Earlier quoted context omitted.
> deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
I think you have my argument backwards
Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
131–140 of 512 posts
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#132Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck.
That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I care because it’s not personal, it’s not informed by lived experience, etc. It has no meaning. AI “novels” are just facsimiles of other people’s writings assembled in a way that appears new, but ultimately it’s just an approximation of a person writing a book. Their’s no author intent or context of any kind to consider. It removes core pillars of experiencing literature. I don’t want a mathematical approximation of…
while I understand this argument - I think it consistently falls down when compared to the types of content that are generally purchased and consumed. I'd argue that most folks get plenty of value from the content itself, entirely separate from the intent, context, or even existence of the author. I don't care about the motivations of the director to enjoy an action movie. I don't care about the life history of the a…
This is the entire issue though. We’ve boiled creation down to “consumable content” like we are all in a boardroom talking market strategy. I am reading a book to enrich my life. Yes I enjoy popcorn entertainment and “low brow“ stuff, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane, but what does it say about us if we’re willing to just sit around “consuming” LLM content which is just facsimiles of actual creation by real people? What is the point when we have more “content to consume” than ever before? It’s just saturating us with impersonal stuff lazily achieved by scraping the real thing and prompting until it outputs something acceptable. Why is the person even making it? The answer unfortunately is almost always “a quick buck,” so I’m not sold.
What is the point of reading a middling fantasy book that a person didn’t even create when there are already likely countless fantasy books in existence/being written right now?
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#134Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#135When I use a calculator, I atleast try to get with in a few digits of what I think the anwser is in my head. Mostly since when I was younger I had a very passionate teacher about how much slower everyone is now because of calculators on simple math. I just apply the same thing with LLMs, just try and think of how and what I would have said and see how close I was. Only thing I change is I don't trust the anwsers and…
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#136Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#137> What are we automating? Human work or human agency? Human tasks or human thinking? I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield. What's the solu…
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#138The article takes a position that assumes hallucinations do not occur, and then posits from that stance the question as to whether we rely on AI too much. We should be taking a step back before even asking that question and focusing on the part where AI does invent answers whole-cloth.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
I think you have my argument backwards
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#140I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise t…
"Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?" Many of the LLM maximalists I know don't have the skills or knowledge to excel in technology and need to use LLMs to do their job. It's seen as a cheat code to get work done. As an example, A person I went to high sc…