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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

#251

Post by dr_pardee »

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.

You are likely not prompting correctly. https://www.deeplearning.ai/short-courses/chatgpt-prompt-eng...

GPT-4 Passed the Bar Exam, so I think there's something to it https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4389233

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

#252

Post by leroy-is-here »

raincole wrote: post #181
hammyhavoc wrote: post #25

> 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 sch…

Do people really hate writing? If so the comment sections of HN and Reddit, the timelines of Facebook and Twitter, the whole Medium... would be so empty.

People really struggle writing simple essays. It takes a lot of work externalizing words from your own context inside your mind so that the sentences can be understood by themselves. It’s one of the reasons we used to teach “word problems” in our mathematics classes alongside composition, but now we just want to compute arbitrary answers.

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

#253

Post by jiggawatts »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #210
jiggawatts wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These things have limits, definitely. In almost every use-case I've tried, I've bumped up against them.

The trick is to know what they can and can't do, and use them where they're useful enough.

Someone here on HN quipped that ChatGPT is "isn't intelligent" because it couldn't come up with a revolutionary new battery chemistry.

Like... what are you expecting? A god?

LLMs are useful when you can validate the output yourself. Similarly, they're useful when the output doesn't have to be precise but the inputs are English.

For example, they're awesome "filters" for human input as measured against human metrics. "Is the following text rude? Output YES or NO only?" is very useful and works well enough, right now.

They're also useful when you need to iterate to find something, or when your search parameters are incredibly vague but have a narrow Venn diagram intersection.

I've been using ChatGPT as a replacement for the /r/tipofmytongue sub-Reddit. It knows everything well enough to be able to interactively find what I'm looking for to an extent that is super-individual-human, and in some ways beyond what even a very large collection of humans can achieve.

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

#254

Post by usgroup »

I've made the point before that I don't even use a spell checker so there is a deep sense in which I agree with this, but it is tempered by the recognition that I'm hardly the sharpest tool in the box and I get great purchase from my doodles, scribbles and other "outsourced" mental facilities.

I think that for most of us, the mental outsourcing optimum which makes you most capable is probably not the one which maximally enhances and preserves the capacities you have.

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

#255

Post by lifeonlars »

musicale wrote: post #72
RealityVoid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, as if people 2000 years ago were more open to challenging ideas.

It's remarkable what some 200,000 people (maybe fewer?) in ancient Athens were apparently able to come up with.[1] They even did pretty well with computing with the Antikythera mechanism and its predecessors; though, like Babbage, they were limited by the manufacturing technology of the day. [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1165/ancient-greek-inve...

Not sure this is a representative sample of "people 2000 years ago".

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

#256

Post by lifeonlars »

futureshock wrote: post #186
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 feel like this is the bias of a very smart, highly educated, highly capable person. If you are already an excellent writer and coder, can take vast fields of knowledge and blossoming ideas and spit them out onto paper in skilled form with minimal anxiety, GPT probably does very little for you. Maybe you could see if you were missing something very obvious and average. I read for probably 8-12 hours a day. I write e…

But the only purpose of writing that paper is for you to practice doing research, thinking and writing. Most people who write deep, thought-provoking work started out doing assignments like that. What could possibly be the point of getting a computer program to do it for you?

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

#257

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

Observation suggests that people are switching to using calculators to add things for them with almost indecent haste. Most people hate math as much as they hate writing. Way more than admit it. Within a year the median column of numbers could be added up by a calculator.

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

#258

Post by nologic01 »

dsign wrote: post #242
nologic01 wrote: post #180

> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have not discovered them all. Ancient bards were learning…

The small silver lining is that there are arguably more people who have access to literature, and who like to read, write, and do math, because generally those things have become more accessible to the wider world. But when the going gets really tough, those people may try to band together and secede[^1]. One thing I have to add though, as somebody who loves to write, is that I couldn't do it without our modern digit…

Digitization is definitely enormously empowering in principle. You could indeed imagine that it might enable a sub-culture of super-literate people. But in practice after 50 years of tech hyperventilation the only nuance we've added to Phoenician script is... emoji.

Amazing things will come, but not as fast as we might like them. The digital space is gigantic but we are exploring it at a snail's pace. The reason is not very different from the barriers linked to writing and math: people need to train their brains to code and it doesn't come cheap or easy.

Imagine if 8 billion people would actually be able to code. Would there be room for "big tech"? The digital conversation might be very different.

Right now we are roughly (in digital age chronology) circa 3000 BC, the dawn of organized digital agriculture. A few digital priests have invented cuneiform and in cahoots with the prevailing power structures are using it to tax and oppress the digitally illiterate masses.

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

#259

Post by nickagliano »

It's more complicated than, "using AI more and more will cause us to forget how to write."

It's just a tool.

I like comparing it to something like quizlet (online flash cards), which can be a great study tool, but which people will also misuse and abuse. Instead of studying and taking the online quizzes, people will often just find the right quizlet which has all of the answers to the online quiz. People who are honest will actually learn the material, and the cheaters suffer.

I think people who misuse ChatGPT will become lazier, worse writers. But using the tool in an honest way will improve even an already talented writers work.

Just my 2 cents.

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

#260

Post by asimpletune »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #176
asimpletune wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think he had a bunch written teachings that were intended only for his students. Obviously they’re lost to time.

With some luck and intelligence maybe we will discover more about the past in the future [1]. [1] https://scrollprize.org

Yeah, I've been excited about this because we're only about a month away until the ink detection deadline.
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