Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 121 posts

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#11

Post by jasonthorsness »

"My entire career has been defined by the reality that people in business don’t really read."

The myth is that the culture at Amazon is contrary to that. Is that true?

I definitely feel like writing clarifies my own thoughts and helps me find inconsistencies or other problems with what I think I want to say. If everyone is letting the LLM do most of the work writing and reading, their thought process and eventual conclusions are definitely going to be strongly influenced by that LLM. A great justification for the alignment efforts I guess, or a great opportunity for to propagandists.

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#12

Post by kelseyfrog »

Writing is not thinking just as calculating is not "doing math".

We've invented the equivalent of a "calculator for words" and we're going through the growing pains of discovering that putting words together is a separate activity from thinking. We've never needed to conceptualize them as separate activities until now so we don't have the conceptual distinction and language to even describe them that way.

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#13

Post by gleenn »

karaterobot wrote: post #6

The title made me think this was going to be about the mental consequences of outsourcing writing to AI. In fact, the article is completely about people not reading documents. Corporate documents to be exact. His examples are from the 00s, so the problem has absolutely nothing to do with AI. Heck, I, too, have noticed that nobody reads anything: what does that have to do with AI? At least with AI, people could read a…

I am firmly a believer very few people read anything. They don't read long things as much as they don't even read short ones. One of the things I always thought was funny was having Product Managers see there were problems with UI, then I would get tickets to add text near the problems. It always crackme up because if users didn't even barely read the button they were clicking they why would they read a paragraph nearby.

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#14

Post by jasonthorsness »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #11

"My entire career has been defined by the reality that people in business don’t really read." The myth is that the culture at Amazon is contrary to that. Is that true? I definitely feel like writing clarifies my own thoughts and helps me find inconsistencies or other problems with what I think I want to say. If everyone is letting the LLM do most of the work writing and reading, their thought process and eventual con…

Ahah I didn't realize that this article was by Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft; I used to work in his organization (Windows) for many years. I'm definitely one of the those he rightly accused of not reading the long documents he would send (at least some of them) :P

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#19

Post by egypturnash »

steveBK123 wrote: post #15
deadbabe wrote: post #10

Thinking is thinking. There is no substitute.

Yes but having to put your thoughts down in writing often forces you to think.

Putting thoughts down in writing also helps you make room for new thoughts; once it's out there on the page/screen then you can stop filling up a chunk of your working memory with it and go on to ask yourself "so what comes next because of that".

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#20

Post by wlesieutre »

gleenn wrote: post #13
karaterobot wrote: post #6

The title made me think this was going to be about the mental consequences of outsourcing writing to AI. In fact, the article is completely about people not reading documents. Corporate documents to be exact. His examples are from the 00s, so the problem has absolutely nothing to do with AI. Heck, I, too, have noticed that nobody reads anything: what does that have to do with AI? At least with AI, people could read a…

I am firmly a believer very few people read anything. They don't read long things as much as they don't even read short ones. One of the things I always thought was funny was having Product Managers see there were problems with UI, then I would get tickets to add text near the problems. It always crackme up because if users didn't even barely read the button they were clicking they why would they read a paragraph nea…

In school they were really big on the 5-paragraph persuasive essay format. I guess because it teaches you to think through an argument and present it to someone.

In practice, I find that if I don't format something as a bulleted/numbered list, nobody is going to look at it.

Post reply on HN