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

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

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

#21

Post by [deleted] »

jasonthorsness wrote: post #14
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

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by raincole »

The title (subtitle, to be precise) is almost completely unrelated to the content.

Title is about AI. Content is just rambling on how people dislike reading business reports.

If writing is thinking I think the author is having a trouble thinking coherently.

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

#24

Post by malfist »

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…

It is true at Amazon. Nobody is expected to come to the meeting having read the document. The first X minutes of the meeting is dedicated to reading the document in silence. Thus, everyone winds up reading the document. Or at least most, some multitask but they weren't going to pay attention anyway

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

#25

Post by anonzzzies »

People do not read, not even short things. Never did. Luckily I am old and senior enough, that when I receive a Teams invite to 'go over the email/doc together' to just say 'nope' and decline as I know they basically want me to read it to them.

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

#26

Post by Herring »

Idk, I'm more optimistic than the author.

I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes ~20 pages of rambling text by a professional coach // amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends and they all love the new style. Even the ones who hate the gym.

My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care.

Hubert Humphrey (VP US) was asked how long it would take him to prepare a 15 minute talk: "one week". Asked how long to prepare a two hour talk? "I am ready right now".

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

#27

Post by jart »

Putting aside the people who need LLMs as a prosthetic, the only writers who are asking AI to write lengthy prose for them are the ones who on that occasion didn't have anything important to say in the first place. Maybe they work a fake job where they're required to do ritualistic writing, similar to the medieval scribes who laboriously copied books by hand over and over again. Now, thanks to AI, they're liberated from having to toil through that lengthy process. So, yes, writing is thinking. It's also willpower. But if the purpose for it didn't matter in the first place, then nothing is actually lost if you stop doing it. You just won't get punished.

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

#28

Post by sakesun »

Just watched Veritasium's "How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY

Inventions created for convenience decades ago have now become health concerns. I wonder how AI might affect our intellectual well-being in the decades to come.

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

#29

Post by gavmor »

raincole wrote: post #23

The title (subtitle, to be precise) is almost completely unrelated to the content. Title is about AI. Content is just rambling on how people dislike reading business reports. If writing is thinking I think the author is having a trouble thinking coherently.

I was hoping he'd touch on how writing is "embodied" or "extended" cognition, ie how it allows for manipulation and reorganization of ideas in ways that are functionally similar to what occurs within the mind a la Clark and Chalmers' “Otto’s notebook” thought experiment (in which an Alzheimer's patient has written all of his directions down in a notebook to serve the function of his memory).

Or how the thoughts we have as we are writing shape our understanding, and so we come out with not only a written composition, but a new frame of mind; AI generated writing allows us to preserve our frame of mind—for better or worse!

There is something to be said for the ways in which coding, too, is an exercise in self-authoring, ie authoring-of-the-self.

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

#30

Post by Herring »

wlesieutre wrote: post #20
gleenn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sympathetic. It's like if code isn't color-coded and properly indented, I'm just not reading it.
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