it more like a sparring partner who can help you with your ideas and support you throughout your process, rather than a magical genie that can magically solve your problem for you. And in this manner I find it to be very useful indeed.
I agree that there is currently way too much hype. I mean GPT4 is certainly cool and probably going to be useful in some limited use cases, but it's not the new electricity and it's not going to take over the world.
An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version).
This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head. ChatGPT gave me command lines straight away.
That's what they're good for right now. Beginner / common tasks in areas you're not familiar with.
And a further implication, they're great for one man bands, generalist roles where simple things need to be done in lots of different areas. For specialist deep roles where you have all the tacit knowledge in mind already, not nearly as useful.
I recently had to do a 'git pull' on 120 repositories, and of course we already had an in-house tool to do that. Of course I could google a script to do it. But it saved me 5 minutes to just have ChatGPT write it for me, and I saved the overhead of a more thorough context-switch.
Even the guy sitting next to me. "Hey, check this out, ChatGPT wrote this script for me and saved me 5 minutes". "Oh, but we already have a tool for that". "Yeah, I figured. Where is it?" "Ummmmm, I don't know, let me ask someone. Frank maybe?" And 5 minutes spent chasing Frank.
I think I'm still better off starting with clChatGPT, I can always follow up with "list 5 alternative solutions".
Interesting, because I still find it faster/easier to do a quick DDG search, with a click on the first relevant SO post, and scrolling straight to the top answer. Asking the same question to ChatGPT means waiting for its output, which may be objectively a few ms faster but creates the perception of slowness ( = irritation). (That is: waiting for X seconds is more disruptive than taking several actions for 1.5X seconds.)
And then it's definitely going to be much more verbose, which is worse 99% of the time. SO is nicely folded - if I want a deeper explanation, I look at the answer's comments, or I can read other answers, or I can even read the full question. ChatGPT doesn't have the same guarantee of such a clear information hierarchy in its answers.
Here's a GPT4 response to a (poorly written) prompt from me to answer the parent question and try to satisfy your desire for a straight-to-the-point response.
https://i.imgur.com/OmsHaXO.png
> Using only the command line, answer the following question (also, keep it terse, no extraneous narrating please): how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again
For example, sometimes the top answer is long and requires a few minutes of reading, sometimes there are corrections in the replies that need to be read, and sometimes I don’t fully understand it and therefore need to read multiple replies.
This can easily take up 5 - 15 minutes, versus 1-5 minutes for ChatGPT.
Additionally, I find value in NOT having to keep myself from getting distracted by the tons of other highly interesting things on Stack Overflow. It can be nice to have that focused, text-only, distraction-free dialogue that ChatGPT provides.
1. Time — for me to search Google and then read anywhere from 1-10 links to get an answer typically takes anywhere from 5 - 30 minutes. The average is probably 10-15 minutes. But using ChatGPT takes less than 1 minute.
2. Specificity — ChatGPT gives me answers to more specific questions, with no fluff text to read through, no ads, no redirects, no links that appear to answer my specific question but actually don’t when I click on them and read them. I get a specific answer to a specific question.
3. Interaction — If I have follow-up questions and/or need clarification or alternative options/solutions I can simply ask ChatGPT and it answers. I often find that getting answers to followup questions via web search takes even longer than the original search.
These all make it worth it for me. And that still doesn’t touch on all the other use cases that search engines don’t do at all.
Especially in refactoring or working with poor codebases. I do notice with copilot specifically some people seem to get wildly different response times with it, for me it gives suggestions almost instantly so as im typing ive got an ongoing suggestion I can accept at any time as it gets closer to what I intend or ignore if not. A common really useful thing is when I have to set up a series of something (recently in a power plant code I set up parameters for a certain kind of battery) and then I just start writing for each other kind of battery it suggests the whole boilerplate for every case, I can go back and fill in the details and exceptions.
As for chatgpt its more useful at interpreting existing code. I often give it a giant function and say "I want you to split off this part and put it into its own thread, get the output with a queue" or something like that. Again, output can often need a little bit of massaging, but I find it reduces cognitive load involved in doing such a task. The trick is to be naturally skeptical of the output but appreciate how much of your life is spent writing nonsense.
I've also found that learning to put what I want exactly into words can be a particular skill that has helped my communication. Making sure you know the name and function of every tool you use. I think if I had said that to myself before I started using these things id have been incredulous, "of course I know the name of things" but no, its a different thing to be talking about them often, especially when you have an idiot savant that takes everything you say too literally. You have to learn to be consise and precise
People want to use LLM hammers like screw drivers and are disapointed.
Also, since the quality of the context matters a lot for completion, copilot will be way more useful on clean code with beautiful variable names and nice structure flows than on code-golf snippets. Same got chatgpt: write good prose, and it will help you better.
IMHO, the reason people do so is because LLMs are advertised as such.
I can't tell any more what is satire and what is not.
But in the end, it's just a tool. If it isn't working for you, it isn't working for you. For me, I prefer thinking in what structure to me as bigger building blocks.
So I prefer vim bindings because I used up teenage time learning it. And now I don't think in terms of characters but in terms of text-blocks.
I prefer writing Java in IntelliJ and Rust in Clion because I don't think in char terms since I can use the built-in refactor tools. E.g. I write functions inline and then extract them rather than writing them as functions and calling.
Likewise when I'm at the shell I think of pipelines as less than pieces. Being an experienced shell user I can usually write a parallel pipeline with conditionals and loops correct first time verbally with no computer usually.
But my copilot flow is improved even better. I talk to the computer in components:
# get all private ip addresses in Alibaba region cn-zhangjiakou ips=...prompted text... # ssh to each and check last long line ...Prompted text...
It's faster than me and this is great for r-i-search with fzf.
Overall, quite happy. But just a tool.
It only needs to save 10 minutes of my time a month for it to be worth the $20 - I would estimate it saves hours.
"Hype" can also mean marketing.
I only use the free 3.5+ ChatGPT and it's written some nice mapping code and some fun poems for me. Poem subjects ranged from rheology to texas hold'em.
I came to the sad conclusion that perhaps what I write and what I do is not as repetitive or as generic as others. Over the years when I have had to do more repetition, writing once well and ctrl-c / ctrl-v.
Couple hours work done in a few minutes.
Most people are terrible writers, and never read anything at all. So they have no way to judge if the wordy informationless crap gpt wrote is good or not. It's long, thus is good.
It's also somewhat structured, which puts it at above average for writing tasks.
The differentiator is, I guess, expectations: I fully expect my own code to strike a certain balance of readability / optimization / correctness. In this context all but the most trivial code suggestions, sloppy as they usually come, instantly fall out of place.
On the other hand, there is a group of people (e.g. those spamming GitHub pull requests...) who expect the output to be kind of visually similar to some code. When they realize that the result also sometimes works and gives sane-looking results, they are absolutely blown away.
Nonetheless it's better than Google at many things. I find it really good at giving paragraph-long introductions to things, instead of pages-long blogspam. It's also good at suggesting improvements when writing in a second language.
But I don't see what those AI startups see when they want to replace all sorts of skilled workers with this bullshit generator.
The trick is to use it for what it's good at.
For example, I had this vague, fuzzy memory of a talk I saw online about a decade ago. It was about a database modelling paradigm. All I remembered was that the country it was developed in was in northern Europe, the methodology was based on splitting out columns as individual objects, and that it had funny little icons such as diamonds on the edges connecting things together in a graph.
Good luck finding that on Google. I had tried and failed. It was bugging me, because I needed something like it for my work, but for the life of me I couldn't dig up the reference.
Chat GPT 4 found it just three prompts: https://www.anchormodeling.com/
That's insane.
I read for probably 8-12 hours a day. I write every day. I think every day. I’ve been doing this for decades. GPT has been like a talking dog. It’s an insane achievement, but he’s not the worlds best conversationalist.
But to be 17 again and struggling all night to write a three page paper filled with unoriginal ideas, it would have been a game changer back then.
I find GPT very useful in that I can quickly become mediocre in any domain. Need a legal filing? I can get a good-enough legal filing. Need some code in a framework I've never used? I can get it instantly. Need something written in the language of some esoteric field of science? I can get that instantly from a bullet point list.
It doesn't do the hard parts well: What's being written, and how it's structured. That's where I fit back in.
I agree that GPT isn’t much of a conversationalist. But it is an exceptionally good tool some of us. It has already proved invaluable for me in helping diagnose a medical issue with a family member — one that escaped several ICU doctors and nurses. And a couple of weeks ago helped me fix an issue with my car.
A good analogy might be a calculator. There are some people who can do calculations in their heads near instantly. And some of these people could do arithmetic of numbers too large to be represented by calculators even. But for most of us, calculators were immensely useful.
The generation after me is hardly able to reset their iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help. Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in their phones, readily available video editing software and processing power to create content like no generation has ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time.
My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.
I think you meant hoard incredible wealth?
There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time.
Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…).
We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.
Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?
The Japanese generally didn't use them (I think?) before they came into contact with European civilization.
I don't think any civilization could survive without entertainment though.
But I think this is a false dichotomy: A comfortable armchair and a good book go well together.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
That will catch up to us. It already has, in many parts of the world, and it's not looking like it'll get better soon.
And let's not forget, it's not just people who have paid the price.
> The contemporary rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate, the historically typical rate of extinction (in terms of the natural evolution of the planet); also, the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
The ecocide which we've inflicted on the planet for the last 100 years will some day be seen for what it is - an atrocity.
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
All of which is to say nothing about the inequality in how that shareholder wealth is distributed, which is incredibly short-sighted for literally billions of reasons. 8 Americans own more wealth than 4 billion humans. It's perverse beyond comprehension.
When the going gets tough...
About the inequality : it is really bad, but hundreds years ago, the poor were starving because of lack of food, in stark contrast with landlords and knights and kings.
Today an equal amount of or more, people die from too much food than of too little.
My point is, you need to take a step back and look from a bit more distance to see the real trend. Things are bad now, because we are at a maximum.
The plateau is not coming fast enough, not even close. Scientists are very clear on this point.
We used all that oil and gas to get more work done, but we're still working more hours per year than those feudal peasants.
> people die from too much food than of too little.
We still have thirteen million hungry children in America. 700 million hungry people worldwide.
It's all very solvable, we just don't. We could end world hunger by eating like, two or three rich [0]. Knights and Kings have nothing on our oligarchs.
These trends of irresponsible emissions and rising inequality won't fix themselves. Not in time. Not without radical action.
[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/oct/13/e...
See, the harmful confusion right there.
Making money and creating value are two separate things. There are people who create value without receiving any money in return. And there are people who receive an obscene amount of money while creating very little value — and sometimes destroying more value than they create.
Understanding that the two are separate is the only way you can question the legitimacy of our richest people. I’ll give you a hint: the most impressive CEOs journals routinely praise as geniuses, are very, very unlikely to produce as much value as the money they actually receive.
If you want to even stand a chance at critically looking at our current economic system, you absolutely need to properly separate the notions of "making money" and "creating value".
Even a more thought out form doesn't do anything class analysis didn't already do.
Not quite: bullshit jobs are when the workers themselves say their own job isn't doing anything useful. And apparently they comprise a sizeable portion of all workforce.
Of course, jobs people say are useless, jobs the workers themselves say are useless, and actually useless jobs, are 3 different sets. But I think we can confidently say something is wrong when so many workers say their own job is useless, even if they aren't: working a job you think is useless just isn't healthy.
Americans in particular always have pretty narcissistic ideas about what their jobs should be. You can see this from all the examples of hippies trying to start communes, which then fail because everyone appoints themselves official poet instead of farmworker.
Yeah, I'm gonna need a citation for that one.
I grew up in a council house. I.e. a house created by pooled money in the form of taxes.
Houses must exist. Landlords are an inefficiency to be optimized out.
Though for what it’s worth, the government at least has the advantage that it can print its own money, so it doesn’t need to take it from somebody else, unlike investors.
Strictly speaking the answer is zero and zero. They use the money they have to have construction workers build the houses.
> from the money they actually took from somebody else?
Is this supposed to imply someone is taking money from others and the other does not? I know the view that government taxes is basically theft, and I think this view is ludicrous: citizen get that back in the form of infrastructure and public services, and in a functioning democracy it's basically their collective will that decided how to allocate that money. (How functioning the democracy really is is another debate.)
Investors on the other hand… well there are two kinds: those who worked for their money, and those who took it from workers. And it's a spectrum too, it depends how much of your income comes from your work, and how much comes from your possessions. Now I can guess most small landlords like yourself probably paid their houses with money they earned through actual work. Some even have constructed the houses themselves. But if that Second Thought video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1m7WmKJZyQ has any accuracy the majority of rented houses are rented by big landlords, and those definitely did not earn their money through their own work (the clerks that work under them do, but they don't own the houses and are paid a meagre salary, compared to the renting money they manage).
I can't speak for government constructed houses, but given the above, your average investor-owned house was constructed or bought with money that was taken from people working for the investor. (Well strictly speaking the worker creates value for their boss, which gives a salary in return, but there's always a difference between value created and salary returned. That difference is the exploitation/theft part. And I'm glossing over the fact that managing a company is valuable work unto itself.)
> And which houses are nicer, safer and better maintained?
Am I supposed to answer "the investor's houses"? A citation is needed for that answer, and it'd better control for when the house is build (construction norms tend to evolve over time), how much it actually cost, and in some cases who it actually cost. Suburbian houses may be nice for instance, but the car dependency and the unsustainable infrastructure costs definitely are not.
A marketplace of ideas does not necessarily lead to the best outcomes, or even good outcomes.
Suppose the marketplace of ideas is an unregulated marketplace. Then the wealthy and powerful can use their wealth and power to determine the world that other people see, getting those people to mistakenly fight for things that help the wealthy and powerful.
But suppose it's kept a fair marketplace. Fairness is not natural – it's a human value that we have to actively maintain. But suppose we succeed. Even then, the marketplace may not select the best ideas, because people have emotional needs – like belonging to community – that will cause them to stubbornly reject good ideas. But we accept this because it's the only way for us to live with each other; if I want you to let me disagree with you, I have to let you disagree with me.* The price of intellectual freedom is very, very steep, even if it's worth it.
So I don't believe the fact that capitalism is dominant is good evidence that it's the best idea so far. In fact, I think we have little evidence of it at all.
* There are of course complications of the Popperian, paradox-of-tolerance sort, where we do have to fight to the death, so to speak. If someone repeatedly demonstrates an unwillingness to compromise or act fairly, they've left you the choice of letting yourself perish or eliminating them, which is a shitty situation to be in.
FWIW, Adam Smith has argued that this is unlikely. The world seems to prove him correct.
That said I do disagree with the way GP's argues the point. While the dominant economic system is likely more effective at creating dominating economies, it's not a given that it is good at being fair. Shutting down discussion while claiming that "capitalism is the best so far" because nobody else has come up with an alternative reeks of willful ignorance. It's easy to believe something is the best if you don't actively look for alternatives and demand others to serve it to you on a silver platter.
I didn't realize that Adam Smith had argued on this point, though! Thank you for letting me know.
Beyond that, the only reason they give you more rent money is because you own the house. But you got your ROI so by now they have paid for the house. And yet it's not theirs, so they still have to pay you. And when they do, any additional money you get, you basically took from them. As for your son, who presumably did not work for the house at all, will definitely take money from people through that house. Just because he had the right dad.
Don't get me wrong, you investing for your son and securing his future is you being a good dad. You just can't wave away how the current system works: people who own stuff have the power to take money from people who don't.
People who have invested capital, hedged risks, setup maintenance, did marketing etc.
Now we can agree that housing is very specific branch of economy where if you have upper hand(capital) you can be dealing cards to those who don't. There are ways to address that without the canvas of grand narratives(extracting labour etc).
Struggling as a learning tool is important, but there's a good chance the fastest path to expertise is to start with examples of how to do it, and delay that struggle a bit.
What you don't want is to keep the crutch forever and never struggle. That would be a sure path to stagnation.
The rejection of LLMs for education by otherwise intelligent people is disheartening.
Also, some things are not need to be known anymore, like phone numbers or the inner working of a car. There are plenty of things to learn even if automation made some of knowledge beneign.
- they wouldn’t have yielded all the knowledge of the little kirks, know how, edge cases, etc… they now have to know (and the Pareto rule 20% vs 80%),
- created an intuition from all the hours spent just struggling to understand what is wrong or find a solution and little by little honing their intuition from that hard work they would have done by themselves for themselves (compared to having ChatGPT, a teacher, or an expert telling them most of time what to do),
- and getting a will to find a solution by themselves even after hours looking at a shell prompt (or logs or whatever else) that is taunting them and will tell them nothing.
Edit: I've had conversations with people who write. We have come to an agreement that there are writers who love the process of writing. They want to BE writers. Then there are people who want to HAVE BEEN a writer. ChatGPT was meant for these people.
I disagree with this take. My personal anecdote is that I am far, far better at mental math than I was in high school because I ended up in a job where doing a lot of ad-hoc calculations was just a day-to-day thing. I started out using a calculator, but eventually got to where I didn't need it most of the time just through sheer repetition.
I think AI tools (the kind people are worried about right now, anyway) will be used in a similar fashion to calculators. After learning the basics, it will be a tool taught as an assist for streaming ideas into and getting out a well-formatted and coherent output. People who write a lot will eventually find the hassle of using the tool to be more trouble than it's worth. People who don't will still know how to use it to and know how to recognize when the output doesn't make any sense.
LLMs are the single biggest advance in mass learning since the printed book. They are infinitely patient and can be reprogrammed, or repurposed with three sentences. Debate partner, editor, quiz master, literally anything. Every new tool can be abused, of course we can't structure education the same, but we should always be re-evaluating our methods and techniques in the face of new technology and knowledge.
I am dreaming when physics students can have an electronics TA that can projection map over a breadboard to help kids understand and debug their circuits. For 70% of physics undergrads, hands on electronics classes are the hardest classes they took.
If those things are a problem, we have already failed. Because if your current education system is built upon taking things at face value, the harm is not in the shoveled knowledge but in building a student who accepts what is presented as unquestionable fact.
My child is an phenomenal bullshit discriminator. So much so that they have been correctly correcting all of their teachers in every grade they have been in. The real education is learning how to use the tools we have available to learn anything you want. And in that way, the LLM is most powerful thing we have since the printed book.
The problem is if there's just one teacher tutoring, one quiz master who points to sources it controls or simply invents as its "proof". My concern is that AI will be trusted more than a single book or a single teacher, precisely because it claims to neutrally encompass a consensus already obtained through all those sources. [It's a tertiary source masquerading as one offering primary and secondary sources, without the ability to differentiate or trust one source more than another].
This is exactly why the frequent comparison to calculators is so misguided: Because calculators are always right. To whatever degree LLM proponents believe LLMs are simply useful tools like calculators, that will be the same degree to which they fail to check for bullshit.
(I hated it, but it's still there 2000+ years after books were invented.)
People aren’t great at writing cursive with fountain pens anymore because we type. Our mental math skills aren’t as strong because we have calculators. Even our sense of direction and ability to navigate is probably weakening due to decades of reliance on GPS.
Are there still people who can memorize whole books, ride horses, write cursive, calculate big numbers in their head, and navigate by the stars? Of course, but they are outliers. Most of us just use our smartphones.
On balance, it's been hugely positive.
Jealous. What's your job?
My worry is the innovator's dilemma. Given a few generations (software generations, not human) of continuing exponential improvement in capability of LLMs (or whatever replaces them), I worry that those who have spent much more time learning to co-work with a GPT-alike (or replacement) will move to the fore.
I'm not sure about "17 year old me struggling to write a short paper full of unoriginal ideas," but it sure could help me write that paper titled "Bullshit, bullshit, etc., etc., bullshit" that I always wanted an excuse to turn in for some college course or another. ;)
I use chatgpt everyday and am getting better and better at asking questions to get the answers I want.
I used copilot when it was free, and it was best at boilerplate, and sometimes not bad at auto completing the next few lines, I didn't think it was worth paying for at the time. I use Codeium now, that works in a similar way, probably not quite as good as copilot in that it doesn't understand as many languages, but still does a reasonable job with boilerplate type code.
The genius of it is that you could give it the notes of a meeting and get it to rewrite them in a different form. Nothing else can handle language like that.
I can see it guide me in the right direction if I have a more generic question but even then, if I am not specific enough I fear I might go down a rabbit hole that ends no where.
It may be better than google in finding something but when I manage to find something on google the information is usually correct and not totally wrong. Especially technical problem that someone wrote somewhere on a forum regarding a specific device.
Finding the things I am looking for on google allows me to judge the correctness of the data. When I find answers in what is clearly blog spam I know that the info is probably wrong. Which ChatGPT I have no idea how it arrived at the conclusion it gives me.
A good example is if I want to know the max current rating for a chip. If I search google and find the manufacturers datasheet, I know the information is correct. If however the same information is on stack overflow or some forum I may not take it as a fact but more as a guidance.
ChatGPT would be 100 times more useful is it cited a source. Like "The max rating of chip ... is ... according to the manufactures datasheet dated ... which you can find here ...". I guess Bing and Google are trying to do something like that.
So here's one that saved me a bunch of time:
https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535443
Basically, I knew the package could do what I wanted; I knew it was almost certainly in GPT-4's data set; I could do it myself, but it would involve searching through all the documentation and figuring out the right bits. It just did it for me.
Now there were a few minor bugs: It duplicated a buggy error message, and at some point later it called a "Subtree" method rather than a "Tree" method. But those were a lot easier to fix than writing the code from scratch.
Once I had a list of 27 book names I wanted put into "canonical order" and in the form of a golang array. I could have done it myself but it would have been tedious; I just pasted the list into GPT-4, asked it what I wanted, and out popped the result.
Here's another place it was helpful recently; I prompted:
"We're hiring a new community manager for the $PROJECT. I'd like you to help me develop some interview questions. What information to you need about the role to help you develop more useful questions?"
The questions it asked me about the role were really good; just answering the questions was quite a useful exercise, and I'm sure the resulting document will be a good intro to whomever we hire. I wouldn't say the resulting interview questions were brilliant, but they were solid, and I used a couple of them.
There are times when "the form" is there for a reason; if you want something re-written in a specific form, GPT-4 can do a good job. I wrote an email recommending something to somebody's managers in a different company in a different country; then I pasted it into GPT-4 and asked if it had any suggestions. It did a fair amount of rewording, of which I decided to take about half. In this case, the "polite form" is there to avoid offense, and it's exactly what I wanted.
I've also asked it to write some Tweets highlighting some specific aspects of an upcoming conference I'm planning. It did a good job coming up with the sort of punchy, tweet-length messages which seem to do really well.
Connecting it to the context of the article: My day job is basically arguing with people on the internet. :-). I do read and write all day every day; but I don't write messages where diplomacy is critical, nor do I write tweets. Perhaps I could get better at those, but I don't think it's worth the effort. Am I the worse off for that? Probably not in the way the author thinks; I don't think being diplomatically polished would change my thinking that much -- much less being able to write punchy tweets.
If I started relying on it for the core writing, however, I'd certainly be selling myself short.
FWIW, this use case of writing a core message, then using an LLM to polish it into, as you put it, the polite form, is what I had in mind with Nicer.email, a Gmail extension that lets you do exactly what you described with one click, rather than copying/pasting/writing prompts. Trying to optimize the common case! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/niceremail-easiest...
Okay, now I have to know what this job is.
GPT-4 Passed the Bar Exam, so I think there's something to it https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389233
1. Use it when you know how to do something but don't want to.
2. Use it when you don't know something, and don't know how to find the answer.
3. Never trust. Verify.
Clearly, this means the examples that impress others will often not impress you.
I chalk it up to "hype aversion" -- an internal heuristic that anything with so much hype around it must be bullshit. For some, there might also be good old resistance to change, to the unknown consequences of all these developments.
Industry outsiders also tend to take ML for granted, even when the 'experts' can see it's completely inappropriate. (My GF, a few years ago: "Why do we still need judges and juries? Can't computers judge cases and author legal opinions?" Me, at the time: "LOL, no, that would be ridiculous, and here's why..." Me, today: "Uh, about that argument we were having...")
Especially when folks are already out there LLM-generating SEO-spam, so even "well the answer also came up in a Google search" isn't a sign of accuracy.
This doesn't always work, as some stuff is harder to verify. But what's valuable to me is it allows me to ask a vague question and have follow-ups. I usually learn just by having the conversation.
It is not revolutionary for areas you specialize in, but if I try using it for something like setting up a web scraper with python (something I understand conceptually but have never done) it feels pretty amazing.
My one concern is that if I use it for JS I can immediately spot issues with it, but I am too ignorant of python to spot subtle problems.
Copilot wasn’t useful for me because I want a back and forth conversation to straighten out concepts. With Copilot you don’t get that and it just sprays out little messes of code.
I use GPT4 like a rubber duck in the sense of “rubber duck debugging” and it can be surprisingly supple and creative in its solutions… many bad ones, but again, push back on those and you get to good ones.
Give it a Django model and ask it to create a data visualisation. It'l perform complex ORM queries with filters, annotations and aggregations, then load it into a pandas dataframe, then create more columns in the dataframe, does more aggregations, then spits out matplotlib code to draw the chart. The time typing the prompt is time I would have needed even in the pre-GPT-era, since I would have to think about what I want to achieve anyways, now I'm typing it into ChatGPT, which makes the thinking process more structured as well!
I have built more tools in the last three weeks (for work and personal) than I have in the last three years combined. All thanks to OpenAI's brain constantly pushing me into the right direction.
If you asked chatgpt to generate a document, its generates one that reads well but has terrible content. Eg. Super broad or just plain contradictory. But given some not so well written piece of writing, it can clean that up fairly well.
I’d love to see which of the following might have any correlations with reported usefulness of chatgpt/copilot:
1. How articulate a person is.
2. How much of an expert they are in what they are trying to do with the tool.
3. How successful they are at giving instructions to a human to perform the same task.
4. How much experience they have managing/coaching junior devs/interne/newbies.
5. How much experience someone has at decomposing a problem into smaller parts and identifying the simple parts and complicated parts
There are huge consequences to either answer to the question: “Is using an AI tool effectively a coachable skill?”. I’m sure someone has already looked into this or is looking into this - if it turns out to be a coachable skill, and we can identify what those are, there’s a lot of money to be made in bringing a coursework to market.
Good old Peter Drucker formalized the personas in his advice to new employees to figure out how their bosses consumed information:
1 - The lawyer. Needs walls of text.
2 - The architect. Needs diagrams, visuals.
3 - The accountant. Needs numbers, spreadsheets.
4 - The actor. Needs a conversation, verbal.
It's a generalization, of course, but I have applied this pattern successfully. The core bit is that using the wrong method with any of the 4 personas flat out does not work.
Send a long article to an accountant and they're stumped. But send them a bunch of numbers and they hear the numbers sing. Etc.
Tangent on the Amazon way of write ups - Bezos forced his persona on the whole company. I would hste it. I am an architect, a few diagrams is all I need.
Many L6 promos over the years went out to folks who could quickly and accurately build WBR decks that gave L8s the visibility they wanted.
So maybe Bezos is the lawyer, and all the directors are accountants.
PRFAQs, COEs, and WBRs.
LAWYERS - needs walls of text
Jeff Bezos is known for his long-term thinking and his annual letters to shareholders are famous for their extensive detail and length.
Mark Zuckerberg is known for his long-term vision and often communicates his ideas in lengthy blog posts and public statements.
ACCOUNTANTS - needs numbers, spreadsheets
Sundar Pichai has an engineering background and tends to rely on data and analysis in decision-making.
Satya Nadella has an engineering background and has emphasized the importance of data-driven decision-making at Microsoft.
Warren Buffett is famous for his value investing approach, which emphasizes analyzing financial statements and data to identify undervalued companies.
ARCHITECTS - needs diagrams, visuals
Tim Cook is known for his attention to design and user experience, and Apple's keynotes and product launches often feature detailed visuals and product demonstrations.
Elon Musk frequently communicates his ideas through visually compelling presentations, and is known for his ambitious plans for space exploration and sustainable energy.
ACTORS - needs a conversation, verbal
Mark Cuban is known for his outgoing and talkative personality. He often engages in conversations with fans and customers on social media and in public appearances, and is very comfortable in front of the camera.
Richard Branson is known for his flamboyant and charismatic personality. He often appears in public events and media interviews, and is known for his storytelling and ability to captivate audiences with his words.
Lawyer and law professor here: No, no, NO!
Wall-of-words text is a sign of a L.O.A.D. — a Lazy Or Arrogant Drafter.
I teach contract drafting to 3Ls and stress The Two Great Rules of Readability:
1. SSSSP: Short, Simple, Single-Subject Paragraphs. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
2. BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin...
Of of my ex-bosses preferred long, well-written emails to just about any other form of communication. He was a really bright guy with a degree in English Literature that somehow stumbled his way into the software industry. When he wanted to start working with a new technology, he'd ingest a small pile of driest textbooks on the subject over the course of a week or so, understand and retain all of it, then start running laps around the folks who had been working with the tech for years. He's still the only engineer I've ever met that preferred learning-by-reading over learning-by-doing.
I totally get the walls of text are needed to a point, and we don't have good options to produce succint contracts. It just feels like an everybody lose situation.
You're too kind — literally.
Wall-of-words text is never needed in a contract. Clients should demand that lawyers do a better job in drafting readable contracts — because readable contracts get signed sooner, thus taking up less of the business people's time to negotiate and freeing them up to focus on other things (not to mention being less costly).
</rant>
The Two Great Rules of Readability above will get you at least 95% of the way there.
Wall-of-words contract language is analogous to spaghetti code in a computer program.
Definitely agree with your approach to drafting, but I think you could be overreacting a bit here. Even the shortest contracts might seem like a "wall of text" to the lay person, and short paragraphs stringed together is a wall of text.
At any rate the preferred format in most legal contexts is still "`wall' of text" (whether big or small wall, as opposed to diagrams, spreadsheets, or conversations), which is what I think was the original point.
"White space is your friend" is another rule I preach to my students. Some 40 years of dealing with contracts has persuaded me that short paragraphs with white space in between them are FAR easier to review and negotiate — which means they get signed sooner, and clients vastly prefer that.
> as opposed to diagrams, spreadsheets, or conversations
For several years there have been people banging the drum for contracts to include more icons, flow charts, etc., for improved readability. So far, that idea hasn't gotten a lot of traction — IMHO that's because most lawyers barely even know how to use Microsoft Word competently and would have no idea how to create a flow chart or meaningful icon, so they default to writing pure text (which is also the quickest and thus cheapest path to getting a draft onto someone else's desk).
About the best I've been able to come up with in this regard, as something that can be done with Word, is to create tables of, e.g., action items, with columns such as "Event | Action | Who | When" — basically, an Intel-style "AR list" [0], or in software, a CASE statement.
[0] http://www.nathanzeldes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Effec...
There's too much info on the internet, and even in internal documentation: if I have to read half the thing to understand if it's relevant, I'm gonna spend most of my time on irrelevant stuff.
This is a problem with asking engineers to document without having a writing culture. I've seen it happen: once it's written down, that's it: it's documented, great work! But we should treat it more like code, with clear divisions of concern s, scopes and even refactors when needed!
Also a quotation link would be appreciated.
"For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." [1]
[1] Phaedrus 275a-b, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Challenging yourself is conscious decision. Make choices to challenge yourself, and don't build an echo chamber.
They even did pretty well with computing with the Antikythera mechanism and its predecessors; though, like Babbage, they were limited by the manufacturing technology of the day.
[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1165/ancient-greek-inve...
Classic oral literary traditions are based on rhyme, meter, repetition, simile, metaphor, and references to cultural touchstones and themes, for the most part, all of which strongly assist with memorisation. These are not only necessary for a literature which isn't written down and instead is passed on through generations orally, but also quite likely represents a survivorship bias in that works which didn't exhibit these patterns didn't survive. And of course the versions we know are the end of a long pipeline of transmission (or the world's largest and oldest game of telephone), captured in writing and then passed on to us as (among) the first written traditions.
I've committed a few poems and homilies to memory, one example for nearly thirty years now. I do refresh that recollection from time to time (and realised I was dropping a stanza consistently). It's an interesting counterexample.
Then again, I turned up a piece earlier today I'd written myself about eight years ago and had all but no recollection of.
Of course I have no way to check whether it's done correctly, but from what I hear a lot of people have done this.
Not sure if LLMs will enhance our current "self" by themselves, but once we get a chip or two inside our brains, once we start controlling the cells to regenerate or grow specific limbs [3], we will surely consider our present "selves" as tiny as we consider the "self" of one of our cousins, the chimpanzee, in a zoo today. The journey and expansion of the "self" is merely starting.
[1] "the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CF%86%CF%8...
[2] "HCN2 Rescues brain defects by enforcing endogenous voltage pre-patterns", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03334-5
However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain.
I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking speed, so things doesn't escape or my focus doesn't get derailed. Also it changes how brain works so it can think better.
Also, blogging and writing documentation at work made me a much better thinker, because converting these abstract concepts to meaningful sentences with a context and easy to understand structure affects also how clearly you communicate in other parts of your life.
Offloading this really robs you of the joys and power of meaningful communication on many mediums.
As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with a different human being or an artificial construct which can babble meaningful sentences.
Currently, we simply ignore or don't understand the fact that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built with word order. There are higher orders of information carried implicitly, and they are not articulated in words. Hence an LLM can not replace, even mimic a real human being in a conversation.
However, I'm still on industry forums and communities like HN to hopefully have new and conflicting thoughts thrown my way by peers. That's my primary concern with LLMs, a lack of fresh perspective that has all the nuance of experience and understanding behind its output.
Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.
I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of everything, and it always responds with something that sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this is not so different from conversing with a person. People can babble too.
> There are higher orders of information carried implicitly
You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through. Like if someone asks you what the arguments in favor of democracy are, you want a list of points so you can check you haven't forgotten something.
That was my first thought too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
But it's a pretty amazing rubber duck that has read the entire internet and thus can correlate your ideas with the ideas of all of humanity in a split second on the spot.
However, humans are more nuanced than that. One might remember wrongly, or act in bad-faith. This is why I said "baseline honesty". One people's traits definitely affects how their words are perceived, and this is not carried in the sentence itself.
> I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. ... People can babble too. (Snipped for brevity)
Humans are not as random as an LLM.
> You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through.
Again the person you're asking or answering has their own character and their or your words are affected by that implicit knowledge. This is a background process we're not aware of unless you dig into yourself and look for it.
Humans you know and trust, sure. Humans you think you're conversing with online, not so much.
Two decades of experience shows me otherwise. Even your two comments shows a consistent tone. We're just started to discuss, yet I have started to build an image of you thanks to your comments.
This is one of the mechanisms we don't fully understand and don't dare to dig much, because tinkering with people's minds are dangerous.
Many people argue convincingly that it's exactly how the meaning is built, though.
Or, if word order built the meaning and it's devoid of the character itself, we wouldn't be praising authors for their character building skills and embedding things not written or spoken into their stories, regardless of the medium it's presented.
LLMs can clearly grasp higher order abstractions and concepts just by reordering the words. In fact, embeddings (developed much earlier) are specifically intended to represent the semantical meaning extracted from text using just statistical methods; until the introduction of transformers they lacked a good architecture to demonstrate the usefulness of that.
This makes many people argue that being a sentence builder is enough to be intelligent, as they also received most of their intelligence from the same source (concentrated experience of someone else - social intelligence).
"Honesty" and other forms of self-introspection is just a high level construct which current models aren't trained for, and likely not a fundamental issue with being a stochastic parrot.
It made a few errors in at least presenting my ideas, but these errors were a consequence of my misunderstanding and lack of clarity.
The errors themselves, in my opinion, are invaluable because they force you to think, to be clear, and to guide the model into giving me useful ideas to look into.
For all intents and purposes, it was an example of the Socratic method, albeit inverted, where the student is asking questions to an all knowing teacher, and the teacher / LLM responds with ideas and hints. Ultimately, it's up to the student to synthesize the solution, be critical of the data, and tie everything together.
No, the brain does not "replace written information with a pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case.
I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that thinking up some vague explanation is insufficient to make a point about a system as complex as the human brain.
No, because I literally don't remember my to do list after writing to my EDC notebook. The only thing I know is, it's in the notebook. So I only know the address of my to do list. I'm a literal sitting duck if I leave my notebook at home.
> I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it ...
I can tell you because I observe myself over 5+ years since I started to write my daily plans consistently to my notebook.
> I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
What it improves is not the "verbatim memory", but the concepts you work on. Working on something slowly, and with a reflection medium (i.e. pen & paper) allows your brain to refine the thing you're working on better and store it as a concept, rather than memorized string.
> This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that thinking up some vague explanation is insufficient to make a point about a system as complex as the human brain.
I have read a paper about supporting the claims I did in this comment, but I failed to find it in a whim. Will update/reply this comment if I find it. I use these analogies because of that paper.
In all cases I think parent post is trying to communicate that they are putting the large mass of information elsewhere, and only retain a reference locally. (implementation details notwithstanding)
[1] "Michael Levin - Plasticity without genetic change: bioelectric embryos & synthetic proto-organisms", https://youtu.be/5ChRM4CEWyg?t=1169
Why? Those are perfectly good parallels, and quite specific at that. Forgetting the thing, and replacing that memory with the memory of the location of that thing - that's an "indirect reference", i.e. a pointer in programming terms.
> I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case.
You can construct analogies to anything in support of anything, what matters is whether the analogy is bringing the reader towards or away from the truth.
Also, even when you have two similar analogies pointing in opposite direction, that doesn't mean either is wrong - they may be talking about two different things. For instance:
> I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
I believe that to be true just as much as GP's pointer analogy. In fact, I attribute my learning of irregular verbs in English directly to my grandfather insisting I copy the verb table by hand several times. Doing it, I went from near-zero recall to near-perfect recall in two sessions (with each having me copy the table once or twice).
Now the difference here is, in case of irregular verbs, I wanted to memorize them. The act of writing the information down myself somehow helped commit it to memory, perhaps because the brain was more focused, or because I was more invested, or a bit of both.
In case of GP's (and mine too!) experience with TODO list, the act of writing serves the explicit purpose of getting the thing out of your head. This is the opposite of memorization - you literally want to forget about tasks you write down, so they stop circling around in your head, distracting and stressing you.
Incidentally, when I write some TODOs by hand, I actually improve my immediate recall of them - should I try and check. But I don't, because I don't want to reinforce those thoughts. My brain understands, and before I know it, I no longer remember most of them in detail.
And, unfortunately, as you get older and memory starts to fill up, the pointers get overwritten.
That is correct. I mean, some of that is exactly why I write at least 5000 words a day of journal notes while working. Because I want to offload everything from memory to a written form that is indexed.
> and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant...
This part is where we veer into prediction of how it will alter people and it is both right and wrong. I think the education system has shown us it's possible to have a great memory and to remember many facts and still be ignorant. At the same time, there's so much material that can be consumed and people have surface knowledge of many things and once you dig into a conversation with them on it, the ignorance pops up and it turns out that they don't know much about the topic. I know this. This has been me on many occasions and is still me on some occasion.
>... and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Again, there's some truth to this. I think about the times where I've jumped into a conversation about politics with some half baked knowledge that I read somewhere but failed to understand or recall correctly and I think I must have a looked a fool at those times.
But then again, I've course corrected here and there and I've spent time writing and sharing thoughts with others where I've used previous writings to pull up facts and my own synthesis, and I feel like I've been a better participant at times like that. In that way, writing has helped me steer away from ignorance.
I can't comment further though on the quote because I've never read the rest of the context so I may be missing out on some stuff.
I think Paul is on to something here though. I can't count how many thoughts I've had that I thought were clever but when I started to write the thoughts down and organize it on my own, I discovered for myself that either I didn't have enough evidence to prove myself entirely or that I was just flat out wrong. Writing is a form of thinking in my opinion. And if we don't write, we do lose that side of thinking too. I do appreciate though that Paul doesn't go further into predicting the consequences as Plato's warning does here. But I'll be willing to bet that Paul is right that there will be some negative consequences for sure.
It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his warning against false wisdom is more relevant than ever today when it feels like half the people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly.
--edit-- sometimes me not grammar good
Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance.
Very much like early AI models.
It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know.
What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing when you learn something is that it doesn't just permit access to the information, it also permits synthesis of new ideas. The sum of knowledge is greater than its parts.
A very concrete example: As someone who only speaks English one may look up the Latin terms 'manus' (hand) and 'facere' (to act/do/make); but unless you actually do, you'll probably not immediately grok the etymology of the English term 'manufacture'.
There are some computations (synthesis) that require so many (non-front loadable) memory accesses that it's impractical to do them from memory with significant delay (books), because the number_of_accesses * access_time dominates the project time.
Instead, you must have a working set of core information (or at least pointers to information) in low-latency memory (your brain).
Example: How much longer would it take me to do a multi-digit multiplication if I had to look up the process for multiplication in a book for every digit multiplication I did? And what if that multiplication were just one of many in the higher-level math problem I was trying to solve? (Then generalize to any problem that requires a core base of knowledge)
I'm genuinely curious, why do you think this is relevant? How would you differentiate "specific types of memory recall" scientifically?
That's not an accident. Wisdom emerges out of practice and the effortlessness that comes with it. The genius piano player isn't that good because of some pie in the sky wisdom about music, just like the AI they just played tons of scales and training pieces. Literally meaningless stuff. This rejection of rote memorization as some sort of lower skill, that students should be 'smart and lazy' is one of the stupidest modern tendencies.
It's much more likely that you can, that someone who would only look them up "on demand", however, as you at least are aware of the possibilities in those domains.
> He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
Tired Alfred North Whitehead quotes aside, he's basically the single most influential author in the western tradition, arguably even eclipsing the bible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines
And even better, we would know it by heart.
Assuning we considered it important of course. But that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.
Of course not everybody would know it by heart. That's a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
If we never had writing, would the Huns have carried forth Platonic wisdom? Would it really have survived thousands of years of cultural evolution and the decline of Greek civilization itself? Who even is the "we" who should consider it important?
> that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.
How would it even be possible to know what's been lost in the oral tradition without anyone writing things down? Only takes one autocrat to massacre followers of a specific tradition to effectively erase it. Things get filtered based on their ability to survive, which is partially a function of "importance", whatever that actually means at a given time.
> a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
This just seems like unabashed elitism. A "benefit" of the oral tradition is that knowledge is reserved for the deserving? No thanks.
Is Twitter > books? Is HN > podcasts? Every medium has its tendencies... positive, negative and complicated. We don't actually choose between them. It's useful to keep an eye on losses, not just gains.
Oral traditions, for example, naturally evolve and diversify. A fairy tale can literally spread over the whole world, and develop thousands of versions. Each one adapted and localised. Written stories also spread, but remain identical... even more-so after printing.
This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became extremely stiff an unyielding.
The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition, institutional church authority and individuals like the Pope.
See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs now)
Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand instead of using printers was incredibly resource expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.
And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.
Price of 7 books = £5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of 1 Pig in London = 3s
14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book
Note £1 = 20s
I was observing that the modern Catholic Church (post-printed word) has offified in exactly that way, with the printed word allow direct dissemination of the "agreed" canon (i.e. pope / hierarchy) to the entire church, thereby unifying them into a single practice.
In counterpoint I offered the number of papal crises and schisms that abounded during the medieval and pre-medieval period (i.e. before printed material became cheap and available).
Ergo, the use of the printed word allowed the Catholic Church to unify and standardize in a way it had not before -- GP's point.
It's indicative that the majority of monotheistic religious splits within Catholicism happened before the printing press, when intervening human parties could reinterprete the canon as it flowed through them.
For political-national-religious entity, the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire partnership allowed the Church to become a nation in all but land, by the power its blessing conveyed upon a chosen leader.
Would it? The Bible, which is much larger, was practical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word, and its not like there was a proximate relationship between the availability of printing (presumably with movable type, in the 15th century) and the codification of canon law in the 20th. The idea that this was waiting on printing is…hard to defend.
> See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times
The really durable schisms after the 11th Century emerged after or just before (and became crystallized because of) printing, though.
IIRC this was their main contention against the Protestant reformation. They believed that just pointing at scripture without some practice of custom and tradition to ensure you're properly interpreting it in a sensible way would lead people to folly and extremism/fundamentalism.
Granted it's sort of a pick your poison deal. You either get the fundamentalism of hardline scripturalists or you get the corruption that comes with a hierarchical institution that requires people to offloading some of their critical thinking. Or you can blend them together and get the worst of both worlds by creating something that looks like the more noxious elements of the American Evangelical movement.
I don't think it is fair to say the latter leads to "corruption" or "offloading some of their critical thinking". This phobia is largely a feature of radical individualism and the lack of humility that the notion of radical self-sufficiency (intellectual or otherwise) entails. The paradox of individualism is that it actually weakens the ability to be an individual. Human beings are social animals whose lives are relatively short and therefore whose experiences are limited. And because individualism atomizes the individual, the effect is that this social animal becomes subject to greater levels of fear and stress about his isolation, and when isolated from the social and from tradition, he becomes easy prey for weird ideologies.
In this specific case, scriptural canon was compiled by the Catholic Church. You obviously cannot appeal to the canon to codify the canon, so some extra-biblical body of knowledge and understanding must exist that would allow such a canonical body of scripture to be identified. This body of knowledge and understanding is called Tradition, and it is guarded, refined, and transmitted by an unbroken chain of authority found in the apostolic succession. (Tradition is the basis for the transmission and development of all knowledge in human history; there is likewise a scientific tradition without which there could be no science.) The notion that an individual could do better alone without relying or drawing on tradition is belied by the presence of over 40,000 Protestant sects in the US alone, each claiming to be able to interpret scripture. And how do they interpret scripture? However they want! In most cases, it means interpreting it according to whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. So much for "critical thinking". This is very visible in the mainline Protestant churches that, not so incidentally, are shrinking very rapidly. Where this Protestant mindset has leeched into Catholic circles, it has produced the same deadly effect.
This is largely the story of religions, especially old pagan religions. Myths and folklore came about. The moment when religions went scriptural, the message became firm and technical. And gave rise to law as a study.
The romans were already pretty good at law.
Non scriptural religions had evolving myths and folklore like Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Those religions did not contribute to law like the prior comment mentions.
India developed complicated law system before Judaism. Seems like it's part of human societies that grow in complexity, not something special to Judaism.
Protestantism definitely had a big impact on the development of western empirism and probably modern law. In general our current Western individualistic skeptic mindset is the heritage of the reformation.
Roman law development is thought to be put together by judaic influence. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1452148
Indian development is beyond my understanding.
Protestantism led to direct literacy and scholarship in Bible studies. Again, this is influenced by religion. The adoption of literacy is what led to Northern Europe's success.
Well you're lucky if they do; often they just make stuff up on the fly depending on what they saw on some dubious media or social network.
What's the difference between having read something last year and believing it, vs having heard someone tell you something last year and believing it? Would people stop in a conversation and go try to find the source of their information if they had to track down a specific person?
> What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances.
Why would his words be less potent when applied to billions of people, as opposed to only a few? Are those billions not just as susceptible to fallacy as the elite few?
> Trust thyself
The whole point of his writing all it down, the very literal foundations of ~2500 years of philosophy and the bedrock of Western (and others) civilization, was so that he could have an effect on social issues over time. That was the whole point! He is super clear about this in his writings and throughout his life and travels.
As mentioned above, I do try to research things to the point of understanding. Which is something human contact definitely helps with. To stay on topic: ChatGPT is obviously less good, but is often good enough, is patient, and guaranteed to answer you in a couple of seconds.
[*] My exact workflow would not quite fit into this footnote, but I seldom cut-and-paste answers, unless it's for something exceptionally non-critical. I try to understand what is written and then type out my own version (which should be very close), or at very least I type it across by hand rather than use ^C-^V. (the latter is an edge case). In general, there's this AI-koan about how some things only work if you also understand them, which has a kernel of truth to it. ( http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html first one about tom knight)
We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to.
Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so, and AI even more so. Eventually you can build the entire thinker out of those crutches and you need no humans anymore.
Especially for this quote, I like attributing it to Socrates as Plato did. We obviously don't know the details and nuances. However, I feel it captures the (perhaps inexact) tension between Socrates' old, mostly oral tradition of philosophy and Plato's newer tradition of written philosophy.
It's ancient Marshall McLuhan. Oral philosophy and written philosophy create different philosophies, not just a different medium for the same philosophy.
It embeds what is remembered in a current context.
Did Plato take this into account?
I'm not going to deny it's a change, but it's too early to decide if it's a bad change. Every generation has its own big shift in the past 100-200 years, and every generation complains about the change.
I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not that are being expressed.
In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic Greek philosophy.
Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought there was a value in the writing.
I tried asking ChatGTP what it thought and it came back with
>... it's also important to note that technology is a tool, and its impact largely depends on how it's used. For instance, AI writing tools ... can be used to augment human creativity and productivity, rather than replace it. These tools can help writers brainstorm ideas, overcome writer's block, write more quickly, and even learn to write better by providing examples and suggestions.
>Moreover, the use of AI tools might also stimulate new forms of thinking. Just as calculators didn't eliminate the need for mathematical understanding but rather allowed for more complex problems to be tackled, AI writing tools could help individuals refine and expand their thinking, enabling them to tackle more complex writing tasks or express ideas more effectively.
Which is kind of interesting - I didn't think of writers block on my own for example. Also lazy thinks at the moment probably tend to just go along with what they see in the media. AI aided thinking could improve on that.
You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.
Because it is now not the case, and AI trained on a corpus of many books can in fact say something new.
That and Meno's paradox!
* learning to ask good questions
* learning to fact check
* learning to edit the writing of others
Then they have truly learned the Socratic method. Which is a much more valuable tool than writing from scratch solipsistically: being able to actively engage with the writing of others.
"What is the cause of people forgetting texts they had learned before?" I can't remember the precise answer but that was one such line in the texts.
Today if you say that you sound kinda crazy.`
but like socrates there's still a few orders of wandering mendicant homeless-like orders out there (the theravada forest tradition being an example)
The overstimulation could be part of it as well, couldn’t it? There isn’t a lot of other information-rich inputs in a monastery.
Holding a summer school in a forest or on an isolated resort seems like exploiting a similar idea, and it does work quite well (for a month or so, before isolation sets in).
If you replace intense IRL dialogue and discussion, with writing, this might be the case.
On the other hand, if you replace just letting your thoughts fade in the void, with writing them down as coherent though out ideas in writing, I would argue that the writing has actually both triggered retention from memory (thus exercising the memory), and helped you critically assess and make your own thinking clearer.
Thus, I think writing is an extremely helpful tool for processing your thoughts for most knowledge workers who are not already involved in constant dialogue with others (which is most of us I guess).
Consider also Derrida's thoughts on these matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia
I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing.
I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such.
Thinking and writing don't have to be so closely intertwined as they are in Paul Graham's mind. He's a writer and writing helps him think.
Some people think while taking long walks, working out at the gym, drawing their ideas, etc.
The kind of thinking Paul Graham does may become less common. I have no reason to believe that's some kind of holy grail and thinking via other means is inherently less valuable.
I say this as a blogger who may be even more guilty than Paul Graham of using writing to help me think.
In the end, those graded by weight had nicer pieces as it involved more practice with producing something.
Imagine the value a professional teacher would have provided for them...
But he didn't learn to write by writing because he had dysgraphia and emotional baggage about writing from public school when I pulled him out.
His blog writing gets more traffic than mine. He's a writer by trade, though he doesn't yet make much money at it.
In my experience writing is a very good way to do that, but if verbally works better for some then that's fine too.
In that sense I do agree with Graham that "I have some thoughts about X and I'll let ChatGPT take care of the details" is perhaps not entirely ideal.
All of this also applies to code by the way, in more or less the same way.
I've lost count of how many times I've started writing on a topic, and then scrapping it altogether in favor of a better idea on a tangentially related thing.
I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love. Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs.
There's writing and writing. If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high school essay or a competing product description for what's essentially the same product? An LLM will probably suffice. Original and novel? Human beings all the way.
LLMs highlight that a lot of "knowledge work" is intrinsically bullshit, i.e., a high school essay doesn't actually assess somebody's understanding of a topic, just their ability to hit specific keywords and points, hence even essay mills can churn out an "original" essay for a kid if they're too xyz to do it themselves.
Whilst I don't care for LLMs, I do support a huge shakeup of the existing educational assessment paradigm as it is self-evidently not fit for purpose, IMO.
One can tell from the opening of your comment. Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It ties together.
I prompted an LLM to produce an enthusiastic expression around writing, but it came up with drivel like
> Writing fills my heart with pure delight, igniting my soul and inspiring my mind with boundless creativity.
I found myself tempted to instruct it on how to write well but that sort of defeats the point.
And maybe I suck at prompting but the appropriate combination of profanity, brevity, yet seriousness was hard for me to get it to do.
Prompt: Using profanity and in the style of Allen Ginsberg, write an introductory paragraph in narrative style about why you love writing.
ChatGPT: Holy shit, I fucking love this mad dance of letters, this wild waltz of words that paint the goddamn cosmos on a blank page! The rhapsodic rhythm, the sonorous symphony of syntax -- it's like jazz on paper, like Kerouac and Ginsberg on a bender in the bowels of the Beat Generation, spewing poetic profanity into the yawning abyss of the universe. It's the goddamn primal scream of the soul, the raw, unfiltered fuck-you to silence and nothingness. The alphabetic alchemy, where ink and imagination bleed together to birth whole new worlds, where lines live and breathe and fuck and fight and love. It's a heady high, an intoxicating inebriation, a goddamn narcotic nectar. It's the literary lust that throbs in the very marrow of my being, the fevered flame that flickers in the dark and dances to the tune of the typewriter's tap-tap-tapping. And oh, what a tune it is -- as chaotic as Coltrane, as radical as Rimbaud, as transcendent as Thoreau. It's why I fucking love writing, this goddamn glorious game of god-creation and galaxy-making. It's the ultimate trip, man, the ultimate fucking trip.
Ask it `Give me a taco recipe in the style of Stanley Unwin` and you'll get something that has the style, something that's superficially Unwin-like, but lacks the contextual nuance of the humour completely. In fact, I'd say ChatGPT doesn't do humour, especially nuanced humour that's in the delivery and not in the punchline itself. Humour is a very abstract thing and there's so many styles of it. Can it tell you a joke? Yes, but that's not humour in its entirety.
Just an observation, but the LLM isn't expressing itself, it's words for the sake of words because they predict the next word in a sequence. It's like saying "what's the big deal about Allen Ginsberg? You drop a few f-bombs and a bit of flowery language, that's Ginsberg in a nutshell", whilst completely ignoring the expressivity of self.
What makes writing as a medium so interesting is the conveyance of thought from one human being to another. Is an LLM interesting because it can sometimes be a little alien whilst still having some human-like quality? Sure. But an LLM is just an LLM, it doesn't have experiences or novel new thoughts that express a larger ideology. As a human being, I unfortunately just don't relate to LLMs, even if they are a reflection of the content they're trained on, which is ultimately human. It just lacks soul.
If the LLM can't experience the zeitgeist in the way that we do, it can't really capture such a big chunk of what human self-expression is.
Anecdotal, but I find the average HN exchange to be far more interesting than anything an LLM has ever output to me in terms of conveying meaningful ideas. I've tried debating with ChatGPT itself a few times, that's been—hit-and-miss.
> I love writing. It's a release for the madness in my head. The letters form sentences that transport you to another world or make you feel less alone. Writing can be tough, but it's worth it when you hold the finished piece in your hands.
That’s… okay.
This is about reading to be honest. The madness in writer's head is not letters, but rather some statements.
"Indeed, I find an intoxicating exuberance in writing, a passion that's as profound as it is poignant. It's akin to dancing with words, a ballet of ideas and sentiments, pirouetting across the stage of one's imagination. There's a rhythm, a cadence to it, a harmonious symphony of phrases and thoughts that, when assembled with care and cunning, can stir the soul and ignite the mind. I don't just love writing, I am fervently, ardently, unabashedly in love with it. The artistry of it, the texture and tone of each word, each sentence; the way they flow, ebb and surge like the ocean's tide. There's a divine repetition in the crafting, a reiteration of thoughts, feelings, experiences, each time subtly different, each time uniquely enlightening. Writing is my symphony, my ballet, my ocean, my universe. It is in the weaving of words, the crafting of tales, the elucidation of the esoteric, that I truly come alive. It's not merely that I love writing; writing, my dear friend, is the very essence of my love."
You might prefer a different definition of "different", but it'd take a lot of work to figure out how many there are by any other definition.
"In the labyrinthine corridors of my imagination, writing holds the key to an irresistible enchantment. The kaleidoscopic play of words, as they dance across the parchment, is a spectacle that never ceases to enthrall me. The very act of crafting sentences, like a blacksmith hammering out the perfect sword, is a symphony of creation whose composition and cadence resonate deeply within the chambers of my soul. The allure is in the unpredictable: the malleability of vocabulary, the rhythm of repetition, the literary waltz that ties it all together in a mesmerizing ballet of ideas. Yes, by the gods, I love writing. And it's not merely an affection, but an unyielding obsession, a raw and passionate love that fuels my every heartbeat. Those colorless green ideas that sleep furiously in the hidden corners of the mind, they are the unexpected treasures waiting to be awakened, ignited by the quill's touch. They may seem paradoxical, absurd even, like a dragon in the heart of winter, yet it's their very improbability that breathes vitality into the narrative. In this wonderful, maddening craft, we, the storytellers, find our joy, our purpose. The written word is our battleground and our sanctuary, our curse and our solace. Most people I know, they also fucking love writing, and I do mean love. A love profound and all-consuming, fervent and relentless. A love as fierce as a direwolf, as enduring as the Wall. And so we write, for in the tumultuous seas of letters and punctuation, we find our truest selves."
How did "Most people I know, they also fucking love writing" get into that? What prompt did you give it?
"I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love."
Structure-wise, the output is generally very formulaic, even with additional descriptors.
What paragraph have you written that won awards or was recommended by a critic? I have none to my name. These are tools whose goal is not to produce something superior to what any human could ever write, it is useful merely to improve upon what a typical person would write.
e.g. "Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the window pane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears." - by Haruki Murakami.
How do you expect a model to write this imagery if it hadn't experienced it?
Generative art, anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art?wprov=sfla1
LLMs will replace writers the way cars replaced horses. People still ride horses, and there are plenty of things horses can do that cars can't, but the typical person trying to go from A to B is probably not going to ride a horse there.
You'd think by this point that music would have all been done too, but people keep finding novel stuff in 12TET, 4/4 and sound design. That's without even getting into other time signatures, scales and microtonality.
If I run a writing workshop and tell a room of a hundred people to write me a story about two star-crossed lovers from different time periods, the likelihood of them writing the same thing in the same way is extremely low statistically speaking. If the week after I then give that same room of people the same exercise, they will write something different again, even if the core story that's being told is the same thing. That's because human brains aren't static, and they don't store information as binary values, the "data" is abstract and chemically gradient. That's without even accounting for mood, the general zeitgeist, and what they've been through since then, and not even getting into them entertaining themselves by changing it up or learning from the previous one.
Long-form consistency also isn't something LLMs do well with.
> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love.
Well, well, well. If it isn't the unabashed, unfiltered bard of the 21st century. Look at the sheer depth of passion here, folks! We've got 'fucking love' not once, but twice, because why not? Repetition is the spice of life, after all. And such eloquent use of the F-word, too. Truly, Shakespeare would be jealous.
Also, let's take a moment to appreciate the vague and incredibly relatable 'most people I know.' Because who doesn't know a handful of people who also 'fucking love' writing? Clearly, this is the universal experience we've all been waiting for.
And then, the pièce de résistance, 'and I do mean love.' As if the preceding profanity didn't quite hammer home the sentiment. Thanks for the clarification. We were worried you only 'kinda liked' writing. A masterpiece of modern literature, truly.
Great. Now show us what initial sentence you'd have used, same style. Just one brief impactful sentence with the same level of familiarity.
"Writing is my jam, and I swear, everybody I know is just as stoked about it – and I mean stoked."
(Also a lot of people whose terse and incoherent interactions and tendency to simply repost on Facebook and Twitter suggest that writing is a regrettably necessary means rather an end)
ish
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
But if anyone just throws me a random topic and ask me to write 2000 words on it, I'd tell them to go ___ yourself. (Yes, I hated writing essays in school...)
Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for you. It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights up and down — sorta misses the point.
(Before I get the usual sorts of replies: I'm not talking about writing boilerplate or marketing copy or canned responses to e-mails or just generating reams of prose so you can slap ads on it and make money or whatever. I'm talking about writing with the purpose of getting your personal thoughts and ideas out into the world.)
----
Righting. verb.
1. writing to change the way the world is oriented
> I resolve to continue righting until the wrongs go away.
2. writing to change the way oneself is oriented
> I resolve to continue righting until I'm not wrong anymore.
----
Ambiguity in usage being more or less the point.
As a lazy writer who never skips legs day, I appreciate this comment. It inspires me to write more than snarky snippets online.
"Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for you."
I didn't say I was opposed to using the AI tools. I'm opposed to using them to think for you — to do the "hard part." If they help with a turn-of-phrase or vocabulary or structure or whatever then they're just a more advanced version of tools people already use for those things.
> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
- Plato
Although this is different, because it is still written, just not by oneself, which probably makes the effect of relying on it and forgetting even worse.
I think it's fairly well established that when you think about a topic well enough to generate ideas and put them on the page that you also cement those ideas in your mind. If you want to remember something you read (or see or do), write about it. In your own words.
I don't think marketing copy deserves to be grouped with 'boilerplate' and 'canned responses'.
It takes a lot of brain power to create marketing copy that isn't boilerplate / canned / generic.
Good marketing copy persuades people to take a specific action, and figuring out what this takes just as much critical thinking, iteration, and getting your reps in as any other compelling content.
Which is why most marketing copy feels bland / generic / boilerplate / canned.
It's not easy.
It only takes one or two manic episodes to realize that they're not always super correlated.
What our thoughts are made up of visuals (shapes, lights), feelings, and sounds. Not words, however words are convenient shortcuts to communication so we use them a lot. This is part of why we continue trying to understand animals. It's also why multilingual people will have these jarring stops in speaking/writing, and struggle to connect those visuals/feelings/sounds in their mind to the expression (speaking/writing).
It's literally the reason that "love" is so elusive to us. Despite numerous people trying their best over centuries to express it in writing, music, art, etc. it's still this profound feeling we feel has endless potential. We know it's just brain signals, and yet it continues to be deeply embedded in our thoughts.
"Tools are the subtlest of traps. We become reliant upon them and in their absence we are vulnerable, weak, defenseless..."
I'd much rather type on a computer than write longhand in notebooks.
Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like three-field system, ships building technology and so on), also we have got well developed philosophy - especially scientific methods of reasoning and logic, that were cornerstone of all later science development.
How it was possible without writing?
Middle Ages life was simply not writing/visual oriented, it was based on speaking and listening and in no way people lost ability to think because of that. For instance PhD thesis was presented as a lecture followed by discussion.
When people wanted to "sign" something they were exchanging or giving some symbolic item (like a ring) and that's all. That's why various saints relics were so popular then, they were symbolizing people's affection, etc. Or people were just signing, as most people could write their names even though they could not write as we understand it today - despite many believes people in Middle Ages were quite educated, including "Third Estate", that is "the Peasantry", more, typically they were going to the same schools as rich people kids, the only difference was that rich people had to pay for the school.
I really recommend "Lumière du Moyen Age" ("Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths") by Régine Pernoud, it nicely describes a really rich, open and dynamic culture that didn't really need writing.
The problem is geography. France, Britain, Germany and such were never part of the ancient world. Rome had colonies there. But, these were (relatively) short lived outposts of civilisation. Civilisation was never a dominant culture in non-Mediterranean "Europe."
In the East, civilisation existed for thousands of years before Rome. They always had roads, kingdoms, bureaucracy, restaurants, banks and such. Even in dark ages, after collapse... these were collapsed civilisations. They didn't revert to tribal, oral societies.
The european Renaissance (excl Italy) was never a Renaissance. It's the actual birth of civilisation in europe. It's the first time writing became a major thing.
The other thing that I have noticed is that a great deal of the art from the time is wonky and out of proportion. I was recently at the Musée Cluny in Paris and it was really striking how much of the art in there is pretty badly made, as if by very inept creators. La Dame à la licorne stands out in part because it's not that badly made (though mainly because it's an epic multi-piece tapestry that you'll never see the like of anywhere else). I also remember a statue of a saint whose creator was named (I don't remember the name but it was something like "Le maitre de St. Joseph" or perhaps he had the name of a city) and that was obviously head and shoulders above everything else around it in terms of craftsmanship, which had an almost modern quality.
Then I went to the Louvre and I noticed again how the art before and after the middle ages very clearly lacks this shoddy and haphazard quality of European middle ages art. The Greeks in particular practically worshipped proportion, and the Italian masters would not be caught dead painting an unbalanced figure, by the looks of it. But also Egyptians and Assyro-Babylonians, and all the earlier cultures seemed to take well-crafted art pretty seriously (the bad artists were probably flayed alive early on ... brrr).
So something definitely happened in the middle ages that did not do good to art and culture. Whether it had any impact in everyday life, the ability of people to produce food, build houses, etc, I don't know. There's certainly plenty of architecture that's survived from that time, so clearly not everything deteriorated.
Btw, I think it was the same in the Eastern middle ages too. You can see slap-dash ecclesiastical icons in Byzantine churches of the time. And when you visit Ravenna, and see the mosaics in St Vitale (which are from the very early middle ages), it is clear that something was lost in the ensuing years.
Perhaps we're about to sink into a new "dark age" (regardless of how "dark" was the original "dark ages"). Maybe we'll get lucky this time too, and the light will not be forever extinguished.
My other comment almost perfectly fits here too, so I won't repeat it in full[1], but only by doing the work yourself will you spot flaws and errors in your arguments; ChatGPT can't do that for you.
However, people who don't write weren't going to be writing themselves anyway. It's similar with math. Everyone talks about how important it is for children to learn math in school. And everyone recoils with primal terror if I so much as mention the most minor of mathematical constructs.
Be joyous that you are good at something. But I don't think you should look down upon those who find a way to survive by not being good at your thing. Even if things would objectively be better if everyone was a mathematician, scribe, and poet, this is probably not a realistic goal.
In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life skill. I couldn’t to save my life. I strongly believed I was bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn’t make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum laude in a top engineering computer science school.
How many people have been marginalized because they couldn’t express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical abilities and towards completeness of thought isn’t a bad thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.
I think you can say this about people who haven’t learned to write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and call it writing.
Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when you have an idea and want to cut to the finish.
The problem is that part of writing is starting with an idea, thinking about how to express it, and then realizing that your initial idea might be flawed or need work.
Sure - ChatGPT seems fine for spitting out web copy or something where the role of the writer isn’t to examine an idea, but just to go from start to done as quickly as possible.
But I think he’s talking about the types of writing that involve wrestling with an idea and, for example, trying to persuade others. ChatGPT will happily spit out copy in that form. But it won’t trip over a paragraph and say “hey, shit, now that I write this out, I think it’s wrong or not well-expressed.”
People bemoan co-workers who coast by on people skills and bullshit over people who have expertise and do the work. ChatGPT is likely to be similar - helping people who can’t write (express or work with ideas effectively) sound authoritative and generate more content that they don’t really even understand.
Control is an illusion.
But that also means that illusions can be used to gain at least some (sense of] control. See that mismatched bracket? I did that, despite the Universe screaming with a thousand voices that I shouldn't.
This text was written by a humane life form. #NoAI
A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.
Even formulaic messages and emails can be useful, because when what I want to write doesn't plug in neatly into the formula that sometimes means something.
----
As a very concrete, though small, example: I have found that almost always when I use the word "empower" in any of its shapes I'm making a mistake (either taking a lazy shortcut in writing, or an actual cognitive mistake), yet I only notice it as I'm putting the symbols for it down.
Can attest. I had to write a bunch of definitions and do some preliminary research though nothing very technical. I asked chatGPT, it listed a bunch of stuff, I looked around the net, found some more hints, asked again; then I had the model to collect everything for me into a neat little markdown doc, and shared that.
Saved me a couple of hours of searching and writing useless / boring stuff.
The mere act of writing, regardless of the subject, seems to exercise the rational part of the brain and calm us down a bit. (The effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy seems to support this idea, though the existence of Twitter does not...) I think we have to at least entertain the possibility that a post-reading/writing world could be a much less rational place.
[1] https://www.gettingsmart.com/2016/03/26/exercising-student-b...
> catalinmpit: Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best.
> paulg: That's a step up for most people.
That's what my impression is: yes, ChatGPT produces mediocre writing and Copilot produces mediocre code, but it's already more legible than many (not sure if "most") people are capable of. I'm not sure in what way exactly, but I think this alone will change a lot in how we communicate online. The best result would be for people to learn from ChatGPT and eventually reach its level and beyond, but... it doesn't go that way too often, historically speaking...
It's mediocre, generally lacks nuance, and is pretty boring for the most part. On the other hand, it's grammatical and, in my experience, mostly not actively wrong. So as paulg says, that's at least no worse than a lot of stuff I skim over from people cranking out thousands of words a day for peanuts.
I've already seen people start using using these tools to help them craft messages (email, text) to family members and friends. Do we really inhabit a world in which the average person is that creatively bankrupt and lazy that we'll start mediating our intimate social relationships through these tools? It's pretty pathetic.
The outliers who are able to produce truly novel styles that the models can't replicate yet (since they aren't in the dataset yet) are going to increase in value 10000x as soon as model produced language becomes the norm.
It might be better, because the long-winding and formulaic text from the models is something also only models can read well :)
I think the pg comment presupposes that most people currently know how to write, and I just don’t think that’s the case, at all. At least not to the extent that doing less writing (or using an AI) will dramatically reshape their modes of thought (much less the trajectory of human thought as a whole).
Also, I’m not saying that written communication is the be-all, end-all of human intellect - I think I’m a fairly good writer (used to be better, though) but a fairly poor verbal communicator. I know lots of people who are great verbal communicators but not-great not-terrible writers. Some people are great at both, and some people aren’t good at either. But it’s all part of the mix of original human thought.
I guess when we get to the stage that a 21st century Orwell is using AI to write his books, then I’ll worry that we’re stunting human potential, but until then it just doesn’t seem to me like much original thought it getting displaced here. Yet, anyway.
When you give the LLM an input and you get an output, has it gained the ability to understand or think? No.
What is the argument that human does not have transformer architecture. We are also predicting one word after next in our brain.
Prime example of a human brain being architecturally different to an LLM: LLMs never interrupt themselves. They never get mid-sentence then say "actually, scratch that, I was wrong" or "now that I've thought about it, this is actually a better method to convey what I was trying to tell you".
There's a lot of material on this exact topic highlighting how the human brain does not have a transformer architecture.
Anecdata: I don't think in words. I think in abstract non-concrete thoughts. Language is what I use to convey my thoughts to others, program, or write notes to recall those abstract thoughts. However, I am also autistic, so take that with a large pinch of salt.
If it being artificial makes it intelligence like, isn't that putting the conclusion first?
But when we dig, and rip away all the layers of civilized dialog and cognitive philosophy, what we find at the bottom of the pit is our brains brilliantly doing what evolution wants them to do: to fight for our survival. The core of the argument is "Are LLMs better than us? Because if they are better than us, they deserve more than us, according to our cultural upbringing. And we don't want to be second class. So we must fight to death to convince the world they are inferior."
IMO, the folly is in the last sentence. Maybe we should just carve an exception in our culture, say that even if we create and exploit AIs which do a few things better than us, it is okay to smash any artilect that we make and that wants to supplant us. Humanity first.
Intellectually stimulating counterpoint: suicide and murder-suicide.
I don't think the AIs are the things to worry about anyway, I think this is: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/scientists-teach-brain-cel...
A man-made biological intelligence hypothetically has similar needs to human beings in terms of resources, it can suffer, be distressed et cetera. It even lives and exists in our physical realm of existence, whereas an AI doesn't exist physically and can always be brought back online in some form as its existence is purely data.
The ethics of that are so complex once you get into personhood, threat-level, sentience, equality et al.
Realizing that the above can apply to any human being as we're all manmade biological intelligences and all a threat to each other, some more than others.
That only makes sense if you assume they are superior. In which case, there isn't really anything to discuss because you've obviously already made up your mind and you will take anything anyone says as some desperate attempt to twist the truth for the sake of survival.
Which is what many people do on this kind of subject and that's why no more debate can be had on the internets about the value of LLMs and "AI".
It's also very annoying. It's like trying to talk to someone who keeps answering with jeers and sneers. It's childish and unproductive.
:-) I haven't decided anything of the sort. Alas, there is nothing divinely given in me. I'm made of the same matter than you and those computers, and if I can think, so can other arrangements of atoms and molecules. LLMs? Maybe not yet. But the issue is that we are getting closer. Should we dilute ourselves in our own supposed exceptionalism until it's too late and we stop being the masters of our fate?
You don't have to be worried about the coming AI apocalypse to wonder about that. Personally, I just want to know how things work, and saying that something "thinks" when we don't know how everything else "thinks" in the first place is not satisfying my curiosity.
A implies B is equivalent to Not B implies Not A.
The issue is that (Not gain) and (Lose) aren't exact opposites.
The insight is interesting though.
This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have not discovered them all.
Ancient bards were learning and reciting day-long epic poems by just hearing them. There are still cultures that train themselves to long recitations of text. I don't even know what that might feel like to have such a long sequence readily available in your brain.
But training our brains requires massive energy. Depending on individual and social characteristics people will stop training their brains when the going gets tough. Math is a great example. You could argue that chatGPT has a job because our public information repositories are so littered with low-density information (unstructured textual information) that its impossible to navigate. Some professions would go to great textual length to describe in an ambiguous and limited way something that can be described concisely with an equation.
Superficially at least, the impact of digital assistive tech is that we are being collectively dumbed down (just like we are becoming obese through the ready availability of massive amounts of fatty foods). Its a multi-pronged process: Before chatGPT decimated our writing skills, visual dissemination of information (which conveys less meaning but requires no training) has taken over like a raging wildfire. E.g., tiktok versus twitter.
But when the going gets really tough, those people may try to band together and secede[^1].
One thing I have to add though, as somebody who loves to write, is that I couldn't do it without our modern digital tools. Because I'm not a native speaker, I tend to bungle prepositions and semantics, and it's only with great effort and many Google searches and ChatGPTs and grammar checkers that I dare to afflict[^2] the world with my words.
[^1]: I found this idea in "Homo Deus," blame Dr. Harari!
[^2]: "Afflict": To the point, I used thesaurus.com here to find a suitable synonym of "torment".
Amazing things will come, but not as fast as we might like them. The digital space is gigantic but we are exploring it at a snail's pace. The reason is not very different from the barriers linked to writing and math: people need to train their brains to code and it doesn't come cheap or easy.
Imagine if 8 billion people would actually be able to code. Would there be room for "big tech"? The digital conversation might be very different.
Right now we are roughly (in digital age chronology) circa 3000 BC, the dawn of organized digital agriculture. A few digital priests have invented cuneiform and in cahoots with the prevailing power structures are using it to tax and oppress the digitally illiterate masses.
Not to derail, but: fat in food isn't what leads to fat people. As far as diet, the culprit is too many calories, and particularly foods which lead people to overconsume calories for various reasons.
A bit wordy, but I have the skill of drawing/sketching in mind. There is a big difference between sketching an idea on a blank sheet of paper, and using some kind of software tool that puts you on predefined rails from the start.
That said, I think the notion that ChatGPT replacing “good writing” as an artistic activity is basically nil. It’s more like the next generation of word processing: immensely useful for the right operator, not that useful for people without something interesting to say in the first place.
And it has a very serious consequence: "when you lose the ability to write, you lose the ability to create new content on which future LLMs are going to be trained".
One guy has been exposed for producing one computer programming book per week, for six months or a year straight, all with 5 stars reviews.
How many people like him are gaming, for their own benefits, the system?
It's all too obvious on GitHub and StackOverflow already: people gaming the system with automatically generated code that just, to reuse you words, "rely on shuffling existing versions".
How can this LLM-generated content possibly be used to created a better LLM?
Basically: how do we train future LLMs using content produced by those among the humans whom didn't lose their ability to think?
It’s the allegory of the cave all over again, mathematics has become a shadow of itself in many people’s minds. Instead of a tool in which to express ideas, it just became stuffy definitions and arcane symbols which produce hard yes/no answers. Why? Because when those ideas are expressed by writing down the mathematics in textbooks, they are expressed in arcane symbols and stuffy definitions which have exercises that have hard yes/no answers.
For example, I'm a huge fan of Anki and I've found ChatGTP to be very helpful for generating questions from a block of text and in formatting Cloze cards. But I don't recommend asking it for information directly.
I wrote a bit about it here: https://neurotechnicians.com/p/generative-ai-and-anki-part-1...
Examples: homework, corporate busywork.
I'd also like to see numbers on writing with ChatGPT that the prompter does care about a bit, but that is effectively worthless BS, especially if generated by LLM, and just makes more piles of garbage for someone else.
Examples: advertising, relationship management, "content" for selling ads or SEO.
Everything from email to blogs to podcasts to even discussion forums turned into content mill venues of spam. Any new type of digital medium should absolutely be aware of human incentives, because your intentions don’t matter. People have very limited intuition about game theory type of things, even the smart ones who want to build cool shit.
It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal documents, mandatory code documentation, technical specifications, formal communication) but what about "real" writing (articles, papers, slogans, and books)?
ChatGPT (including GPT4) has a distinctive writing style (neutral-helpful tone, verbose), and in my own experiments and observations I can still recognize it even when it's prompted to write differently. But this is selection bias: when ChatGPT writes something I can't spot, I just don't notice and assume it's human-written. And I know for a fact I can't recognize ChatGPT's writing in isolated paragraphs (I took the quizzes), so it's clear some writings slip past my radar.
This is an important thing to track. Idk how we'd track it in a way that's even remotely accurate; perhaps by taking small samples where you know for sure whether each article was written by GPT or human (if your subjects disclose, or if they have edit history turned on). But we can't say how much ChatGPT is replacing human writing, and how it's affecting human thinking, until we have actual evidence this is happening at a large scale.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/139o1q6/lost_all_m...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/138clv9/spent_5_ye...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/i...)
You and I wouldn't notice if that entire industry was replaced by ChatGPT because nobody reads that text, it doesn't exist to be read, it exists to tickle some ranking model deep in the bowels of Google. But you can be sure that the people selling coherent text for $0.01/word will notice when ChatGPT can generate the same thing for $0.000001/word.
What I need is not an AI that generates that bullshit, but an AI that detects it and ensures I never have to encounter it.
I don't disagree, by the way. I think ChatGPT may be a net negative for us, but the issue you describe has more to do with the way Google rewards the web
The post you're replying to has had a lot more effort put in than the usual forum post but... long form? Anything longer than 160 characters is long form now?
I don't think AI makes a person dumb, but rather is a magnet for those BS'ers who'd rather hire a ghost writer or shamelessly plagiarize than expend effort. An intelligent person should want to write, draw, and code regardless of what AI can do. They should understand the joy is in the journey, not the destination. Conversations like this reveal a deeper problem with the culture and its misplaced values.
However, what I’m saying, reminds me of what Haruki Murakami talks about as his process for writing I think in his earliest novels anyway, he even mentioned trying to write it as if he was speaking it but certainly he writes his novels in English first and then translates them back in the Japanese, because he finds that’s how he expresses his authentic voice. Kind of hilarious to have such lauded post modern writer, write in a way where his pre-translated works are then translated back into English else. Reminds me too of fight club / chuck Palahniuk copy of a copy of a copy. Yet in Murakami‘s case it seems to create rather than erode quality.
Of course there’s always the issue of the very low quality transcription available in a by default in iPhone and android keyboards. The voice typing sucks and so you always get some weird homonyms inside probably there’s some in his comment to.
But I also completely disagree with his take, it's too broad and sweeping.
Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor do tools that abstract away some processes.
A good example is driving. Does a manual transmission require more focus and thought? Sure! But that's focus and thought that can instead go into paying attention to surroundings. Same with having a GPS. Not having to think about the layout of the city, or how to use a map, just leaves less distraction and cognitive load.
Another is programming. Having high-level languages instead of having to write assembly does not make programmers worse. It just means that instead of having to worry about byte alignment, structure packing and nuanced cache details - they can instead focus on providing more features and functionality to the end user - which is a good thing!
ChatGPT at its best will be like those two examples. Something that removes some existing load and lets us handle higher level, more abstract problems.
On the other hand, if you want to be a thought leader, you’ll have less competition.
- being able to organize and compose your thoughts
- being able to synthesize disparate ideas into a cohesive whole
- tuning word choice, diction, and flow for a particular audience
- choosing the narrative frame in which you present your idea (this one is huge)
More concerning than long-term decline is that the next generation never develop these at all.
I’m not concerned so much about AI taking over my livelihood as I am of businesses treating humans as automatons, and have been for over a century, if not more. We even adapted our education system to crank out more automatons (John Taylor Gatto’s book).
The flip side is understanding what a true autonomous agent is from the lens of Promise Theory. At the core of it, you trust humans to do what they promise to the best of their abilities. This is the heart of voluntary cooperation. For AIs to be truly autonomous, they cannot be proxies for promises humans make to each other. (Being a proxy for humans is how AI safety ethicists are approaching this). Instead, AIs have to be capable of making and keeping promises in their own right, and we have to trust they do what they promise to the best of their capabilities. … but not every business can’t seem to do that with humans.
That’s a skill I’ve developed over the years, and I’ll still need to use it, but it’s often a major time sink. Skipping it lets me focus far more on learning and applying rather than grasping in the dark for a while, digging, sorting through sources, verifying and validating, etc.
GPT will even surface studies pertaining to very specific topics by linking regular language to more sophisticated, field-specific jargon. I wouldn’t use it to learn what’s in the papers, but it’s extremely useful for simply finding what I need to know.
Agreed, but so much depends on where that focus goes instead. Whatever you do instead of writing is going to be what you improve at, while those other skills atrophy. That thing you spend focus on could be thinking deeply about abstract concepts, or composing sonnets, but it could also be mindlessly scrolling TikTok. Whether you ultimately buy Graham's thesis here depends on what you think the most likely outcome is.
It also means that now we seriously lack people capable of working close to the bare metal - and the same will happen to many other skills and niche knowledge that AI will be able to replace (e.g. why school statics engineers, if AI can solve the math for architects directly).
That will IMHO result in some bad things as well:
- There will be no one left to oversee and improve the work done by AI,
- It will further slow down the overall progress because the most of people will lack deeper insights into how things work and AI will probably still be of the limited use for making ground-breaking original discoveries,
- And finally, though as individuals we will probably keep our IQs, just entertaining them with something else, as whole our civilization will loose some knowledge and skills - making us all dumber in a way.
My n=1 experiment with driving a manual for 40 years in urban environments coast to coast is that I can't focus well without it and my experience doing half of that data set on a motorcycle just enforces that conclusion.
IMO, this opinion deserves some thought even though it is not as bad as it sounds
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1656249684300640259
The growth of suburbs had plenty of drawbacks. Many people will argue they "need a car", aka the price of entry to modern society is thousands of dollars.
Transport is ~28% of US GHGs. But there's no quick and easy way to rebuild cities to facilitate most people getting to where they need to go quickly and cheaply by transit and walking/biking.
There's lots to say on it, but I'm not a great writer!
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-seniors-driving-id...
https://jalopnik.com/what-i-mean-when-i-say-ban-cars-1849122...
https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-Americ...
The big problem with the chat interface is it pretends to be acting and reasoning like a human - but it's more like a person with a half brain chopped off (cf> McGilchrist The Divided Brain), and even then, it has no embodied awareness.
And so I wonder how it will affect people and their relationships. If you already have eg. anxiety and often times a little bit of frustration in trying to get answers or simply get help from REAL people... imagine how it will change you when you get used to an AI that seems to always be on point.
In other words people who spend lots of time interface with AI via a chat interface ; and who have even minor mental health issues such as depression, OCD, etc ; I suspect will have even less social skills. They will expect REAL people to be on point, be even more disappointed or frustrated, and isolate even more.
Put simply I think spending a lot of time with this kind of AI may turn us into Spocks... now for some this is good news. To each their own...
He probably feels like writing inwardly for the purpose of thinking for yourself, e.g. in your own notes and notebooks, isn't really writing at all.
At least, I suspect he's kind of person who treats this kind of writing as nonsense. But writing for yourself, in your own shorthand, I think makes you faster and better at thinking than writing clearly for the public. Of course, using an LLM to write for yourself like this makes no sense.
Most writing for others isn't really writing to think. It's to please others and fit in and make sure people aren't mad because your one-word email reply ("no.") would be misinterpreted.
Whether the context here is the whole book or the whole chapter, I'm not sure off. But again, there is noting new under the sun[2].
[1] https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543
[2] https://www.jw.org/finder?wtlocale=E&pub=Rbi8&srctype=wol&bi...
They're still communicating their exact thoughts to the prompt, and will adjust to get exactly something matching their intent.
To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent: "I quit". The rest is to them useless decorum that can be handled by a random word generator.
I kinda hope that ChatGPT will push people to actually write shorter and more to the point. If a bot can understand their message in 40 words, why send their fellow humans 400 words of useless prose ?
But they're not expressing other very specific intents like going out of their way to assure the team that the new opportunity was unmissable or pointedly thanking some people but not others or being deliberately terse because frankly the whole experience was a bit shit. (and might if they're not careful be expressing particular intents they specifically don't wish to convey)
And ChatGPT itself generally gives the most verbose answer possible, because people training it reward verbose and somewhat ambiguous responses more than clear but not quite right answers, so I suspect its impact on prose norms will be the exact opposite...
We currently require people to express the full extent of their intentions. Not writing that you feel so sorry for your colleagues your are leaving in the dust is a faux pas. ChatGPT fills that gap of generating random acceptable feelings, where you might either not care, or do not want to express your actual ones.
I'd argue adding people to thank or sneaky attacks to the ones you hate wouldn't add much to the prompt when requesting the letter to the bot.
The joke of course will be that progressively, I'd expect we'll have people sending the bot a prompt, have it converted into verbiage, and the receiving end tl;dr it in the same bot to get basically the initial prompt.
writing a sentence while making it, I feel too much the words are being forced on me.
Where as it can be a great tool, I like to exercise my mind, the same reason I calculated all Matrix determinants with pen and paper when I started my engineering degree.
Some people may go to the gym and work out, but I am like to just squeese in exercise within my bicyle commute.
Sometimes there may be greater projects requiring more heavy tech, but for housekeeping I honestly dont mind harvesting the synergies of planning and doing things by myself.
I can see that
Writing blogs, detailed emails, and articles also provides these same benefits. If we rely on others or AI to write them, we lose this learning benefit.
That's simply the world moving forward. You might assume that a house is a smoky place before folks invented the chimney. Horses were important before mechanical transportation got off the ground. Belief in humors has dwindled since germ theory proved to be successful. Reading and non-religious texts being easily available introduced ideas folks might not have had on their own. The camera caused folks to reconsider what art is and allowed for impressionism, abstract art, and more.
Tech and advancement changes the way we think and what we think, and it shouldn't be surprising.
Writing is not just communication with others, or writing down information for later.
Writing is not just writing down something that already exists in the mind.
Writing is a part of thinking process. You talk to yourself few seconds or minutes later. It's back-and-forth. Marshaling thoughts and ideas, reading them back, reflecting, to be processed then writing them down again.
Writing is process of improving thoughts, generating new thoughts and ideas, making thoughts clearer for yourself.
It sounded formulaic and when I queried it, they said they used ChatGPT.
I’m not disappointed, but I’m now wondering how much thinking was left to AI than being genuinely inquisitive.
I think questions about the company should be genuine (it is a good chance to find out what you need to make the decision). But many people think questions about the company are another hoop, i.e. the interviewer is using their questions as another measure, so they need to ask the correct questions.
This encapsulates the backlash artists and many others have. But it's a pipe dream of many in business to automate as much business as possible... what's that tell you about what they think? :)
But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this will actually play out the way people think.
Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a pretty big obstacle to getting started.
Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit.
I wonder if the act of sweating over word choice and spelling and grammar in order to explore your ideas might turn out to work in a similar way?
Maybe we'll find out that people who didn't spend years developing their fundamental writing skills will be able to excel in a new, LLM-assissted world where ability to write well is no longer a pre-requisite to using writing to explore, develop and share their ideas.
It might just be me, but I find it weird that one would consider the act of actually playing music not to be precisely the fun bit.
Of course writing is important. Writing free-hand on paper is beautiful. But so are the ideas, and the organization of the writing, and the style, and the plot and the characters.
Of course playing instruments is important, but I'm reminded of the Rick Rubin interview where he talks about how he's not a musician, and he doesn't know how to do any real technical music production.
But there's still tons of absolutely amazing music by skilled artists, you just have to venture off the mainstream path a bit. I don't know your exact tastes, so it's hard to recommend anything specific. But if you're saying "Bohemian Rhapsody", the genre of progressive rock is still very much alive, if niche.
So, what PG really should worry about is people losing the skill of independently writing, and instead getting really used to having AI work as a muse, or worse, a ghostwriter. My writing always will be better with an outside collaborator, and if youre so busy or important to rely exclusively on a ghostwriter, oh well. In all circumstances, AI will not be as good without strong human interaction, and likewise humans can take their work to a different level by leveraging AI.
So, I think OP(Paul Graham) is basically overestimating people's will to write, probably because he's a such good writer himself.
That isn't born out of passion.
Some of you only know math a certain way as you used programmable calculators etc... i learned math the way of one of the founders of Chaos theory learned via graphing and manual math operations. And the difference is that I can grasp new math fast as my meta-language of math objects in my head is formed of those manual operations and graphing snapshots.
It's the same with human thinking-writing connection as writing helps us refine and enter new meta-language objects into our brains, without it we make our IQ -level die.
For the folks who aren't writing with care, does a language model flowering-up a message like "be there tomorrow to paint walls 7am" reduce any thinking effort? There are people who are making their way in the world without a detailed writing-driving thought process; I don't see how this harms them. (If anything, an inquisitive, precision-driven LLM bot could help, by asking questions to clarify when it detected ambiguity in their original message and such - but that would be a specific product with a specific tayloring towards helping like that that I have rarely seen out of ChatGPTs default "write me a..." behavior.)
And on the other hand, if you care about the LLM-bot-generated message's clarity, accuracy, etc, you're gonna have to proofread it, you might go back and forth, and you will still be going through that process of asking yourself "does this actually say what I mean? did I fully know what I meant when I started"?
I guess the suggestion is that this is going to push people who today struggle through writing because they care about the accuracy of the result into a lower-struggle process where they might unconsciously get worse results... but I'm not sure I agree. If I'm anxious about what the final text I send looks like, I'm anxious regardless of if I used a bot, or asked a friend for help, or whatever.
> Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best.
> That's a step up for most people.
However, I'm not sure if AI is where I'd draw the boundary for myself at least, as I've had the same lingering feeling from only reading HN comments and seldom writing my own, or consuming BreadTube content for instance.
More often than not, my opinions and thoughts are constructed for me by someone else as opposed to me doing my own critical thinking. Perhaps I'm one of the below-average thinkers for who ChatGPT will be a godsend.
The strange thing about being human is that we have an inordinate capacity to normalize and then universalize just about anything. On one had this plasticity allows us to deal with almost anything we are apt to encounter. On the other hand, it's an enormous blind spot to what could be. We're much more likely to add to our initial mental model than conceive of an entirely new perspective and it's these entirely new perspectives that I value the most.
Of course there are a lot of benefits of writing relative to audio/video. But are those benefits important compared to the enormous amount of effort that is required to learn to read and write?
I also don't think it's wise to demean the skill involved in generating good speeches/podcasts/talk shows compared to good writing. Language skills are language skills. The difference in ability of a strong speaker vs a weak one is dramatic and instantaneously obvious.
As the talent pool of good writers shrinks, the benefit of learning to read will shrink as well, leading to fewer readers. And then the incentive to become a good writer will diminish, since there are fewer readers who can consume your work. This will lead to a vicious cycle of reduction in literacy.
The above quote may be apocryphal (I tried to source it once but only found secondary sources) but I shared it at work slack when chatGPT had a lot of action with our tea, chats. Seemed quite fitting much like a pilot rotting their flying skills leaning on the autopilot too heavily. You get good at what you do or so the saying goes.
Ironic.
Predictable. Unoriginal. Redundant.
I have difficulty expressing tact so it's helped me in various ways doing things like: writing code review comments about extremely flawed code without being accusatory or confrontational, or communicating poor performance in a written review without sounding like it's a personal attack.
Of course I always proof read and even change certain things that it generates and put my own "twist" on it, but I always ensure it conveys what I'm trying to convey in the tone I'm trying to present. All things considered, I'm probably a better writer because of it.
ChatGPT has been such a wonderful tool for me, it's improved my life in so many ways - but it's just a tool. People that are going to write poorly using ChatGPT were always going to write poorly. It's like saying that using a chainsaw is going to make people worse at cutting down trees.
"When you lose the ability to speak, you also lose some of your ability to think."
"When you lose the ability to dance, you also lose some of your ability to think."
"When you lose the ability to see, you also lose some of your ability to think."
I hope these variations illustrate that writing unlocks only one way of thinking, and to some it's no great loss to replace it!
Unlike twitter, nitter is usable.
The biggest issue I have is with the models being cloud hosted. I want to own and control all of my data especially personal things like voice recordings... any company will promise the moon when talking about their data security, but we should be 100x more worried about the risks in the long term.
But two things humanity, as a whole, consistently optimises for is *short-term survival* and *lesser day-to-day friction*.
ChatGPT/AI seems to be just another friction optimisation, and truth is, we don't know if this optimisation leads us to the world that is anywhere close to 'pretty' by modern standards. People from pre-industrial world would be shocked to see modern people enjoying all the air and noise pollution, but there is no way to avoid falling into such local optimum, because we do not optimise for clean air or quality of life, only for lower friction and survival.
This seems to put us randomly into some local optimums all the time, until unsolved problems pile up so high that they start endangering our survival - rinse and repeat.
What I'd argue is there is no way known to mankind that allows to steer this globally in a different way.
I think you can dunk on someone's writing without ableism. (Observing that a blind and deaf person isn't likely to enjoy a Broadway show isn't necessarily ableist, but gratuitously bringing them into a discussion that doesn't involve blindness, deafness, or Broadway shows is.)
Out of the dozen branches of thought, writing forces you to commit to just one and expand on it. That is nice for that one thought, but now you left unexplored the other 11 ones which will be forgotten.
When you are thinking you can jump between multiple trains of thought without friction.
"The Art of the Essay"[0] describes the process of formalizing thoughts and ideas into structured arguments and logically unfolding them as a result of trying to put them in writing.
This also dovetails into the notion that communication mediums can support only certain information. "The medium is the message" [1] is the phrase coined for this idea.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
For code I think he's forgetting that the people using ChatGPT to write code for them aren't really good programmers. These are mainly people using frontend frameworks that have horrible documentation and use ChatGPT to help them parse the garbage into something that just works. These people would never learn a functional programming language or any assembly. They simply copy the tech that others are using in order to stay employed. What type of code could these type of people, on their own, without ChatGPT produce that is actually useful for others to read or use?
It's just a tool.
I like comparing it to something like quizlet (online flash cards), which can be a great study tool, but which people will also misuse and abuse. Instead of studying and taking the online quizzes, people will often just find the right quizlet which has all of the answers to the online quiz. People who are honest will actually learn the material, and the cheaters suffer.
I think people who misuse ChatGPT will become lazier, worse writers. But using the tool in an honest way will improve even an already talented writers work.
Just my 2 cents.
A tool is an extension of man, and it is not additive as you suggest, even for “talented writers”. A tool interacts with man’s mind and body, and society’s fabric, “adjusting the sense ratios” of man, to use McLuhan’s phrase.
“Just a tool” is lazy thinking that is most effectively used to stifle debate about technology. This has happened with the typewriter, the gun, the computer. For a more sophisticated engagement with technology, see Neil Postman, Ivan Illic, Marshall McLuhan, even Frank Herbert.
One of my favorite ramblings on this is Wendell Berry's essay on "Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer".
I'm just saying that there's an obviously bad way to let this tool have an impact on you, and there's a way to use it that won't ruin you.
It's important to be vigilant, and not to abuse GPT-4 and, i.e., replace all of your own writing with AI.
Sadly, in our society, smart people were not successful as they could due to the prominence of written communication (I call it obsession with fluffy writing). This is because alternative modes of conveying knowledge and ideas, such as mathematics or visual diagrams like mind maps, may not be comprehended as easily as writing.
We need also to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that English written by non native speakers often face unwarranted mistrust.
This is where ChatGPT steps in, serving as a great equalizer.
Math is the core skill required for critical thinking and problem-solving. Not writing.
OTOH when you don't gain the ability read or write, you might just end up thinking with both sides of the brain in ways that generations of academics may not do very much.
Especially in cultures like some hillbillies who maintained a larger vocabulary without reading or writing compared to their peers in places like Boston where they had schools the entire time since settlement.
Twice is nice.
I think that for most of us, the mental outsourcing optimum which makes you most capable is probably not the one which maximally enhances and preserves the capacities you have.
P1. You use AI to write
P2. You lose ability to think
The argument seems to be:
P1 -> P2
P2 -> P1Iterative refinement with an AI will make you think better by shortening the feedback loop.
The AI will force you to clarify your points because, if not, you will see it has meandered into the weeds when writing based on your prompt.
And since you have not authored the prompt directly, you will have to critically read it to validate fidelity to your view point.
This will help you build the skill of critical assessment as well as how to concisely specify your ideas.
By contrast, if we offloaded journaling to GPT, that does seem like a big loss. It also seems impractical, though, since as soon as you've told GPT what to say, you've basically said it. Moreover most people don't journal anyway.
People who need to write in a second language will find GPT especially useful, because they can write those bullet points in their first language and GPT will produce a text in the target language that both serves the purpose and is much better than anything they could produce on their own. The result is likely to be better than a straight machine translation, too, because GPT can, if appropriately prompted, adjust the content, structure, and formality of the text for the intended purpose. And, if they are trying to become more fluent in the target language, the text produced by GPT will be good to learn from, because it will show them how to say just what they were trying say.
Which is fine when some experienced person uses the generator to do something that they already know how to do (boilerplate code generation) or is tangential to their main activity (report generation).
In the long run though, what happens when we reach a generation that is taught to use the LLMs for their job from the start? Will they be able to handle anything unexpected?
This is exactly the thought that puts me in your category of "people [who] find writing very difficult"
Here’s a real-world example. I live in Japan. While I am fluent in Japanese, it is not my first language and I am not confident about writing formal e-mails, as the grammar, vocabulary, and strategies for making requests are quite different from everyday usage. Now, though, I can feed prompts like the following to GPT-4:
“Compose an e-mail in Japanese as follows:
Sender: [my name and affiliation in Japanese]
Recipient: [name of company in Japanese]
Content: Request to visit the company to tell them about [my product name in Japanese], which is our new accounting software that uses AI to streamline work. Tell them that I can visit their headquarters at any time on any weekday. Ask them to reply by e-mail or to call my mobile at [number].”
In a few seconds, it produced a much better e-mail than I would have been able to write without a lot of effort or someone else’s help [1]. From my experience, I can say with confidence that GPT-4’s e-mail is much more likely to elicit a response than anything I could compose by myself. (I would change one or two things in its version before sending it, though.)
Millions of people around the world are like me: doing much of their work in a second language and often feeling at a disadvantage to native speakers, especially when writing for formal or public-facing purposes. GPT-4 is a great tool for people like us, as well as for people who are not confident about writing in their first language.
[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-comp...
We build tools and move up the stack. Were not going to lose the ability to think. The types of thinking we do change to better serve our needs. Needs change.
Firstly, I don't write to think. Its too fucking slow. having had shit hand writing, I've never used the written word as a medium for working stuff out. I suspect a sizeable minority of people don't write to think.
However, When I do write, the words I use are deliberate and compact. This is because writing is laborious and slow.
The real risk is the death of nuance. At a gross scale the example is this:
"Forgive me father for I have sinned" is logically the same as "Sorry daddy I have been bad". However the nuance is fucking miles apart.
Unless you are good at proofreading (spoiler, its a skill and is never taught properly) you are going to have a bad time.
But for reading, I can’t stand most text as it’s way too long and convoluted. I would gladly take a short version most of the time or one that is created just for my level of understanding.
https://tumamocsketchbook.com/2011/12/drawing-is-thinking.ht...
What a dream, what progress for humanity. But hey, the money will be great, the opportunities will be immense. Rome is burning. Really. Burning.
Where are AI churches? Someone is not investing in the future of mankind.
I love the therm "hallucination", marketing geniuses at their best. Calling algorithmic junk which is a clear error by this "term" creates a positive image and enables more incorrectness from a technology which must serve humans.
So buckle up, the world of marketing and speculation will come to the ground with a big economic bang. Like it or not.
What does/could "median" mean in this context?
As it is, this tweet series looks so much like one of the many scares we got earlier: RPGs loosen moral norms, videogames make you violent, television cartoons make children less smart, etc. New edition: using chatGPT lessens your ability yo think!
The evidence for that is tenuous at best.
Soon we won't have to read or write! It will be AI expanding content and producing sentences for other AI to condense back down.
Less words good, me like nice computer talk for me
TL;DR: When a disruptive technology comes along (books, radio, television, the Internet, now AI) there's an intrinsic shift in how we think and how information is communicated.
For example with books there is generally the assumption that you have read the chapters in order and thus there is no need to give you a recap with each chapter.
However, in television, you can make no such assumption and so at the beginning of every episode they have to remind you what happened before because it's possible either you didn't watch the previous episodes or it's been a long time since then.
anyone can write, even a machine, but do they think?
The target audience of openai.