PEOPLE ARE NO LONGER THINKING
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If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
41–50 of 121 posts
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#42Writing has always been my way of thinking things through. Sometimes I use AI to help with writing, and it does save effort. But over time, I’ve noticed that many of the ideas I should’ve taken the time to untangle myself just get skipped. The words are there, but it feels like I’ve missed the chance to really have a conversation with myself.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#43Lots of confusion about what Steven is saying here. I'm pretty sure his point is: A) People don’t actually read deeply in corporate and professional contexts, even pre-AI, and B) AI compounds the issue because it both creates vast quantities of content and is increasingly being relied upon to summarize that content, So: the implication is that a loop of low quality reading and writing is compounded. Basically: If writing is thinking, and people rarely read carefully even without AI, then the widespread adoption of AI, both as writer + summarizer may very well push orgs into cycles of shallow understanding and misinformation at large.
Personally: All my best business has been done in front of a whiteboard.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#44Idk, 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…
Might I ask what LLM you use for it to do all of that, including the visuals, so neatly?
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but having to put your thoughts down in writing often forces you to think.
Putting thoughts down in writing also helps you make room for new thoughts; once it's out there on the page/screen then you can stop filling up a chunk of your working memory with it and go on to ask yourself "so what comes next because of that".
Tangentially related to the Zeigarnik effect.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#46Just watched Veritasium's "How One Company Secretly Poisoned The Planet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC2eSujzrUY Inventions created for convenience decades ago have now become health concerns. I wonder how AI might affect our intellectual well-being in the decades to come.
It's already affecting students knowledge. Why bother with understanding something if you can ask chatgpt to do the work?
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#47The title made me think this was going to be about the mental consequences of outsourcing writing to AI. In fact, the article is completely about people not reading documents. Corporate documents to be exact. His examples are from the 00s, so the problem has absolutely nothing to do with AI. Heck, I, too, have noticed that nobody reads anything: what does that have to do with AI? At least with AI, people could read a…
Completely wild counterpoint, now that our docs are available to the AI bot, people are interacting with them more because when they ask the bot can reply, explain and then say "docs are available here" do the point i'm actually investing even more of my time in writing them.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#48Then nothing is being learned by AI (yet due to LLM being prefabbed but not dynamic) or human.
I dont use LLMs at all for writing. Mainly for checking stuff and the most boilerplate of code.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#49Idk, 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.
As with visual art, AI is replacing humans when it comes to creating filler and background material.
I haven’t seen many examples of anything in either visual or prose arts coming out of an AI that I’ve liked, and the ones I have seen seem like they took a human doing a lot of prompting to the point that they are essentially human made art using the AI as a renderer. (Which is fine. I’m just saying the AI didn’t make it autonomously.)
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#50Idk, 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…
Might I ask what LLM you use for it to do all of that, including the visuals, so neatly?
Gemini pro. The flow chart, color-coding, tables etc are just latex. The illustrations are picked off the web. I suspect I might have to hire a professional photographer eventually.