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The Human Is the Loop

brentfitzgerald.com

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61–70 of 101 posts

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#61

Post by pinkmoonx »

kranner wrote: post #59
sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously…

[dead]

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#62

Post by ky-hy »

boesboes wrote: post #32
garrickvanburen wrote: post #6

Yes. This is consistent w/ my default position: "if LLMs are good at it, we probably don't need to do it."

100% Anything worth doing, is worth doing yourself. LLMs create nothing of real value imo. And all my colleagues that whole heartily agree, just to go 'but i use it ...', are not much different from smokers & day traders that think they are the exception.

if I had to write code by hand and take time to do it, I would be fired long time ago, and as a person with only 2 YoE I don't want to risk going on a job hunt currently. I already get weird looks from people when I say that I take time to review code or change some small parts of it by hand.

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#63

Post by cj »

sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

Gmail's AI is particularly guilty of robbing the writer of their style.

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#64

Post by sonink »

embedding-shape wrote: post #57
sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

> Strategic thought is the other thing I feel like LLMs can be very helpful to double-check a bunch of stuff here, and evaluate alternative-paths and so on, but the "direction" really has to come from you, then you can use the LLM to double-check and what not. But if you let the LLM set the "direction", then all bets are off, as they don't have a single care about anything in the world, so they'll just do whatever es…

"Direction" is what I mean by strategic thought - but even if the high level direction came from you - the tactical approach might fall prey to the same over confidence which destroys direction setting in the first place.

I use it very sparingly for stuff like this - and even when I do - I discount its outputs heavily and maybe just use it let me see some blind spots and sanity testing.

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#65

Post by sonink »

kranner wrote: post #59
sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously…

Not too sure - I never read that many books - and it wasnt an issue at all. I think writing more, without AI, is helping me get back to my pre-AI-stink self.

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#66

Post by budsniffer952 »

sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

[flagged]

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#67

Post by borski »

sonink wrote: post #65
kranner wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose. IMHO the fix is to read more books. Obviously…

Not too sure - I never read that many books - and it wasnt an issue at all. I think writing more, without AI, is helping me get back to my pre-AI-stink self.

Sure, but if you’re influenced by how AI writes, it stands to reason that you’d be influenced by a great author too, and that may help improve your writing.

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#68

Post by vaylian »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #66
sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

[flagged]

> If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great.

As a recipient of AI-enhanced texts I must say: AI is not good at making things clearer. Good communication requires that the sender makes the message as simple as possible. AI is anti-simple, because it likes to produce more words, not less.

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#69

Post by borski »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #66
sonink wrote: post #54

I am coming around to the view that for somethings it is better to not use AI at all. Writing and Strategic thought are those things for me. The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a litt…

[flagged]

> Prose? Don't care, I'm not writing literature, I'm delivering a message. If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great.

Writing well is not easy. PG has written many essays about this very topic.

LLMs do not write well.

> Strategic thinking? The LLM has more context than you. Sure, you know more about your company, but AI knows more about the rest.

This is a mistake, and untrue. The LLM has more general knowledge, yes. But it’s the specific knowledge (aka “context”) that makes all the difference. It’s the same reason management consultants are, by and large, useless; they aren’t dumb, but they lack context.

So no, the LLM doesn’t have more context than you. In fact, its context window is literally limited. You have decades of experience and knowledge and patterns you’ve matched, and the LLM has none of that.

Do not fool yourself into thinking it has more context than you. It doesn’t. It has more knowledge. Those are very different.

(Incidentally, the same is true of humans; the most knowledgeable ones are not always the ones making discoveries or changing the world. Often, it is specific context that matters more, as the application of a solution to a problem requires seeing the right problem. LLMs are a solution engine, but they have no metric for what is a “right problem”)

Re: The Human Is the Loop

#70

Post by borski »

vaylian wrote: post #68
budsniffer952 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> If AI helps that be more clear and faster, great. As a recipient of AI-enhanced texts I must say: AI is not good at making things clearer. Good communication requires that the sender makes the message as simple as possible. AI is anti-simple, because it likes to produce more words, not less.

Relevant essay: https://paulgraham.com/simply.html
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