Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

> History students using AI should be much more productive than they were in my day! I wonder whether essays are far longer now than they used to be.

We should not aim for endless productivity. In this world of surplus information, "click-bait" titles, SEO content, etc., we should aim to produce less. This includes learning: learning should be done as a meditative process to understand the human condition, not simply to output the most comprehensive essay.

While the end result might be interesting, the most worrisome part about this is the mentality: the general attitude of becoming too machine-like moves us away from quiet solitude that is so integral to humanity.

View on HN

Amen. Since Chat GPT took off I've continued to believe it's biggest contribution to society will be that it greatly improves the ability of individuals to generate massive amounts of noise which they can add to the sea of unnavigable garbage the internet has already become. The power to produce more in less time is a net negative that ultimately lends itself to entropy, it is not a positive thing at all unless you completely ignore social and holistic effects in favor of a machiavellian hyper-individualist perspective which claims that any means and any consequence is acceptable to satisfy the isolated, local needs of single individuals at any given point in time.

there will be a layering effect where the "winds" howl and suffocate on one "low consciousness" level, while at another effective teams use it for high-value targets; etc. Someone once told me that "the Internet is so big, that there are certainly groups of tens of thousands of individuals somewhere, organized and doing some activity that you have never heard of".. so yes to the dark futures interpretation and also yes to constructive purposes and yes to predatory militaristic purposes, and more..

ps- people self-obsessed and off balance will dive in and try to communicate with "everyone" .. enabling new personal hell realms

You can always ask GPT to give terse results to greatly reduce the noise.

Excellent idea! Then you can produce ten times as many essays with one-tenth the length!

Yes and let's call the generated output what is: bullshit.

Now add https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law

Google is in such a hard place. I unwillingly came across a SEO conference while I was vacationing and every single SEO practitioner is using AI tools to fill the web with articles and low quality rehashes while using Google's inability to punish them while not punishing Forbes and the like (while also publishes low quality articles at times). I honestly don't know how Google is going to solve this one and in another decade how will things look like.

Do things that don't scale. Manually curate the good content somehow and find a way to profit from it. If curating legit content can somehow be more profitable than spamming low-quality content, then everyone will start curating and sharing the good content.

It is a valid thought (which I suspect was done with a wink) that is worth following. If students are more productive (in terms of output volume) how are teachers going to cope with that? Do we need to delegate grading of AI output to AIs? Will this contribute to the heating of the planet or does it lead to a self improving and aware AI? And another concern: Writing is sorting thoughts and putting them in order. Writing is thinking. If students delegate writing will they learn to think?

> We should not aim for endless productivity

There is no such thing as endless productivity. We should always aim for higher productivity, because that means getting more for less. What we should not do is to reward solely based on productivity.

I disagree. We should aim for less. We already have too much.

In pure math, the challenge was always to express your ideas as concisely as possible. The problem was that sometimes it takes five or ten pages to explain things properly!

Writing is just very ineffective in general. We could have conveyed important ideas using far fewer words than what is considered as standard in academia.

Producing too much content to be absorbed and processed is detrimental to society. In the past, it was reasonably easy to filter out duplicate and redundant information. With AI, this is less and less so. Information overload is a real thing. People will have less and less in common, as their opinions and world views are shaped differently by external stimuli.

"they knew so much, and understood so little"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com