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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

#431

Post by dboreham »

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.

I think we went through this with calculators in the 1970s.

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

#432

Post by web3-is-a-scam »

My experience with ChatGPT is using it as an "editor". I write down a rough draft of what I want, give it to GPT - tell it to act as an editor, and give me suggestions using certain tones, contexts, etc...

I have difficulty expressing tact so it's helped me in various ways doing things like: writing code review comments about extremely flawed code without being accusatory or confrontational, or communicating poor performance in a written review without sounding like it's a personal attack.

Of course I always proof read and even change certain things that it generates and put my own "twist" on it, but I always ensure it conveys what I'm trying to convey in the tone I'm trying to present. All things considered, I'm probably a better writer because of it.

ChatGPT has been such a wonderful tool for me, it's improved my life in so many ways - but it's just a tool. People that are going to write poorly using ChatGPT were always going to write poorly. It's like saying that using a chainsaw is going to make people worse at cutting down trees.

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

#433

Post by passion__desire »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #406
jjk166 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing I've seen from an LLM thus far would be winning any awards or get recommended by a critic. What paragraph have you written that won awards or was recommended by a critic? I have none to my name. These are tools whose goal is not to produce something superior to what any human could ever write, it is useful merely to improve upon what a typical person would write.

That's not the topic at hand, the greater implication is that people are saying LLMs are going to replace writers and writing as a whole because they are apparently as good as humans and apparently also more creative.

Stephen King writes about 6 pages a day or about 2000 words. Let's say that takes about 4-6 hours. Now imagine spending that much time with ChatGPT and guide it towards whatever goal you have in mind. It took me just 2 minutes to craft the prompt and ChatGPT did the rest. You do the math. Humans use other sense modalities and base their writing inspired from those experiences. If and when future models incorporate those modalities, we will see true "creativity" on full display.

e.g. "Whipped by the wind, raindrops tapped unevenly at the window pane. As long as she remained silent, the old man looked into her eyes, saying nothing. Time marked its irregular pulse in her ears." - by Haruki Murakami.

How do you expect a model to write this imagery if it hadn't experienced it?

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

#434

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dsign wrote: post #352
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> So we must fight to death to convince the world they are inferior. That only makes sense if you assume they are superior. In which case, there isn't really anything to discuss because you've obviously already made up your mind and you will take anything anyone says as some desperate attempt to twist the truth for the sake of survival. Which is what many people do on this kind of subject and that's why no more deba…

> That only makes sense if you assume they are superior. In which case, there isn't really anything to discuss because you've obviously already made up your mind and you will take anything anyone says as some desperate attempt to twist the truth for the sake of survival. :-) I haven't decided anything of the sort. Alas, there is nothing divinely given in me. I'm made of the same matter than you and those computers, a…

The question is why would LLMs be able to think? Cars don't think, houses don't think, crock pots don't think. Those are all made of the same matter as us, who think, but that is not enough to assume something thinks. Animals think, humans think, but LLMs are not animals, and not human animals, so why would they think?

You don't have to be worried about the coming AI apocalypse to wonder about that. Personally, I just want to know how things work, and saying that something "thinks" when we don't know how everything else "thinks" in the first place is not satisfying my curiosity.

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

#435

Post by admax88qqq »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #316
donkeyd wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way. The generation after me is hardly able to res…

> They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. I think you meant hoard incredible wealth? There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity co…

What makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?

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

#436

Post by lukeschlather »

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…

Nginx/Apache config is not an easy task. I would call this an incredibly hard problem to solve. I certainly never trust that I've done the config correctly until I've tested it carefully. The way this eventually works is you tell the AI "I want Nginx config that has these properties" and the AI generates config and tests it against Nginx until it has the requisite config and it's tested.

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

#437

Post by britzkopf »

Tainnor wrote: post #430
simonw wrote: post #426

I'm a big fan of writing as a crucial skill for thinking. But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this will actually play out the way people think. Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a pretty big obstacle to getting started. Now, thanks to software…

> Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit. It might just be me, but I find it weird that one would consider the act of actually playing music not to be precisely the fun bit.

Some might even say that an analysis of the compositions by those who took up music writing after the advent of Garageband etc. proves the harm of such tools.

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

#438

Post by psychlops »

chasing wrote: post #407

Writing is thinking. You do it as much for yourself as you do your readers and having to put effort into it is how you realize gains. Like strength training. Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for you. It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights up and down — sorta misses the point. (Before I get the usual sorts of replies: I'm not talking about writing boilerplate or marketin…

> It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights up and down — sorta misses the point.

As a lazy writer who never skips legs day, I appreciate this comment. It inspires me to write more than snarky snippets online.

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

#439

Post by davidthewatson »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #388

I'm not really a fan of ChatGPT, I think it's overhyped and oversold, and very fundamentally limited. But I also completely disagree with his take, it's too broad and sweeping. Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor do tools that abstract away some processes. A good example is driving. Does a manual transmission require more focus an…

This is overly optimistic. If this were true, most people driving an automatic transmission would be safer drivers in light of the lighter cognitive load. But that's not what happens. Instead the brain is overwhelmed by autonomous friending and vending apps until the car becomes an autonomous ending machine.

My n=1 experiment with driving a manual for 40 years in urban environments coast to coast is that I can't focus well without it and my experience doing half of that data set on a motorcycle just enforces that conclusion.

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

#440

Post by joelfried »

admax88qqq wrote: post #435
loup-vaillant wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. I think you meant hoard incredible wealth? There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity co…

What makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?

Many of us have the ability to entertain ourselves entirely within our own minds on the regular. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a chair from nothingness.

Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?

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