On the other side of that token, the average language abilities of the average American office worker are pretty low so I’m assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb.
I agree with your point though. And to answer your last question, unfortunately I think the answer is “yes”.
On the other side of that token, the average language abilities of the average American office worker are pretty low so I’m assuming they view this as an enhanced AutoCorrect and they appreciate it because it makes them look less dumb.
why?
This problem can be solved without text prediction by building a personal knowledge base with hyperlinking[0] and backlinking[1] for discovery, and transclusion[2] for automating writing the same bland things. How I org in 2023 by Nick Anderson[3] goes over a great workflow for this. The advantage of this is that all of the words that you share are actually words that you wrote, instead of sharing words that Google suggested you share.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion [3] https://cmdln.org/2023/03/25/how-i-org-in-2023/
Anyway, I like and use the feature daily at work. So do lots and lots of other people.
If the suggestion doesn't match what you were already planning on saying, you just ignore it.
The human desire to be original and authentic is always going to be stronger.
(It's much less effort to ignore it and keep typing your original thought, than it is to think about it, compare with what you were going to say, decide its version is better, and then accept it.)
1) there is a sort order to them. And we don't know how the 'recommendations' work. What is a recommendation? Why is Google recommending something over something else?
2) it bogs down creativity. You end up not thinking and accepting the suggestion as 'good' enough.
"When can I expect to get $workproduct?"
"Here's when I can commit to getting you $workproduct"
"What's the estimated date for $milestone?"
"Here's the project plan for $initiative"
"I can't make this meeting, can you be sure to record it?"
I welcome any tool that can predict what I want to type and does it for me. I'm not sure if it's my imagination or not but Outlook and Teams seem to have gotten better in this regard. I'll take more of that.
This is why I stopped using copilot autocomplete in my IDE. Once you see a suggestion, you can’t make your brain un-see it.
Authenticity didn't start to become a thing people cared about until about the early 1990s, and it didn't blow up and take over the mainstream culture until the 2000s and 2010s.
Prior to the 1990s, there was a lot of interest in professionalism. People spoke and wrote in overly formal, jargony ways that they perceived as being a marker for competence in some specialized professional domain. Being too honest/authentic would have been seen as unsophisticated and lower class.
Just pointing out that what people strive to emulate can change over time. Once LLM writing becomes commonplace, it will probably become trendy to write in the exact opposite way that an LLM does!
In your lifetime, but…
Another common theme in the philosophy of both Dostoevsky and Descartes is the idea of authenticity. Dostoevsky believed that people must live authentically, in accordance with their true selves, and that this is essential for their happiness and well-being. Descartes, on the other hand, argued that the path to knowledge and certainty begins with the rejection of all previous beliefs and the adoption of a completely new and authentic perspective.¹
And of course, the U.S. counterculture movement of the 1960s was deeply preoccupied with authenticity:
You note three themes underlying the American hippie experience: authenticity, individualism and community. Why did these concepts stand out, and what did they mean in the context of the hippie/counterculture movement? / W.R.: Although hippies often disagreed about beliefs and practices, they shared a desire to be authentic. Members of the counterculture condemned mainstream society for being conformist, rule-driven and uptight. Authenticity meant “doing your own thing.” Because freaks distrusted both society and government, individual decisions were applauded as the most authentic.²
¹ https://vocal.media/geeks/freedom-authenticity-and-the-mind
² https://www.washington.edu/news/2015/08/17/uw-historian-will...
Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance
Think of it like spellcheck : the vast majority of the time it produces desired results, but if you really want to type bjPvc9fQ, you certainly can.
I’ll accept the risk of blandness, if it means that written communication finally becomes “easy” for me to participate in.
I really look forward to using GPT to help me throw together RFCs, documentation, announcement letters, daily standup write ups and other artifacts like that that prevent me from getting actual work done.
I think and hope the pendulum will swing back eventually, but my guess is that it’s still got some way to go before that.
I personally don't find them useful for quick / short / informal communication like email, or at least not yet.
This isn't to say a human element doesn't have a ton to offer! Just to say that we aren't necessarily engineering a bland world of pablum, either.
E.g. try asking an LLM to name a real, non-famous person. The internet and it's training corpus is full of regular people, but you won't have much luck - they're statistically too uncommon to remember.
Source? A MS exec said that creative and precise are GPT4 but balanced is a not (or not 100%): https://twitter.com/MParakhin/status/1693579775590224097
So, I don't agree that there's insufficient data for it to remember a random person. This was obviously a conscious decision, probably in response to situations like this one last spring: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-ai-made-up-sexual-ha...
Like any other technological advancement, we're freeing ourselves from the burden of wasting mental energy manually doing those commonplace unoriginal tasks which can be easily automated, so there's more bandwidth left for human beings to focus specifically on the things which can't be
I'm much more open to using transformers as a better auto-correct, where it's one word at a time and uses the first letter as a filter. Especially on a tiny phone keyboard on the go.