Sounds like a problem! Good luck solving it.
Is the post some sort of series? I will be looking forward for the part that addresses possible solutions.
If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#62Potentially related - "I'd rather read the prompt" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#63The sci-fi movie Brazil (nothing much to do with the country), is set in a beauracratic dystopic future and at the start of the movie a literal real world bug falls into “the machine that never makes mistakes”. The error plays out over the course of the movie having a somewhat (negative) butterfly effect. I feel the movie well captures the tone of the current moment. Worth a watch.
For anyone who wants to watch, there are a few endings in similar flavors to the Blade Runner endings.
I guess like the Penfield Mood Organ you can dial how you want to feel. But you probably shouldn’t pick ‘good’.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Then in the A/B test you're the 1 fail out of 7 tries, everyone else loved it, and you haven't even looked at it. I can live with those results. Lesson is don't always publicize the LLM help.
> everyone else loved it
Most people are very bad readers, too.
For example, most of my coworkers don't read books at all, and the few that do, only read tech or work-related books. (Note that most don't even read that).
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#65I think it's the type of thing that the mere awareness of it counts a lot to counterweight the problem. It's like when you are growing up and a certain type of behaviour that would work for socializing when you're 14 years old suddenly doesn't work anymore when you are 21. You learn about it when someone you trust brings you attention to it and suddenly you have the opportunity to reflect and change your behaviour. T…
> mind-altering drugs like Adderall
This is strange to me. You could give me 100 chances to guess which “mind-altering drug” you are thinking of and Adderall wouldn’t cross my mind. Amphetamine is a stimulant; it’s plainly not mind-altering in the way that psychedelics are. Adderall is mind-altering in the same way that caffeine is. Which is to say, it isn’t.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#66I think Sinofsky is asking a question: what does the future look like given that (a) writing is thinking but (b) nobody reads and (c) LLMs are being used to write and read. It's that (already) old joke: we give the LLM 5 bullet points to write a memo and the recipient uses an LLM to turn it back to 5 bullet points. Some plausible (to me) possibilities: 1. Bifurcation: Maybe a subset of knowledge workers continue to w…
4. Degradation: Humans with specialized knowledge lose their specialized knowledge due to over reliance on AI, and AI degrades over time due to the lack of new human data and AI contaminated data sets.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#67The 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…
[deleted]
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#68I think Sinofsky is asking a question: what does the future look like given that (a) writing is thinking but (b) nobody reads and (c) LLMs are being used to write and read. It's that (already) old joke: we give the LLM 5 bullet points to write a memo and the recipient uses an LLM to turn it back to 5 bullet points. Some plausible (to me) possibilities: 1. Bifurcation: Maybe a subset of knowledge workers continue to w…
The executives in example three seem redundant and a cost center we can eliminate.
Everyone without significant capital is redundant and can be eliminated.
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#69I think Sinofsky is asking a question: what does the future look like given that (a) writing is thinking but (b) nobody reads and (c) LLMs are being used to write and read. It's that (already) old joke: we give the LLM 5 bullet points to write a memo and the recipient uses an LLM to turn it back to 5 bullet points. Some plausible (to me) possibilities: 1. Bifurcation: Maybe a subset of knowledge workers continue to w…
> 1. Bifurcation: Maybe a subset of knowledge workers continue to write and read and therefore drive the decisions of the business. The remainder just do what the LLM says and eventually get automated away.
This already happens. Being the person who writes the doc [for what we wanna do next] gives it ridiculous leverage and sway in the business. Everyone else is immediately put in the position of feedbacking instead of driving and deciding.
Being the person who feedbacks gives you incredible leverage over people who just follow instructions from the final version
Re: If writing is thinking then what happens if AI is doing the writing and reading?
#70Idk, 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…
> 4 pages of latex with informative diagrams, flow charts, color-coding, tables, etc.
What tool are you using for this?
I too have used LLM to do writing that, frankly, I wouldn't have done without it. Often I don't even take what it says but it helps to get the ideas out in written form and then I can edit it to sound more like how I want to sound.