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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

#61

Post by r_hoods_ghost »

weinzierl wrote: post #23

I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Be it stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, school essays with standardized expectations or formulaic messages and emails. Not much ability to lose there, but AI is a tremendous timesaver. A pg quality essay is a whole other story but I doubt AI is much useful there in its current state.

I'm sorry but most ChatGPT output is functionally indistinct from a pg "quality" essay: Make banal observation about recent technological development. Explain it's "disruptive potential" for legacy industry. Express mild concern about possible social impact on group. Conclude that such concerns are overblown and that tech workers / investors can make shit loads of money while making the world a better, happier place for their chums. Be sure to only use a 9th grade vocabulary. If I had to ask why pg is concerned I'd say it's because ChatGPT threatens to disrupt the thought leader-industrial complex that he sits at the heart of. When anyone can generate his type of vacuous prose what point pg?

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

#62

Post by hammyhavoc »

tspike wrote: post #54
kqr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

On the surface-level, yes, it's semi-convincing. On the other hand, it lacks all the nuance of a human being.

Ask it `Give me a taco recipe in the style of Stanley Unwin` and you'll get something that has the style, something that's superficially Unwin-like, but lacks the contextual nuance of the humour completely. In fact, I'd say ChatGPT doesn't do humour, especially nuanced humour that's in the delivery and not in the punchline itself. Humour is a very abstract thing and there's so many styles of it. Can it tell you a joke? Yes, but that's not humour in its entirety.

Just an observation, but the LLM isn't expressing itself, it's words for the sake of words because they predict the next word in a sequence. It's like saying "what's the big deal about Allen Ginsberg? You drop a few f-bombs and a bit of flowery language, that's Ginsberg in a nutshell", whilst completely ignoring the expressivity of self.

What makes writing as a medium so interesting is the conveyance of thought from one human being to another. Is an LLM interesting because it can sometimes be a little alien whilst still having some human-like quality? Sure. But an LLM is just an LLM, it doesn't have experiences or novel new thoughts that express a larger ideology. As a human being, I unfortunately just don't relate to LLMs, even if they are a reflection of the content they're trained on, which is ultimately human. It just lacks soul.

If the LLM can't experience the zeitgeist in the way that we do, it can't really capture such a big chunk of what human self-expression is.

Anecdotal, but I find the average HN exchange to be far more interesting than anything an LLM has ever output to me in terms of conveying meaningful ideas. I've tried debating with ChatGPT itself a few times, that's been—hit-and-miss.

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

#63

Post by Doxin »

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.

I find copilot most useful when writing comments tbh. Whenever I'm stuck contemplating how to phrase the rest of a comment it comes with a suggestion. It might be a terrible suggestion but that's usually enough to get me unstuck. And every now and then it's exactly what you need and it saves a bunch of typing :P

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

#64

Post by bayindirh »

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 speed, so things doesn't escape or my focus doesn't get derailed. Also it changes how brain works so it can think better.

Also, blogging and writing documentation at work made me a much better thinker, because converting these abstract concepts to meaningful sentences with a context and easy to understand structure affects also how clearly you communicate in other parts of your life.

Offloading this really robs you of the joys and power of meaningful communication on many mediums.

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

#65

Post by andy_ppp »

bombolo wrote: post #58
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…

Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?

We just use our brains differently now, mostly to find ways that support our default positions, that leave our minds unchallenged and certain.

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

#66

Post by revelio »

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.…

By the way, on macos the preview tool can do this. You can drag and drop pages between documents using the sidebar and reorder them the same way.

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

#67

Post by hammyhavoc »

tspike wrote: post #59
hammyhavoc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well, herein lies the interesting thing: my experience of "normal" thinking won't be like the average human being due to autism. Thus I acknowledge variance of how brains function even amidst human beings. It isn't an impossibility to consider that this could extend to artificial intelligence, but it's an LLM. It's intelligence-like (artificial), but it isn't intelligence by the traditional measure.

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

#68

Post by bayindirh »

andy_ppp wrote: post #65
bombolo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?

We just use our brains differently now, mostly to find ways that support our default positions, that leave our minds unchallenged and certain.

The thing is our bandwidth is limited and we allocate it differently now. However, not all replacements are beneficial and adding external dependencies adds points of failure.

Challenging yourself is conscious decision. Make choices to challenge yourself, and don't build an echo chamber.

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

#69

Post by RealityVoid »

andy_ppp wrote: post #65
bombolo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?

We just use our brains differently now, mostly to find ways that support our default positions, that leave our minds unchallenged and certain.

Hah, as if people 2000 years ago were more open to challenging ideas.

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

#70

Post by anon-3988 »

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…

Perhaps having a conversation with an LLM will help thinking even further? I am prone to thinking out loud (in private) and it helps me a lot.
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