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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

#211

Post by shagie »

embedding-shape wrote: post #71
nidnogg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guilty as charged. In my mind, when I'm insecure about a response or if I don't have enough expertise in the topic at hand I end up running it through an LLM. Lately I've been really trying harder to keep my original ideas as much as possible. I'm seeing a bit of an improvement, but still early to tell

"running it through an LLM" doesn't mean "Give LLM my text -> Copy-paste the output of the LLM" does it? Checking against an LLM then using your own voice feels completely fine, just another type of validation before you share something, but if you actually let the LLM rewrite what you say, then I feel like that's beyond "running it through an LLM", it's basically letting the LLM write your text for you instead of ju…

The decline of writing is something that's been going on for a long time. Well written and grammatically correct emails are something that's been on the down turn. Consider how often people send emails in all lower case, lacking punctuation, or even without any sentence structure.

The "you need to write in a more professional business oriented way" is something that a lot of people are having difficulty with. Yes, this needs to be addressed earlier in someone's education more forcefully - but the SMSification of long form text started a while ago.

With that said, the "Ok, you need to write long form with correct grammar when sending an email that a director or VP is CC'ed on". It used to be Grammarly as the "install this and have it fix up your grammar and tone" ( https://web.archive.org/web/20191104093353/https://www.gramm... GPT-1 timeframe there). However, LLMs of today seem to be more accessible than Grammarly but it largely does the same thing - fix up and refine tone.

What I don't see from back then is people decrying Grammarly saying that it's making everything sound the same.

I'm also not sure if I would prefer the pre-fixup emails to what is produced by an LLM unless sending coworkers to remedial writing classes is something that is acceptable.

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

#212

Post by shimman »

jaredsohn wrote: post #145
shimman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people tend to suffer from AI psychosis, and I don't think it's a thing you'd want to admit publicly that you don't interact with any humans and prefer the company of machines (let us also ignore that such people wouldn't be in public to begin with). I can't image such people are living meaningful lives in any capacity. They're up there with consumers that think the only purpose in life is to cheerlead for a co…

The GP said more with LLMs than people - not no interactions at all with people and not preferring machines to people. I don't think it is that hard to spend more time talking with LLMs than people if you work in tech and I don't think that takes away from one's life meaningfulness.

Yes, this is called alienation of the work place and it has been discussed since the 1800s. Maybe tech workers will realize that their employers are literal enemies of humanity rather than their friends.

Employers want to mechanize humans and they'll force it even if it makes everyone miserable for their entire, short, lives.

Amazon is a good example of this.

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

#213

Post by yw3410 »

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…

It's odd to me that you live in a place where it's hard to find a theatre. Living in a cosmopolitan city there's so many theatres with anything from professional shows to amateur dramatics all at very reasonable price points.

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

#214

Post by giancarlostoro »

rimliu wrote: post #102
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…

did you mean "grammar nazi"? /s

Typo funnily enough.

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

#215

Post by giancarlostoro »

nonameiguess wrote: post #161
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.

I would intentionally tell myself how to correctly spell the words, but that is fair.

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

#216

Post by Izkata »

nusl wrote: post #40
misterflibble wrote: post #2

Subtly? I beg to differ. My team leader only communicates to me using his LLM and so his "thoughts" are not his own!

https://not-an-llm.bearblog.dev/meat-based-llm-proxies/

> > The experience is strange; you aren't able to grasp any common human aspects because there are none. You can't reason with the human, because the human isn't doing the reasoning. You can't appeal to it, because the LLM behind it is in direct support of its own and the proxy's opinions and whims.

I've sometimes wondered if the chat context is why some people think LLMs are intelligent, it being divorced from their usual experiences, and they need something like this to feel the cognitive dissonance before they can notice LLM shortcomings.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

MengerSponge wrote: post #177
beej71 wrote: post #139

LLMs have felt to me like they excel in one particular skill (being able to make connections across vast amounts of knowledge) and are basically average, otherwise. If I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results. I used Claude a lot for planning my current fun project. Good rubber du…

It's just Gell-Mann amnesia.

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by [deleted] »

simplyluke wrote: post #202
beej71 wrote: post #139

LLMs have felt to me like they excel in one particular skill (being able to make connections across vast amounts of knowledge) and are basically average, otherwise. If I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results. I used Claude a lot for planning my current fun project. Good rubber du…

> I'm below average at something (painting, say) the results astound me. But if I'm above average (programming, writing (I like to think)), I'm generally underwhelmed by the results. Industrial scale dunning kruger/gell man amnesia. We're ~5 years in to the meme of "wow, every white collar profession other than MINE is doomed. But yeah, mine requires really specific domain knowledge, taste, and problem solving, so I'…

[deleted]

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

#219

Post by simplyluke »

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…

Fashion seems like the right analogy. I think about how many sentences I speak today that would have been incompressible to me ~15 years ago and not even due to recent events/technology, but just because our slang/humor has evolved during that time.

The flip side is the same thing was true then, and we aren't making a lot of jokes about the narwhal baconing at midnight these days.

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

#220

Post by shagie »

watwut wrote: post #166
serhart wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

One of the more impressive Taskmaster (British humor gameshow) tasks was the memorization one. The contestants were given the task to recite a non-standard deck of cards in order after 5 minutes of looking at them.

https://youtu.be/aSQnWQUyekk

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