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AI may be making us think and write more alike

dornsife.usc.edu

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Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#161

Post by nonameiguess »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #65

English is not my first language, but when I started using Firefox with the built-in spell correction, I firmly believe my ability to spell words went drastically up. My grammar is stiff iffy, like I'm pretty sure I do comma splices everywhere, but at least most people can understand what I say now compared to when I was 13 and on the internet. If there was a "gramma nazi" teenie tiny LLM with a total focus on Englis…

I'm not going to say with 100% confidence that spellcheck never teaches anyone anything, but you have to beware of basic post hoc ergo propter hoc here. Virtually everyone's spelling improves between age 13 and adulthood.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#162

Post by azan_ »

hirako2000 wrote: post #133
davebren wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance... Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future? I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if m…

I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives. Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70…

> Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.

I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#163

Post by altruios »

shimman wrote: post #135
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.

Gemma4 is apache2 licensed.

I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'.

Open source is the only way forward, I agree.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#164

Post by Jerrrrrrrry »

mpalmer wrote: post #86
sobiolite wrote: post #56

Human communication and reasoning is the end result of billions of years of evolution. I'd be very surprised if LLMs can fundamentally alter it in a few years. When considering phenomenon like these, I think people seriously underestimate what I'd call the "fashion effect". When a new technology, medium or aesthetic appears, it can have a surprisingly rapid influence on behaviour and discourse. The human social brain…

Think of all the things that took hundreds/thousands/millions of years to develop and mature, which humans have managed to destroy in relatively short order. Every 50 years we cycle out an entirely new batch of thinking humans. What cognitive legacy is it exactly that you think is going to be self-preserving?

Plato said the same thing.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#165

Post by azan_ »

danielbln wrote: post #25
rdevilla wrote: post #7

This state of affairs presages the advent of a second dark age - one that will forever eclipse the era of radical openness & transparency that once served the software community for decades. Tips, tricks, life hacks and other expert techniques will once again be jealously guarded from the prying eyes of the LLM whok would steal their competitive advantage & replicate it at scale, until any possible information asymme…

There were no "dark ages", that's the same common wisdom blunder like "in the middle ages everybody was dressed in drab grey clothing, ate gruel and walked through mountains of poop everywhere". It was a time of transition away from the slave powered empire to decentralized kingdoms and ultimately the Europe of today. It was by no means a time of standstill.

Yes, Europe did not have dark ages, it only had period of population decline, of less emissions, less building, less inventions, less records and severed trade networks.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#166

Post by watwut »

serhart wrote: post #127
Brendinooo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you just trying to be a bit more measured by saying he wasn't so much "opposing" as "articulating pros and cons"? Or are you trying to say that things like "this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves" or "You would imagine that [written speeches] had intelligen…

I'm not who you replied to, but no, no, I don't think that's an "opposition" to writing in the sense that it's making us stupid or replacing oral traditions. From my limited understanding of history and Greek philosophy, Socrates valued dialogue, a "back and forth" for understanding. Basically a scientific method of probing to understand something or someone. This needs to exist to be fully sure you understand someth…

Socrates did not favored "scientific method" nor anything close to it. And took issue with writing itself as it reduces power of the memory.

And to be fair, we did lost the "technology" of memorization. We are not capable to create easy to remember texts, because we are not trying to.

Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike

#167

Post by rubslopes »

shimman wrote: post #135
TeMPOraL wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.

> Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are.

Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...

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