Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button

1. Concern about loss off creativity in creative exercises: this is a fair UX critique. Personally, I find that using ChatGPT as a rubber duck is extremely valuable, even for complex "softskill" challenges. I wish more tools were built towards this angle, instead of trying to just do the work with AI. I imagine an LLM auto-writing text like now, with subsequent UX highlighting points to converse and evolve the artifact.

2. Post-scarcity loss of meaning where quality used to be a proxy metric. eg if a professor of status took the time to write a good letter of recommendation, you were really worth it. This was always a flawed and biased system. Same for yearly reviews, and most promo processes. Hopefully society adapts by dropping the fluff in favor of hard data - a bulletpoint list from a professor with some mechanism to verify the number of recommendations made seems better than what we have today.

Indeed, and that's why you let the student write it for you [1].

And then nobody reads it, or if they read it, the ignore it anyway and only look at the student's grades, if that.

To be honest I don't understand recommendation letters. The whole concept looks completely backwards to me. Like I'm a young adept joining the guild of software engineers or something, but I need to get a recommendation from the School Master of OOP Patterns to get in, or something. Next you'll tell me a magick robot owl will fly in and take the letter to the Guild.

If LLMs can get rid of this absurd practice, I'll count that as an honest to god example of beneficial use of neural nets.

____________________

[1] This is mostly the case in post-graduate letters of recommendation. Basically, you'll ask someone for a letter of recommendation and they'll reply asking what they should put in the letter. Then you send them an "example" or "sketch" letter, or just say outright "mind if I write it for you?", depending on how well you know them. The person you ask is always a senior academic who has another ten irons in the fire and they will only feel gratitude that you took this bitter cup away from them.

I don't know if this is supposed to be kind of hush-hush, and it hasn't happened to me personally yet (some people will actually sit down and write a letter themselves, I guess as a matter of principle) but from what I understand it's really the done thing.

And I wonder how long it will take us to look back at "the button" with the same kind of wary attitude we have today about smoking (and that we're starting to have about social media).

So many things are easy and good for us in the short term, but terrible for us in the longer term. Will we get better at spotting such things earlier?

We use secondary/contextual indicators, which are historically proxies for "How much time, expense, and/or expertise was involved in preparing this document" to judge documents. It's not even that different than printing eliminating the quality of the scribe's work as a tell.

Maybe, ChatGPT is return of the personal secretary not just for the elite, but for the masses.

That's the real impact of the new publicly available LLMs: clients will now expect professionals in many fields to use AI for a lot of their work. Many of us now have to find creative ways to use AI, otherwise we're likely to be out-competed by those who do. We'll soon have to justify the times we don't use AI.

Sounds good. Content that nobody reads might as well be content that nobody writes.

At a certain point, of course, the perfect prompt will itself take quite some time to write. If you want your writing to actually contain specific content, AI might be less helpful, except as a way of making your writing sound more eloquent. But if you don't care about saying anything meaningful, as is all too often the case, you might as well let the AI do it for you.

One can hope.

If someone's going to read it thoughtfully, you still need to write it thoughtfully, and AI is at best a fancy Oblique Strategies tool.

If no-one will actually care what you write because writing it was always just a bullshit job, then it never needed to be thoughtful and AI can happily automate the menial task.

If AI can automate it, it was always bullshit.

The opposite could also be true. With AI generating a skeleton, more thought can be given to what you want to say instead of the individual words.

I just worry about the impacts on creativity around forming ideas.

Sometimes when working on a document or presentation, I’ll get partway through and realize “oh maybe I want to go a totally different direction with this”.

I feel like that will partly be lost, because the thinking pattern of changing directions like that depends on having thought through some of it already.

Will AI be able to do that? Maybe eventually, but we’re nowhere close right now with LLMs. I’m a bit worried about this increasing inequality between those who “still need to think creatively” and those who don’t need to anymore (and start to lose the ability). We’re living in interesting times!

I have to say I will be signing up for that one

Dude, if you make errors like that in your letters, letting AI write for you will probably be a good idea.