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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#111

Post by gibbitz »

curl-up wrote: post #31

> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…

I think the point is that part of the value of a work of art to this point is the effort or lack of effort involved in its creation. Evidence of effort has traditionally been a sign of the quality of thought put into a work as a product of time spent in its creation. LLMs short circuit this instinct in evaluation making some think works generated by AI are better than they are while simultaneously making those who create work see it as devaluation of work (which is the demotivator here).

I'm curious why so any people see creators and intellectuals as competitive people trying to prove they're better than someone else. This isn't why people are driven to seek knowledge or create Art. I'm sure everyone has their reasons for this, but it feels like insecurity from the outside.

Looking at debates about AI and Art outside of IP often brings out a lot of misunderstandings about what makes good Art and why Art is a thing man has been compelled to make since the beginning of the species. It takes a lifetime to select techniques and thought patterns that define a unique and authentic voice. A lifetime of working hard on creating things adds up to that voice. When you start to believe that work is in vain because the audience doesn't know the difference it certainly doesn't make it feel rewarding to do.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#112

Post by [deleted] »

avaika wrote: post #110
don_neufeld wrote: post #3

Completely agree. From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive. I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer. Lest you wonder “what does this gu…

This reminds me how back in my school days I was not allowed to use the internet to prepare research on some random topics (e g. history essay). It was the late 90s when the internet started to spread. Anyway teachers forced us to use offline libraries only. Later in the university I was studying engineering. And we were forced to prepare all the technical drawings manually in the first year of study. Like literally…

[deleted]

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#113

Post by computerthings »

jebarker wrote: post #17

> nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. No LLM can ever express your unique human experience (or even speak from experience), so on that axis of competition you win by default. Regurgitating facts and the mean opinion on topics is no replacement for the thoughts of a unique human. The idea that you're competing with AI on some absolute scale of the quality of your thought…

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#114

Post by ryankrage77 »

> All of my original thoughts feel like early drafts of better, more complete thoughts that simply haven’t yet formed inside an LLM

I would like access to whatever LLM the author is using, because I cannot relate to this at all. Nearly all LLM output I've ever generated has been average, middle-of-the-road predictable slop. Maybe back in the GPT-3 days before all LLMs were RLHF'd to death, they could sometimes come up with novel (to me) ideas, but nowadays often I don't even bother actually sending the prompt I've written, because I have a rough idea of what the output is going to be, and that's enough to hop to the next idea.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#115

Post by ay »

Very strange. Either the author uses some magic AI, or I am holding it wrong. I used LLMs since a couple of years, as a nice tool.

Besides that:

I have tried using LLMs to create cartoon pictures. The first impression is “wow”; but after a bunch of pictures you see the evidently repetitive “style”.

Using LLMs to write poetry results is also quite cool at first, but after a few iterations you see the evidently repetitive “style”, which is bland and lacks depth and substance.

Using LLMs to render music is amazing at first, but after a while you can see the evidently repetitive style - for both rhymes and music.

Using NotebookLM to create podcasts at first feels amazing, about to open the gates of knowledge; but then you notice that the flow is very repetitive, and that the “hosts” don’t really show enough understanding to make it interesting. Interrupting them with questions somewhat dilutes this impression, though, so jury is out here.

Again, with generating the texts, they get a distant metallic taste that is hard to ignore after a while.

The search function is okay, but with a little bit of nudge one can influence the resulting answer by a lot, so I wary if blindly taking the “advice”, and always recheck it, and try to make two competing where I would influence LLM into taking the competing viewpoints and learn from both.

Using the AI to generate code - simple things are ok, but for non-trivial items it introduces pretty subtle bugs, which require me to ensure I understand every line. This bit is the most fun - the bug quest is actually entertaining, as it is often the same bugs humans would make.

So, I don’t see the same picture, but something close to the opposite of what the author sees.

Having an easy outlet to bounce the quick ideas off and a source of relatively unbiased feedback brought me back to the fun of writing; so literally it’s the opposite effect compared to the article author…

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#116

Post by abletonlive »

taylorallred wrote: post #4

Among the many ways that AI causes me existential angst, you've reminded me of another one. That is, the fact that AI pushes you towards the most average thoughts. It makes sense, given the technology. This scares me because creative thought happens at the very edge. When you get stuck on a problem, like you mentioned, you're on the cusp of something novel that will at the very least grow you as a person. The temptat…

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#117

Post by worldsayshi »

taylorallred wrote: post #4

Among the many ways that AI causes me existential angst, you've reminded me of another one. That is, the fact that AI pushes you towards the most average thoughts. It makes sense, given the technology. This scares me because creative thought happens at the very edge. When you get stuck on a problem, like you mentioned, you're on the cusp of something novel that will at the very least grow you as a person. The temptat…

I feel there's a glaring counter point to this. I have never felt more compelled to try out whatever coding idea that pops into my head. I can make Claude write a poc in seconds to make the idea more concrete. And I can write into a good enough tool in a few afternoons. Before this all those ideas would just never materialize.

I mean I get the existential angst though. There's a lot of uncertainty about where all this is heading. But, and this is really a tangent, I feel that the direction of it all is in the intersection between politics, technology and human nature. I feel like "we the people" leave walkover to powerful actors if we do not use these new powerful tools in service of the people. For one - to enable new ways to coordinate and organise.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#118

Post by Animats »

wcfrobert wrote: post #92
curl-up wrote: post #31

> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…

I think the article is getting at the fact that in a post-AGI world, human skill is a depreciating asset. This is terrifying because we exchange our physical and mental labor for money. Consider this: why would a company hire me if - with enough GPU and capital - they can copy-and-paste 1,000 of AI agents much smarter to do the work? With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are worthless. While I'm g…

> With AGI, Knowledge workers will be worth less until they are worthless.

"Knowledge workers" being in charge is a recent idea that is, perhaps, reaching end of life. Up until WWII or so, society had more smart people than it had roles for them. For most of history, being strong and healthy, with a good voice and a strong personality, counted for more than being smart. To a considerable extent, it still does.

In the 1950s, C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" became famous for pointing out that the smart people were on the way up.[1] They hadn't won yet; that was about two decades ahead. The triumph of the nerds took until the early 1990s.[2] The ultimate victory was, perhaps, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. That was the last major power run by goons. That's celebrated in The End of History and the Last Man (1992).[3] Everything was going to be run by technocrats and experts from now on.

But it didn't last. Government by goons is back. Don't need to elaborate on that.

The glut of smart people will continue to grow. Over half of Americans with college educations work in jobs that don't require a college education. AI will accelerate that process. It doesn't require AI superintelligence to return smart people to the rabble. Just AI somewhat above the human average.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

[2] https://archive.org/details/triumph_of_the_nerds

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#119

Post by johnisgood »

don_neufeld wrote: post #3

Completely agree. From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive. I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer. Lest you wonder “what does this gu…

You can learn a lot from LLMs though, same with, say, Wikipedia. You need curiosity. You need the desire to learn. If you do not have it, then of course you will get nowhere, LLMs or no LLMs.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#120

Post by flysand7 »

zdragnar wrote: post #46
don_neufeld wrote: post #3

Completely agree. From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive. I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer. Lest you wonder “what does this gu…

Anyone who has learned a second language can tell you that you aren't proficient just by memorizing vocabulary and grammar. Having a conversation and forming sentences on the fly just feels different- either as a different skill or using a different part of the brain. I also don't think the nature of LLMs being a negative crutch is new knowledge per se; when I was in school, calculus class required a graphing calcula…

Another case in point is that memorizing vocabularies and grammar, although could seem like an efficient way to learn a language, is incredibly unrewarding. I've been learning japanese from scratch, using only real speech to absorb new words, without using dictionaries and anything else much. The first feeling of reward came immediately when I learned that "arigatou" means thanks (although I terribly misheard how the word sounded, but hey, at least I heard it). Then after 6 month, when I could catch and understand some simple phrases. After 6-7 years I can understand about 80% of any given speech, which is still far, but I gotta say it was a good experience.

With LLM's giving you ready-made answers I feel like it's the same. It's not as rewarding because you haven't obtained the answer yourself. Although it did feel rewarding when I was interrogating an LLM about how CSRF works and it said I asked a great question when I asked whether it only applies to forms because it seems like fetch has a different kind of browser protection.

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