As people rely more on AI they experience cognitive atrophy. This is measurable in IQ loss, and other symptoms we might otherwise associate with early onset dementia or Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
I fear there is some truth in it.
I'm becoming AI-blind
31–40 of 533 posts
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#32Something that bothers me about AI generated content more broadly is how unmemorable it is. I don't mean as in bad . I mean literally, as in hard to remember or recall. Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs. The same is true of AI generated te…
That's the cost of an AI work that is derived from the outputs of others. There's no real edge to it. Same as with the writing. The stuff that you'd latch onto (and thus remember) is simply not there, precisely because those image or word choices would be just outside its latent probability space. But because they're well inside it, your mind sees nothing novel to register. This is also why I think human output will…
> There's no real edge to it.
Yes, as if it is in some weird hidden dimensional sense completely uniform.
ETA: suddenly reminded of the Bateson quote about information being “the difference that makes a difference”.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#33> A technical requirements document that describes a rather simple concept in a very verbose way.
This is not AI specific. I have come across many humans who describe a simple concept in a very complex and verbose manner.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#34Something that bothers me about AI generated content more broadly is how unmemorable it is. I don't mean as in bad . I mean literally, as in hard to remember or recall. Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs. The same is true of AI generated te…
I wonder what you mean by ephemerality here, since those images are definitely sloptastic as hell. Compare to works in similar style, like Dorothea Lange[1] or Gerome’s orientalist pictures[2].
Reason why those images are flat and boring is that they are just statistical guesses making a composition averaging whatever the model has been trained with. They would be technically brilliant (if made in oil), but superficial and meaningless, same as so much Sunday painting is.
Same goes with language. Nobody is trying to communicate anything with you, so it just words after another. You can create meaning out of it if you want of course, we homo sapiens -apes excel at that, but what’s the point? Language Jones on YT has pretty good video on this[3].
[1] https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2024_01/12/12/124216388/d...
[2] https://uploads4.wikiart.org/00339/images/jean-leon-gerome/t...
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#35I can relate. I noticed this exact phenomenon when encountering NotebookLM-generated diagrams recently. Even if I know there's some intelligent thought behind one, it's like some slop detection circuit-breaker is tripped.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#36[dead]
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#37I also find it impossible to parse half the comments that Claude tries to sneak into our pull requests. I’ve never had an issue understanding code comments written by humans like this before. The structure of the information is like a waterfall that leaves me unable to swim to the surface and grab the air of comprehension. So, “Please write a one-liner comment manually to replace these 5 lines of AI generated comment…
It is getting to the point where you are better off getting an LLM to describe the PR changes in your preferred style (make it very short, make a table describing API changes, list renames in a table, etc, etc) than go to the one created by the reviewer. If only the reviewer could embed his prompts (like "make clear X" is happening) or his manual edits.
But to be honest I doubt most people who use AI for PR descriptions even bother changing anything.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#38Ironically, the “summary of the situation” linked within this article seems clearly written with AI.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#39"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. " I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good. And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who r…
I partially think the difference is “can you tell something is the output of Claude without any real prompting”. People can absolutely use LLMs to generate text that I wouldn’t recognize, but people who don’t care and are producing slop with the major models set to default settings leave these incredibly obvious signatures behind
Although you're referring to prompts given the Claude rather than the people attempting to recognize, it occurs to me that most of the discussion I've seen around people recognizing AI seems cover contexts where the reader is actively suspicious about whether content generated to begin with. Rather than a binary "is this text AI generated or not", I wonder if it would be harder for people to do a Coke/Pepsi style challenge where they're given two pieces of text where it's not guaranteed to be exactly one LLM-generated and one human-written, but they could both be from an AI or both be from a human.
Going further, I'm curious about whether people are mostly good at the case where they suspect most or all of the content from given "author" has the same amount of AI usage/prompting in generating it rather than the adversarial case where someone might usually use AI extensively and then try to slip by purely human written text (or vice-versa). I don't have a good sense of whether this is a threat model that actually matters, since maybe the heuristic of weeding out sources that are mostly AI-generated is enough for people who prefer to avoid that type of content, but I do think that changes the definition of what it means to be "good at recognizing AI" in a meaningful way. It seems plausible that disagreements about how easy it is to recognize AI content might be coming from two people assuming a different framing of the question that results in a different answer without realizing that's what they've done.
Re: I'm becoming AI-blind
#40There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…
> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output
It works just fine for me.