Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 121 posts

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#31

Post by zahlman »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #5
johnnienaked wrote: post #3

Writing isn't necessarily thinking. For example you can have a spreadsheet of 20 000 words and use an algorithm to randomly pick a sequence of words. No one would call that thinking, even if such a process made intelligible sentences sometimes. "AI" is using an algorithm and statistics in the same way---it's just more accurate at making intelligible sentences than the example above. I wouldn't call either thinking, w…

That’s not at all the point the author is making. The point is people don’t read. Now we don’t even write. At least what USED to be written had to cost a human time, something relatively precious. Now we can churn out text at rates unprecedented and the original problem, no one reading, is left untouched. The author wonders what happens when the weird lossy gap in-between these processes gets worse. There’s lots of e…

I liked Tris' take on it: editing is thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#32

Post by evolve2k »

The sci-fi movie Brazil (nothing much to do with the country), is set in a beauracratic dystopic future and at the start of the movie a literal real world bug falls into “the machine that never makes mistakes”. The error plays out over the course of the movie having a somewhat (negative) butterfly effect.

I feel the movie well captures the tone of the current moment.

Worth a watch.

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#35

Post by AndrewKemendo »

The next few decades of humans grasping for existential meaning at the level of Camus, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, and being left empty because there’s nothing is going to be interesting.

We’re already seeing the regression to the mean, which is basically fanatical clinging to myths and historicism that favors whatever period or place favors the lifestyle they personally want.

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#36

Post by kaushikt »

Herring wrote: post #26

Idk, I'm more optimistic than the author. I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes ~20 pages of rambling text by a professional coach // amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends and they all love the new style. Even the ones who hate the gym. My experience is LLMs can write very very…

this. I am almost addicted to dropping long voice notes (pronounced rambling) and LLMs do such a great job at creating and managing these notes. I can then convert that format into anything.

although, I agree with the author since many emails and messages onlinkedin i get these days are just long post shits by AI. I am not reading them anymore but it's some other ai summarising ebcause no human talks or writes like basic ai prompting does. so so difficult to read that

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#37

Post by [deleted] »

evolve2k wrote: post #32

The sci-fi movie Brazil (nothing much to do with the country), is set in a beauracratic dystopic future and at the start of the movie a literal real world bug falls into “the machine that never makes mistakes”. The error plays out over the course of the movie having a somewhat (negative) butterfly effect. I feel the movie well captures the tone of the current moment. Worth a watch.

[deleted]

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#38

Post by RedShift1 »

anonzzzies wrote: post #25

People do not read, not even short things. Never did. Luckily I am old and senior enough, that when I receive a Teams invite to 'go over the email/doc together' to just say 'nope' and decline as I know they basically want me to read it to them.

Sometimes people ask me "how do you know how to do that?" and the only thing I did was read the manual...

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#39

Post by ramesh31 »

Herring wrote: post #26

Idk, I'm more optimistic than the author. I'm currently using a LLM to rewrite a fitness book. It takes ~20 pages of rambling text by a professional coach // amateur writer and turns it into a crisp clear 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc. I sent it out to friends and they all love the new style. Even the ones who hate the gym. My experience is LLMs can write very very…

>My experience is LLMs can write very very well; we just have to care.

My experience is that people who think this are really bad writers. That's fine, because most human writing is bad too. So if your goal is just to put more bad writing into the world for commercial reasons, then there's some utility in it for sure.

Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?

#40

Post by dexwiz »

evolve2k wrote: post #32

The sci-fi movie Brazil (nothing much to do with the country), is set in a beauracratic dystopic future and at the start of the movie a literal real world bug falls into “the machine that never makes mistakes”. The error plays out over the course of the movie having a somewhat (negative) butterfly effect. I feel the movie well captures the tone of the current moment. Worth a watch.

For anyone who wants to watch, there are a few endings in similar flavors to the Blade Runner endings.
Post reply on HN