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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

#301

Post by nbzso »

So basically "fake it till you make it", "move fast and break things", "build it, and they will come" gave us the ultimate UX achievement: Offloading responsibility to the outside entity to be comfortably dumb.

What a dream, what progress for humanity. But hey, the money will be great, the opportunities will be immense. Rome is burning. Really. Burning.

Where are AI churches? Someone is not investing in the future of mankind.

I love the therm "hallucination", marketing geniuses at their best. Calling algorithmic junk which is a clear error by this "term" creates a positive image and enables more incorrectness from a technology which must serve humans.

So buckle up, the world of marketing and speculation will come to the ground with a big economic bang. Like it or not.

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

#302

Post by EugeneOZ »

bayindirh wrote: post #64
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Plato's warning is true, actually. Since I started to write, I remember less and less about the things I have written down, because the brain replaces them with a pointer. However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain. I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking…

I remember MUCH, much better things that I once had written, not just read.

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

#303

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

jiggawatts wrote: post #199
hammyhavoc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure, different methodology, but it's not something we haven't already been doing for yonks.…

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…

>> You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds.

And how well does it do them? Correct me if I'm wrong, but for the time being all you know about its ability to replace that other MS tool is a "yes, yes it can" by a MS dev? Don't you want to withhold judgement until after you've spent some time actually using ChatGPT to do OCR?

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

#304

Post by didericis »

noobermin wrote: post #261
futureshock wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and untalented will only grow.

It will rob people going through the motions and cheating from actually learning. The people who most benefit from education have never been the people just going through the motions and have at least some intrinsic motivation to actually learn.

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

#306

Post by derrida »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

It's true. People can memorize 100'000s of words of text and this ability was common place among learned people. The pali canon is an example. I found myself remembering huge amounts, having just read a text, with no intentional effort to recall after a month in a forest monastery and in the 4 months I was there but afterwards when exposed to the internet and sensory stuff again found my ability to recall texts had gone.

"What is the cause of people forgetting texts they had learned before?" I can't remember the precise answer but that was one such line in the texts.

Today if you say that you sound kinda crazy.`

but like socrates there's still a few orders of wandering mendicant homeless-like orders out there (the theravada forest tradition being an example)

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

#307

Post by ethbr0 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #288
ethbr0 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word. See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs now)

I largely agree about the administrative difficulty although I‘d emphasise the written word over the printed word in this context. Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand instead of using printers was incredibly resource expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.

It'd be fascinating to see a conversion to person-hours to copy one book in medieval times.

And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.

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

#308

Post by haint_ »

barrkel wrote: post #35
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.

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version). This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.…

Yes, I mostly use ChatGPT for ffmpeg commands. Just give it the description along with the full file path and it will output the correct command 99% of the time. Bard can also do that (not as well though) but the format of the answer is so much worse, the resulting command is not put in a code block for example.

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

#309

Post by nocoiner »

voidhorse wrote: post #271

I don't typically agree with pg, but I think he's right here. I was thinking about this topic yesterday. I've already seen people start using using these tools to help them craft messages (email, text) to family members and friends . Do we really inhabit a world in which the average person is that creatively bankrupt and lazy that we'll start mediating our intimate social relationships through these tools? It's prett…

My question is though, how many of these people who are supposedly offloading the mental energy of writing onto ChatGPT are good writers in the first place? And are they really delegating that much substantive thought?

I think the pg comment presupposes that most people currently know how to write, and I just don’t think that’s the case, at all. At least not to the extent that doing less writing (or using an AI) will dramatically reshape their modes of thought (much less the trajectory of human thought as a whole).

Also, I’m not saying that written communication is the be-all, end-all of human intellect - I think I’m a fairly good writer (used to be better, though) but a fairly poor verbal communicator. I know lots of people who are great verbal communicators but not-great not-terrible writers. Some people are great at both, and some people aren’t good at either. But it’s all part of the mix of original human thought.

I guess when we get to the stage that a 21st century Orwell is using AI to write his books, then I’ll worry that we’re stunting human potential, but until then it just doesn’t seem to me like much original thought it getting displaced here. Yet, anyway.

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

#310

Post by efficax »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #93
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #50

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have inven…

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his…

plato is specifically thinking of the social impact but he's also not actually arguing against writing. after all, he's making his argument in writing. he's trying to push the reader to look into their souls for the truths that he thinks are already there. "remembrance" here is specific, so is "memory". It doesn't mean, to remember facts and things that happened, but to reach back into ones mind beyond sensation and to "remember" the eternal forms.
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