If an AI saw cuts an AI tree in an AI forest and no AI is around to hear it does it matter to AI?
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
#52Many people find writing very difficult or are not confident about their ability to do it accurately. For people like that, GPT can be a godsend. If they need to write an e-mail or short report for work, they can just give GPT a few bullet points and it will produce a perfectly serviceable, error-free text.
People who need to write in a second language will find GPT especially useful, because they can write those bullet points in their first language and GPT will produce a text in the target language that both serves the purpose and is much better than anything they could produce on their own. The result is likely to be better than a straight machine translation, too, because GPT can, if appropriately prompted, adjust the content, structure, and formality of the text for the intended purpose. And, if they are trying to become more fluent in the target language, the text produced by GPT will be good to learn from, because it will show them how to say just what they were trying say.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#53Sometimes 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.
What effort have you put into learning useful prompts?
I only use the free 3.5+ ChatGPT and it's written some nice mapping code and some fun poems for me. Poem subjects ranged from rheology to texas hold'em.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#54> Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. Way more than admit it I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . Some do it for pleasure, some do it as a career, others do it as a means to an end in their career, and they haven't found value in LLMs. There's writing and writing . If all you're doing is rewording what someone else has already done like a high sch…
> I fucking love writing. Most people I know also fucking love writing, and I do mean love . One can tell from the opening of your comment. Composition, cadence, vocabulary, repetition. It ties together. I prompted an LLM to produce an enthusiastic expression around writing, but it came up with drivel like > Writing fills my heart with pure delight, igniting my soul and inspiring my mind with boundless creativity. I…
Here was my first try:
Prompt: Using profanity and in the style of Allen Ginsberg, write an introductory paragraph in narrative style about why you love writing.
ChatGPT: Holy shit, I fucking love this mad dance of letters, this wild waltz of words that paint the goddamn cosmos on a blank page! The rhapsodic rhythm, the sonorous symphony of syntax -- it's like jazz on paper, like Kerouac and Ginsberg on a bender in the bowels of the Beat Generation, spewing poetic profanity into the yawning abyss of the universe. It's the goddamn primal scream of the soul, the raw, unfiltered fuck-you to silence and nothingness. The alphabetic alchemy, where ink and imagination bleed together to birth whole new worlds, where lines live and breathe and fuck and fight and love. It's a heady high, an intoxicating inebriation, a goddamn narcotic nectar. It's the literary lust that throbs in the very marrow of my being, the fevered flame that flickers in the dark and dances to the tune of the typewriter's tap-tap-tapping. And oh, what a tune it is -- as chaotic as Coltrane, as radical as Rimbaud, as transcendent as Thoreau. It's why I fucking love writing, this goddamn glorious game of god-creation and galaxy-making. It's the ultimate trip, man, the ultimate fucking trip.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you turn the handle on a mechanical computer and get an output, has the computer gained the ability to understand maths or think? No. When you give the LLM an input and you get an output, has it gained the ability to understand or think? No.
The real question is "How can you prove that somebody/something has the ability to think ?". If LLM can reason and answer satisfactorily based on context I would deduce that it can think. What is the argument that human does not have transformer architecture. We are also predicting one word after next in our brain.
Human brains are objectively and quantifiably vastly more complex, including context and planning, they don't sequentially predict the next word.
Prime example of a human brain being architecturally different to an LLM: LLMs never interrupt themselves. They never get mid-sentence then say "actually, scratch that, I was wrong" or "now that I've thought about it, this is actually a better method to convey what I was trying to tell you".
There's a lot of material on this exact topic highlighting how the human brain does not have a transformer architecture.
Anecdata: I don't think in words. I think in abstract non-concrete thoughts. Language is what I use to convey my thoughts to others, program, or write notes to recall those abstract thoughts. However, I am also autistic, so take that with a large pinch of salt.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#56Sometimes 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.
My experience is very similar. I am neither a great writer, not a great coder, not a grammar nazi - but still have to make major corrections to the output of such tools.
I came to the sad conclusion that perhaps what I write and what I do is not as repetitive or as generic as others. Over the years when I have had to do more repetition, writing once well and ctrl-c / ctrl-v.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#57Sometimes 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.
Tell it the columns of a certain table. Ask it a GraphQL schema for a CRUD for this table. Ask it for a resolver using X libraries. Ask it for unit tests using Y libraries.
Couple hours work done in a few minutes.
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#58This 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…
Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real question is "How can you prove that somebody/something has the ability to think ?". If LLM can reason and answer satisfactorily based on context I would deduce that it can think. What is the argument that human does not have transformer architecture. We are also predicting one word after next in our brain.
Human brains are objectively and quantifiably vastly more complex, including context and planning, they don't sequentially predict the next word. Prime example of a human brain being architecturally different to an LLM: LLMs never interrupt themselves. They never get mid-sentence then say "actually, scratch that, I was wrong" or "now that I've thought about it, this is actually a better method to convey what I was tr…
Is it fair to say that you define thinking as operating in a nearly identical manner as the human brain?
Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
#60Sometimes 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.
> it is a really terrible writer
Most people are terrible writers, and never read anything at all. So they have no way to judge if the wordy informationless crap gpt wrote is good or not. It's long, thus is good.