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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

#201

Post by makeitdouble »

notahacker wrote: post #182
makeitdouble wrote: post #174

I have the feeling this is missing on what people want ChatGPT to do for them. They're still communicating their exact thoughts to the prompt, and will adjust to get exactly something matching their intent. To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent:…

> To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent: "I quit". But they're not expressing other very specific intents like going out of their way to assure the team that the new opportunity was unmissable or pointedly thanking some people but not others or b…

I think that's really the crux of it.

We currently require people to express the full extent of their intentions. Not writing that you feel so sorry for your colleagues your are leaving in the dust is a faux pas. ChatGPT fills that gap of generating random acceptable feelings, where you might either not care, or do not want to express your actual ones.

I'd argue adding people to thank or sneaky attacks to the ones you hate wouldn't add much to the prompt when requesting the letter to the bot.

The joke of course will be that progressively, I'd expect we'll have people sending the bot a prompt, have it converted into verbiage, and the receiving end tl;dr it in the same bot to get basically the initial prompt.

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

#202

Post by AverageDude »

barrkel wrote: post #35
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.

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version). This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.…

For me, they are more miss than hit. I was amazed in the initial days but I have bounced back to searching from google and reading stackoverflow. It’s not just about finding solution for your problem, it’s also looking at what other options are there and comparing them mentally is a really good exercise. You learn a lot by that way. The comments and not accepted solution are also invaluable.

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

#203

Post by rodelrod »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Most of the comments here are assigning this as Plato's opinion.

I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not that are being expressed.

In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic Greek philosophy.

Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought there was a value in the writing.

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

#204

Post by INGELRII »

I completely agree with PG.

Writing is not just communication with others, or writing down information for later.

Writing is not just writing down something that already exists in the mind.

Writing is a part of thinking process. You talk to yourself few seconds or minutes later. It's back-and-forth. Marshaling thoughts and ideas, reading them back, reflecting, to be processed then writing them down again.

Writing is process of improving thoughts, generating new thoughts and ideas, making thoughts clearer for yourself.

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

#205

Post by dumpsterdiver »

largepeepee wrote: post #100
marginalia_nu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

It's also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but that doesn't automatically make anyone wise. Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance. Very much like early AI models.

> also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall

I'm genuinely curious, why do you think this is relevant? How would you differentiate "specific types of memory recall" scientifically?

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

#206

Post by criddell »

bombolo wrote: post #76
tspike wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here was my first try: Prompt: Using profanity and in the style of Allen Ginsberg, write an introductory paragraph in narrative style about why you love writing. ChatGPT: Holy shit, I fucking love this mad dance of letters, this wild waltz of words that paint the goddamn cosmos on a blank page! The rhapsodic rhythm, the sonorous symphony of syntax -- it's like jazz on paper, like Kerouac and Ginsberg on a bender in t…

as most gpt writing, it's too long and has no substance

I sent the same prompt but asked it to be brief:

> I love writing. It's a release for the madness in my head. The letters form sentences that transport you to another world or make you feel less alone. Writing can be tough, but it's worth it when you hold the finished piece in your hands.

That’s… okay.

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

#207

Post by janandonly »

When early books began to include this new thing called an "index" scholars decried that people could now simply look-up the fact they were looking for without reading and understanding the context[1].

Whether the context here is the whole book or the whole chapter, I'm not sure off. But again, there is noting new under the sun[2].

[1] https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543

[2] https://www.jw.org/finder?wtlocale=E&pub=Rbi8&srctype=wol&bi...

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

#210

Post by hammyhavoc »

jiggawatts wrote: post #199
hammyhavoc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure, different methodology, but it's not something we haven't already been doing for yonks.…

Neat? Neat!? Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet. Either way, whether you are talking about the…

And yet, my default go-to example with me being personally unimpressed with ChatGPT 3 and 4 is getting it to output a valid NGINX configuration without hallucinating, despite feeding it the required documentation, the original Apache .htaccess file, and telling it what URL rewrites would be required. This should not be a difficult thing, but it constantly hallucinates things that aren't there because it's an LLM, and that's what LLMs do, they predict the next word.

Whilst to the untrained eye, sure, the NGINX config looked great, but it didn't function, and it didn't include the URL rewrites as instructed, hallucinated a bunch of rewrites that didn't exist and would serve no purpose, and despite refining the prompts over many days, and consulting with self-proclaimed "prompt engineers", it still didn't give the expected output.

It's neat. Reliable? Not in my experiences for my needs, but I am genuinely glad you're making it work for what you need, that's definitely cool, provided it doesn't hallucinate in an unnoticed capacity. It's a lot of trust to place in an LLM.

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