I agree. The AI witch hunting has made people abandoned em-dashes. It also made me abandoned listing. At this point it will make us abandoned any structural writing in a few years.
AI may be making us think and write more alike
221–230 of 271 posts
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#222Sure, the written word helped us to think and write more alike. The the Gutenberg press, radio and moving pictures, and then the internet. Modernity is an ognoing acti of cultural genocide that swallows everybody up and blends all human culture together into an undifferentiated grey goo.
Several years ago I visited Flores Island, which is part of the Indonesian archipelago and the place where Archeologists discovered Hobbit man. The Island is only 150 km long but it's inhabitants speak 5 distinct languages and 80-something dialects.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The test I run is "Can it simplify a concept I know in a matter of sentences/words, better than I can?" on a subject area that requires a lot of nuance. And to my disappointment, the LLMs never come close. They dump paragraphs upon paragraphs. I actually want to see the LLMs surprise me. But they disappoint me for what Im specifically looking for.
Hm I gave the prompt: > Summarize a technique for type erasure as is done in C++. Assume that your audience is familiar with all of C++'s features, but not with the technique of type erasure. The briefer the summary, the better, but don't omit any essential pieces or use vague language. ChatGPT Plus generated a lot of text and code. Then I said: > Now please summarize using only a few sentences. and it replied: > Typ…
Is it pretty good, though? :) I wouldn't let that go out the door. Needs a *lot* of TLC.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#224LLMs 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'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.
I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard sell to the person struggling when there's an easy button available.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#225[deleted]
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#226Human 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…
Young singers brought up listening to autotuned vocals can unknowingly learn and emulate the sonic signature of the tuning algorithm (and the telltale lilt when it's used as an effect, but the subtle tuning case is more surprising).
If you read too much sloppy LLM prose, it's going to influence how you write and structure your own.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more. If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.
But I considered that when I said "Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally."
You can have a great LLM model with vast coding knowledge running on your computer right now, for free. It won't be the best one nor the fastest one, but still a very good one.
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's hard to say if he's doing marketing because that's his job or if he's really swallowed the whole pill
Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company? Do they not teach critical thinking anymore in schools, did it go away with phonics too? Why would you ever ignore the MASSIVE conflict of interest here, it's just really foolish but it's endemic not just in tech journalism or journalism in general wher…
> Is it really hard to figure out that the owner of a company, who personally stands to make 100s of billions, would be doing marketing when talking about said company
The question isn't about what action he's taking, it's about what motivates him under the surface. Obviously what he is doing is marketing. What I'm curious about is whether he truly believes his own marketing or if he is just doing it because its his job
Re: AI may be making us think and write more alike
#229LLMs 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'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably. I think the value we're losing is where people are bad at things, which is often where new ideas/approaches come from, but this is a macro metric, so it's a hard…
> I'd argue that they're above average for the population, and below average for experts. Can they draw as well as an expert/professional illustrator? Probably not. Can they draw better than almost anyone who isn't a expert/professional illustrator? Probably.
That's pretty much the definition of "average" (as most commonly used, to refer to "mean" rather than median or much less commonly mode), isn't it?