Turning the Tables on AI | Hacker News Reader

Turning the Tables on AI

ia.net

111 pointszdw21 comments

I think this is very interesting.

As an expert, you can ask an intelligent layman to interrogate you about some idea you have, or some essay you've drafted. To answer their questions, you have to be clear, explicit, and avoid jargon. That in turn forces you to think about what you mean.

You can then ask your layman to play back to you what they think you said; they might play it back using a structure that is clearer than the one you started with. [Edit] So someone who doesn't know your subject-matter can still help improve both your phrasing and structure.

FWIW, I suspect you'd get better results from an intelligent (human) layman, than from a chatbot.

wrt. the examples: I didn't understand what I was seeing. Are those snippets of real ChatGPT exchanges? I think they were [sort of] promo material for iA Writer; which is not so much vapourware as an imaginative fiction, used to make a point. Is that right?

> wrt. the examples: I didn't understand what I was seeing.

guess they should have hired an expert to write the article in a way everyone could understand? :)

Integrating some sort of AI into the creative process seems like a way more useful approach than how we think of it today. You can bounce ideas off them, have them steelman opposing ideas, rip your ideas apart, or treat them as a muse.

Best part: it works today. No hopes and prayers for future AI needed!

The first suggestion, ask the AI to ask you continual questions to help you clarify your thinking, is a great technique. I have seen this type of conversation partner very beneficial in my own writing and planning.

In spring of 2023 OpenAI was introducing custom system messages and one of the examples was a Socratic teacher who teaches by asking you questions. I'd messed around with ChatGPT a bit but that was the big moment that i realized these things were really interesting.

Socratic questioning is quite amazing, I created my own prompting for this and found it to be invaluable in exploring my beliefs.

Sounds interesting. Do you mind sharing these prompts?

Money quote at the end

"Enthusiasts present AI as a magic wand that can solve humanity’s biggest problems. In the meantime, it uses an exponential amount of energy to make everything the same."

It is a magic wand for CEO's who are looking for more reasons to lay off more people

Same CEOs who hire only the best now seem to magically forget those standards when AI's involved.

I thought this article was going to be a pun on the domain it’s hosted on.

Isn’t it?

I really like the point about getting AI to ask you questions.

The focus in the AI tutor world is basically a chatbot to ask questions of. But if you're trying to learn something, it's really helpful to have targeted questions asked of you!

Bonus answer data for AI training.

The best way to turn the tables on AI is to take a hammer and smash the server that runs it.

I was hoping this was about how LLMs can’t read tables accurately, but alas

...Or just ignore AI and use your human creativity to write an amazing story. Something that is NOT a stale echo of another story. Something that adds to a global conversation/debate or examines a concept/premise a fresh new light, rather that parroting ideas that have already been expressed ad nauseam.

And if you can't think of anything new? Maybe the creative fields aren't for you. The world doesn't need more writers. There are much easier ways to earn a living.

I don't agree, imo being asked questions still draws creativity from yourself. It also help to clarify your thoughts. It's like pair programming or rubberducking. The goal isn't to wait until someone else tells you what to write.

But I agree that a lot of people are copy pasting from chatGPT until it works

You can use your human creativity to come up with an outline of a story, then have AI do first drafts of chapters according to your outline. It's tremendously faster to go back and rewrite the AI draft than it is to generate a first draft by hand and to be honest for most writers the quality will be better.

That doesn't mean you don't painstakingly labor over characters, story flow/pacing, events, meaning, etc. It just means you're never stuck with writer's block - though you might get stuck with storyteller's block, which AI can also provide suggestions to help push past.

> You can use your human creativity to come up with an outline of a story, then have AI do first drafts of chapters according to your outline. It's tremendously faster to go back and rewrite the AI draft than it is to generate a first draft by hand and to be honest for most writers the quality will be better.

It's also tremendously crappy and less creative. If all you want to do is an outline, just publish that instead of fattening it up with AI slop.

Also, your idea is great if you always want to be a terrible writer and develop your writing skills poorly, and just care about volume of output. IIRC, real writers say the writing part isn't actually the hard part, but for some reason that's what you want to automate. The hard (and creative) part is the thinking you have to do when you're figuring out what to write.

There are books I've read where I seriously wish the author just published an outline, with maybe a bit more exposition around world-building (yeah, they were sci-fi). And that was human written stuff, reading AI slop would an even bigger waste of time.

I've known literally dozens of published writers and I can tell you that the reason that pro writers say that putting the words down on paper is not the hard part is because they've trained themselves to mostly vomit on the page, then edit it to where it needs to be. Writers that try to write good prose out of the gate get blocked, almost always. It's a basic piece of tradecraft that people who write for a living all know.

The process is outline, trash draft (who gives a shit who does this) then refine until you can't bear to read your work anymore and neither you or anyone you share the work with has critical points that don't have very solid counter arguments. Most wannabe writers have notebooks of worldbuilding and story arcs but can't even get the trash draft done.

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