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ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

biblioracle.substack.com

181–190 of 363 posts

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#181

Bullshit. This speaks less to the reality of the situation and more to the author's biases/myopia. Remember when Craigslist was just a quirky little website? Cheerleaders at the time dismissed the notion it threatened anything of value, then it basically killed the newspaper industry, which in turn bricked boots-on-the-ground journalism. Anyone feel like claiming nothing of value was lost there? We're talking about a…

The article is only and specifically about english writing classes.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#182

I do not see the fact that writing out one's thoughts as prose is one of the best and one of the only methods of comprehensively assessing any complex concept. What are the other methods that are not derivatives of "writing your thoughts down?" There are none I can think of right now. Compex anything left as "thoughts" and/or only verbalized is too easy to gloss over critical points that are easily focused upon when…

Exactly. We learn to speak our mother tongue without instruction, but need to learn to write. And what is actually happening is training in putting thoughts out in a linear fashion, and debugging them. That's been the core of the curriculum for about 2500 years.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading quality for price has been happening everywhere for long enough that it is easy to see how unfortunately it will now play out in the arts as well. I mean, not that long ago all clothes you wore were custom made by a tailor, all the music you listened to was played live by musicians, all stories were brought to life in front of you by theatre actors: now all of those while still available are significantly mor…

> now all of those while still available are significantly more expensive and niche than the mechanized (production or reproduction) equivalents. No, they cost exactly as much as they always had. Before machines, people didn't have wardrobes full of tailor-made clothes. Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.

> Each person had, give or take one, exactly as many tailor-made clothes as we have today.

Many, perhaps most, people don't have any tailor made clothes because they can't afford a tailor. Which has indeed always been the case. But before machines, people who couldn't afford a tailor had no other option for clothes except homemade. Now, with machines, they do.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#184

One of the problems that I have with the "AI might replace some menial jobs, but people should aspire to bigger and better things" argument is that a lot of menial jobs are training for those bigger and better things. "Sure, ChatGPT can write some basic code, but it can't come up with creative solutions like I can." Yeah, that's true. But how did I get to the point of being able to make creative solutions? Years of w…

Thats the same issue with dall-e, stable diffusion, or any of these, and the ML world seems to think its a win and artists don't deserve to have jobs if they can't compete with or become users of those models.

If you can't get paid to produce art as a journeyman that supports your basic needs you won't make it to being a master artist except in your free time, maybe, and you won't have the same work references for work on projects during your development. It will be somewhat like in the writing world, where many or most of the major writers are independently wealthy because nobody else can afford to take the time that writing requires off of real work that feeds and houses them.

Imagine replacing all the engineers in training with ML and wondering why there are no engineers later. Thats where we're headed.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not use "AI" to mean "machines."

Certainly not. Indeed, all AIs are machines, but not all machines are AI. The kitchen faucet that preceeded the dish washer as the primary tool used to wash dishes is a machine, but has no intelligence. The dish washer expanded upon the concept of the kitchen faucet by adding artificial intelligence to it.

By that logic a sprinkler system is “artificial intelligence” when compared to a garden hose. That’s not what the term means.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It exists to hide the fact that companies took a page out of Google's book and forewent customer service altogether.

This is more befuddling - they are replacing one automated system (button driven) with a worse automated system (voice driven). No one wins unless you still have a rotary phone.

A SaaS that sells voice-driven customer support wins.

A manager with misaligned incentives that reduced call center costs by 50% and got promoted also wins.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#187
post #52

I'm less worried about stuff like ChatGPT killing things off, but more about just making everything noticeably a bit worse. To take an analogy: bad voice recognition software abounds everywhere, not because it is better than what it replaced in terms of UX, but because it works just enough and allows massive cost-savings on hiring people to do customer service jobs. A world where most marketing copy is written by med…

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Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not. Indeed, all AIs are machines, but not all machines are AI. The kitchen faucet that preceeded the dish washer as the primary tool used to wash dishes is a machine, but has no intelligence. The dish washer expanded upon the concept of the kitchen faucet by adding artificial intelligence to it.

By that logic a sprinkler system is “artificial intelligence” when compared to a garden hose. That’s not what the term means.

That's exactly what artificial intelligence means...

There is a secondary definition of AI that says basically an AI is anything that we haven't yet figured out how to do. Once we figure out how to do it, it ceases to be AI.

Indeed, terms can and do have multiple meanings, but I'm not sure that secondary definition fits the topic of discussion.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#189
I think people both give ChatGPT too much credit and too little credit at the same time.

In my day to day life, I can’t think of a single thing that ChatGPT does better than a search engine and I can better judge the trustworthiness of the sources.

On the other hand, it does a great job writing working Python code based on plain language requirements. It does at least as well as a junior dev for run of the mill scripting.

No most development is not reversing a binary tree while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

Re: ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

#190

It’s gonna kill the internet as a place to find useful information. Google is already almost unusable for researching any topic that’s even adjacent to anything that can be monetized. Widespread, good-enough, AI-generated, SEO’d “articles” will push it over the edge.

At the rate people are using ChatGPT, there won't really be a search engine to do SEO if ChatGPT and competition keeps getting better. If chatbots become popular, the ad space would go from search engine to product placement in chatbots replies.

ChatGPT prompt: Devise an economic policy that would lead to the elimination of the advertising industry. Include a list of wealthy persons and companies who would benefit from it so that I may solicit bribes... err, "political donations" from them to support my 2024 presidential campaign.
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