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When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

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Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#21

Post by Foobar8568 »

jmillikin wrote: post #10
armchairhacker wrote: post #8

How much is ChatGPT replacing human writing? It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal do…

ChatGPT can't replace writing intended to convey information, but that's only a small fraction of the writing that's getting created. There's a whole industry where people are given prompts like "five paragraphs about the history of spaghetti" and get paid $0.01 per word, then that text gets put into an Italy-themed travel blog full of ads. You and I wouldn't notice if that entire industry was replaced by ChatGPT bec…

I don't remember what I search yesterday, but the whole first Google page result was useless websites like that, endup using site :-/

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#22

Post by lordnacho »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

I'm surprised about copilot. I find every day it saves me time by "nexting" whatever I'm doing. Whenever it's right about what I wanted to write, I save a bit of time.

My go-to example is if conditions. When I start with the first case, it almost always figures out the rest of the cases correctly.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#23

Post by weinzierl »

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver.

A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#24

Post by arvinsim »

lordnacho wrote: post #22
rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

I'm surprised about copilot. I find every day it saves me time by "nexting" whatever I'm doing. Whenever it's right about what I wanted to write, I save a bit of time. My go-to example is if conditions. When I start with the first case, it almost always figures out the rest of the cases correctly.

I thought Github Copilot was useless until I found out that I have to wait for a few seconds for Copilot to display the autosuggested code.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#25

Post by hammyhavoc »

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it

I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love. Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs.

There's writing and writing. If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high school essay or a competing product description for what's essentially the same product? An LLM will probably suffice. Original and novel? Human beings all the way.

LLMs highlight that a lot of "knowledge work" is intrinsically bullshit, i.e., a high school essay doesn't actually assess somebody's understanding of a topic, just their ability to hit specific keywords and points, hence even essay mills can churn out an "original" essay for a kid if they're too xyz to do it themselves.

Whilst I don't care for LLMs, I do support a huge shakeup of the existing educational assessment paradigm as it is self-evidently not fit for purpose, IMO.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#26

Post by martin-adams »

I just had an interview candidate come up with questions to ask us about the company.

It sounded formulaic and when I queried it, they said they used ChatGPT.

I’m not disappointed, but I’m now wondering how much thinking was left to AI than being genuinely inquisitive.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#27

Post by hammyhavoc »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it, but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly wrong, but they herald it as amazing.

The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving databases here for the foreseeable—still writing things by hand for the foreseeable, and loving every moment.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#28

Post by Broken_Hippo »

andsoitis wrote: post #12

The risk isn’t so much losing the ability to think (I think that is exaggeration), but rather that interacting with it is changing how we think, or, indeed, what we think.

* but rather that interacting with it is changing how we think, or, indeed, what we think*

That's simply the world moving forward. You might assume that a house is a smoky place before folks invented the chimney. Horses were important before mechanical transportation got off the ground. Belief in humors has dwindled since germ theory proved to be successful. Reading and non-religious texts being easily available introduced ideas folks might not have had on their own. The camera caused folks to reconsider what art is and allowed for impressionism, abstract art, and more.

Tech and advancement changes the way we think and what we think, and it shouldn't be surprising.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#29

Post by kqr »

weinzierl wrote: post #23

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver. A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

I don't know about other people, but it helps my thinking process to write things in stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, etc. also. It forces me to combat edge cases that I didn't think about until I had to spell them out. Not always, of course, but perhaps often enough that it's worth it to know how to.

Even formulaic messages and emails can be useful, because when what I want to write doesn't plug in neatly into the formula that sometimes means something.

----

As a very concrete, though small, example: I have found that almost always when I use the word "empower" in any of its shapes I'm making a mistake (either taking a lazy shortcut in writing, or an actual cognitive mistake), yet I only notice it as I'm putting the symbols for it down.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#30

Post by hammyhavoc »

zmmmmm wrote: post #4

Interestingly enough, you can reverse this statement: "when you gain the ability to write, you gain the ability to think" - and in part gain some insight into how LLMs seem to suddenly have "emergent" behaviour to perform quite impressive feats of logic.

When you turn the handle on a mechanical computer and get an output, has the computer gained the ability to understand maths or think? No.

When you give the LLM an input and you get an output, has it gained the ability to understand or think? No.

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