3 ms·
Anybody remember how we used to learn new words and build our vocabulary? Perhaps it went something like: "What does this word mean"? "Look it up in the dicti
by rchaud 4y ago
Anybody remember how we used to learn new words and build our vocabulary? Perhaps it went something like:
"What does this word mean"?
"Look it up in the dictionary"
"Why can't you just tell me??"
I remember the hassle of looking things up in a paper dictionary. Over the long term, it massively helped improve my ability to not just recall a simple definition, but also learn new words, as they were adjacent to what I was looking for.
It's effectively this hassle ChatGPT and Bard are 'solving'. Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time), you will now have a chatbot AIsplaining things to you like you were a 12-year old, regardless of the topic's complexity.
I'll admit I was concerned about about Grammarly.com ruining people's ability to learn to write. That pales in comparison to an opaque search engine promising to give you the keys to all of human knowledge.
- veec_cas_tant 4y ago> Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time)... This sounds an awful lot like email's "Spam" folder, an AI driven bullshit detector that I am particularly fond of.
- marricks 4y agoDid you hear how Google made a decision that political email wasn’t spam prior to last election? So that AI driven filter is, at least, partly influenced by political bias. What about the AI that drives YouTube auto play so somehow kids watch horror clips and everyone else gets nudged towards Jordan Peterson for some reason? Having more of our internet and communication filtered by ostensibly “neutral” AI will get lead very weird and probably not great places.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- humanizersequel 4y ago>"What does this word mean"? >"Look it up in the dictionary" >"Why can't you just tell me??" FWIW, I'm not sure I've ever done that and I've learned two languages (outside of a classroom environment, which I expect makes a difference). I usually just encounter words in books and infer their meaning from context. As I encounter the word more and more and tried to use it myself I gained an understanding of what it meant. It is an interesting bootstrapping problem.