The Human Is the Loop

So edit it?

> Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully.

Well said.

I found myself so strongly endorsing almost every remark and impression in this post - are we the same person?? AI truly is dual-use: it can lead to immense speed ups on 'research rabbit-holes' that used to take a lot of manual work and Google-fu, or it could also just waste a ton of time generating too much output to make meaningful use out of (I almost always now invoke a text expansion snippet like "What's the 2-paragraph-block TLDR of the previous response?").

It's always looming in the mind of an overachiever-type person such as myself that 'AI could search and synthesize better', and so it has a very seductive siren song for almost all tasks.

The current moment with AI does very much feel like the early days of atomic energy where people had all kinds of now-crazy-seeming use-cases for the atom, and this showed up again with at-home microwaves, as seen in that "Microwave Cooking for One" book from the 1980s (see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...).

I do think with new technologies it's important to try many different forms and applications of it before finding their true practical utility, and this is no different. Maybe we're collectively (at least within the HN crowd) finally feeling the "cool-down of the mania" and starting to shift to more realistic uses of AI (at least until there might be another big capabilities jump...)

But at the same time, I cannot deny that AI has also made me become a better person in other areas. I'd always had poor 'handiness' or 'around the house' type skills, and the number of things I've gotten comfortable doing because of AI assistance, like hanging art on the walls, taking on some basic at-home plumbing and fix-it tasks, trying new things in the kitchen with cooking and food prep and brewing coffee etc, is frankly much higher than pre-2022. And that's to say nothing of all the help it's provided getting more fit in the gym. Maybe my upbringing lacked these things that others never had an issue with, but I am grateful to this technology for helping 'level the playing field' in this regard. Just like I know how it's done the same for non-techie people who are now a little more well-versed in the matters that I'd been naturally more fluent in.

So, like most tech, we need to be mindful of our use, especially us HN-types that are drawn to information processing systems, optimization, efficiency, etc. It's really a double-edged sword, and I've never felt that more than lately. And this is doubly true for anyone with certain neurodiverse information habits (all the open tabs, 'research trails' with poor follow-up, etc). I often joke that I'll know we've reached AGI when my open browser tab count hovers below ~5!

I may be misreading, but I think the earlier post was about the LLM being used to edit (clean up) their writing.

It's quite different than just reading a lot of text from other authors and passively absorbing diction and style. Instead, it means getting detailed reinforcement signals in the context of your own active writing effort.

This can start an ironic reinforcement learning pattern where the writer gets tuned to write in the LLM's "corrected" form. Imagine a traditional professional writer, in a long-term partnership with a particular copy editor who gates their output.

I used to be an AI sceptic, but with newer model being released I come closer to the mid: It's a great tool that amplifies human output, but without human judgement in the loop it's a danger to IT systems.

I don't think human should only judge AI design decisions described by LLMs in English. Understanding the codebase is important to be able to judge further development. So reading code, correcting code, articulating on it is still an important skill imo.