Pointlessness is a feeling within. People are just rationalizing it conveniently by blaming LLMs (they used to blame other things in the past).
Same with doom anxiety.
Literally just look up some good therapist prompts for chatgpt
Thoughts on thinking
261–270 of 459 posts
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
>evidently repetitive “style”. Use LORAs, write better prompts. I've done a lot of diffusion and especially in 2025 it's not difficult to get out something quite good. Repetitive style is funny, because that's what human artists do for the most part. I'm a furry, I look at a lot of art and individual styles are a well established fact.
Yes, most human artists have a repetitive style. In fact that's often how you recongize who made a piece of art.
Yeah but the difference is that style is sometimes actually interesting and not completely banal.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#263> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…
> So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. People realize this at various points in their life, and some not at all. In terms the author might accept, the metaphor of the stoic archer comes to mind. Focusing on the action, not the targ…
> Focusing on the action, not the target is what relieves one of the disappointment of outcome.
This is true, but the tough part is it's not the whole story.
First, obviously along some dimensions of life, targets matter. If we need to grow food to eat, the pleasant feeling of working in the garden isn't going to be sufficient; if we need to strengthen a dike to prevent the town from being inundated, the sensation of swinging a hammer isn't going to cut it.
> However, if they go in with the intention of showing up authentically - something people tend to appreciate, and something they have full control over - the changes of them succeeding increase dramatically.
That is true, but it's also possible for a person to feel like they are being authentic (and even to be correct about that), yet still seem off-putting to others, perhaps for reasons they aren't aware of. Even if they're not focused on the "target" of making a friend, there are intermediate targets like "interact with other people in a way that they (not just I) enjoy", and if those targets aren't met, eventually a reckoning must come.
So the second point is that evaluating the "action" is an internal perspective that can become out of sync with reality even in cases where the result isn't so critical. We may not want to be focused on "end goals" but we need some amount of focus on external calibrators of some sort, to keep us from descending into solipcism.
Then the third thing is that (maybe because of the first two), people have a tendency to extend their results-oriented mindset more and more, and even if an individual resists this, they have to deal with the fact that everyone around them may be doing it. So even if you take the view that writing is a human activity that should be valued for the gusto and AI writing is missing the point, if everyone around you stops writing and starts using AI instead, a lot of important stuff in the penumbra of the activity can be weakened. Like it becomes harder to put together a writing club/workshop etc., maybe even to buy books. And in particular it can become harder to straddle the line between target and action in terms of employment and generally meeting your material needs. There are plenty of people who have artistic skill and have a job where they get to use it to some extent (e.g., graphic design), and even though it may have some distasteful commercial aspects, they can still get some of that "action satisfaction" from their job. But if AI eats all the graphic design jobs, now you have to spend all your work hours doing something that gives you none of that satisfaction, and cram all the satisfying artistic action into your free time.
The same is true for technical tasks. A lot of the dismay over the use of AI for programming arises because people used to be able to get paid for doing things that also gave them a sense of satisfaction for engaging in a sort of problem-solving task that they enjoyed as an action. Now it's harder to do that, but everyone still has to eat, so they have to give up some of the satisfaction they used to get because they can't get paid for it anymore.
I agree that, for an individual, shifting the mindset to action can be helpful. But we as individuals live in the world, and the more an individual's mindset becomes out of step with that of his society, the harder it becomes to live in accordance with that mindset. So I think we also need to apply pressure to create a societal mindset that values and supports the kinds of individual mindsets we want people to have.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#264Although I think there's some truth to the overall gist here, I don't really agree with the author's point that AI can do so many of these things better. I seriously doubt that an AI would write a blog post as good as this, and I entirely doubt that it could write a blog post better than the best human writers could. For me the depressing part is not so much that AI can do everything better, but that AI is so much better at producing low-quality output that it's becoming increasingly difficult to locate anything better than that baseline in the morass of slop.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is knowledge that gets automated, rather than reasoning. I was thinking of the first solar civilization, which lives totally in space. Near a star, but not in a planet, and no gravitational pull anywhere. They build tubes 10 km long, a shot board is put at one end, and the players at the other end. They shoot darts at the board, and each shot takes 5 hours to reach the target. That's their national sport. Problem…
Oh turns out ChatGPT generates exactly the level of banality that one would expect. https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297... I don't want to read this story. I probably want to read one that a human author laboured over.
O3s story is not amazing but it sure is orders of magnitude more interesting than your example:
https://chatgpt.com/share/68282eb2-e53c-8000-853f-9a03eee128...
I don't think it's possible to generate an acceptable story without reasoning.
That is not to say that I disagree with you. I would prefer to read human authors even if the AI was great at writing stories, because there's something alluring about getting a glimpse into a world that somebody else created in their head.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh turns out ChatGPT generates exactly the level of banality that one would expect. https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/6827fcdd3ec88191ab6a2f3297... I don't want to read this story. I probably want to read one that a human author laboured over.
It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Of course they are going to get better. But that is not the point - it is that in the chat room the human and LLM spark ideas off each other. Humans come with their own unique life experience and large context, LLMs come with their broad knowledge and skills.
This is basically a contemporary reframing of the core purpose of Renaissance magic. I suppose aspiring to be a 21st century John Dee from talking to some powerful chatbot of the future, rather than angels or elemental beings, does sound a bit exciting, but it is ultimately mysticism all the same.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#267I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…
It is knowledge that gets automated, rather than reasoning. I was thinking of the first solar civilization, which lives totally in space. Near a star, but not in a planet, and no gravitational pull anywhere. They build tubes 10 km long, a shot board is put at one end, and the players at the other end. They shoot darts at the board, and each shot takes 5 hours to reach the target. That's their national sport. Problem…
There is a huge focus on training the LLMs to reason, that ability will slowly (or not that slowly depending on your timeframe!) but surely improve in the AI models given the gargantuan amount of money and talent being thrown at the problem. To what level we'll have to wait and see.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#268Early on I wondered if things like this might happen. But for me what has actually happened is almost the opposite, I seem to be experiencing more of a "tree of thoughts" with the ability to now perform rapid experimentation down a given branch, disposing branches that don't bare fruit. I feel more liberated to explore creative thoughts than ever. I spend less time on the toil needed both bootstrap my thought process…
> disposing branches that don’t bear fruit Disposing branches that the LLM convinces you won’t bear fruit. The Next Big Thing doesn’t exist yet. At least not in any LLM models. If someone thinks of the NBT, asks LLM about it, and LLM’s model says “impossible”, this could squander innovation.
Indeed I was playing with a local model and thought I might work on a difficult project I've been putting off which is a new programming language. As I described the task, the model attempted to convince me this was a foolish endeavour that I wasn't equipped to do -- so naturally I included documentation from my most recent PL project as a counterpoint, then suggested starting from there. Llama responded (ironically) by claiming I was attempting copyright infringement.
Which is to say, in the long and short of it, an LLM is completely useless for anything so ambitious as to be intellectually challenging, because the median user has no use for such cases. If I were to pay a subscription fee for something more cutting edge, I would not only be giving up the copyright on the project but also any and all trade secrets, which would end up feeding the next version of GPT or Claude or what have you.
At least while I'm unemployed and underinsured, I'm not in the business of giving away my remaining talents to multinational billion dollar corporations (and paying for the privilege). Instead I've signed up to be a volunteer developer for a non-profit.
My consolation prize against AGI optimists and Singularity doomerists is the film "Slumdog Millionaire." Our individual experiences feel worthless until the opportunities present themselves where they become invaluable. The exponential space of creative problem solving ensures that (some) winning combinations will always come out of left-field.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#269I think it’s a trade off between depth and breadth. Thinking is hard and painful. But the insights achieved through deep thinking IMHO is worth because of the mental models that we develop. Not just how it compares now with an LLM generated content.
No doubt LLMs are excellent at researching, collating, structuring and summarizing information. Infact I think o3 Deep Research can probably save a weeks worth of survey time.
But in my experience a lot of thinking is still required to do something meaningful with it.
Re: Thoughts on thinking
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.
Go with 99.9%. But not 100%. Someone imagined space and time could be a deformed fabric. That was new. In minor and major ways, new ideas are found or emerge from searches for solutions to problems from science to art. Or exploration of things in new combinations or from a previously untapped viewpoint. Most people are not looking hard for anything beyond what they know. So not likely to find anything new. But many p…
Not really new it came from observations or imagination of observed things.