5 ms·

Photography is a great example here, because it seems pretty possible that generative models do to writing what smartphones did to photography.

haswell 3y ago
Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were. People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers. I think it’s interesting to look at, but I think the parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to take photos is all about a rather technical skillset becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made many other legacy things irrelevant for most people. Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in a rather existential way. It’s less clear that reducing the skillset required to participate in writing is a net benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by people who might not have done so before. Smartphones make a photographer’s job easier and a non-photographer’s goals possible. I worry that the same can’t be said for language models and the end result is likely to be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the democratization of a process that formerly required greater degrees of technical skill. When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  I have already had to "intervene" on a developer that was writing bad code biased by the fact that he talked to chatGPT, and chatGPT can make tons and tons of bad code for you effortlessly. (The intervention was basically asking "why did you write that? did that function win you anything?") It's easy to imagine the same thing happening with text. In fact, the speed that lawmakers and judges adopted the idea of generated text is a very big concern to me.
- HellDunkel 3y ago
  What is completely overlooked is the reader. He will have a hard time navigating the world. I sometimes hear people say „there is so much interesting stuff to watch on youtube/pinterest/whatnot“ and i always wonder how the vastly the meaning of „interesting“ can vary.
mpweiher 3y ago
What did smartphones do to photography? I know what they did to cameras, but photography? You still need the person who takes the picture, and the process of taking a picture hasn't really changed that much.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- patmcc 3y ago
  Charitably, smartphones made photography a hobby/art form/vocation accessible to almost everyone. We all carry a "good enough" camera in our pockets. So it's really opened up the hobby to a ton of people. I don't know why LLMs would do that with "writing" though.
  - swalling 3y ago
    Yes, it democratized access and made everyone a photographer, which also had the effect of nuking the bottom tiers of paid professional photography / stock photos, and turned them into something people do mainly for intrinsic motivations (i.e. as a hobby or as a social activity). The same might potentially happen with writing, where if anyone can generate a decent original story, poem, advertising copy, product UI writing, etc. in less than five minutes, the lowest and middle tiers of paid writing work will be eliminated. It’s possible that because these writing-specific jobs were already low value / largely eliminated by the Internet at large, that won’t happen. But it could happen to almost any role that basically involves synthesis and summary of words and data, since LLMs are so general purpose.
  - deckard1 3y ago
    Smartphones only cheapened photography in an additional manner. Which is why you get Instagram filled with pictures of food. It's the internet combined with the nearly free cost of digital. But digital cameras for the everyday person existed long before the smartphone. And before that, point and shoot film cameras and Polaroid.
    - 3y ago
sixstringtheory 3y ago
I think this is a good analogy. Smartphone cameras are great and easy to use for a very narrow set of conditions. Outside those conditions they perform terribly. The kicker is that you don’t really know unless you already know… the “trained eye” can immediately notice. The same is true for GPT text/code. Even then, yes, it will still result shifts like we saw years ago with newspapers letting go of their photo staff and telling journalists to use their phones.
wintogreen74 3y ago
Smart phones dramatically increased the technical capability of amateurs, and to a lesser extent their mechanics, but the net outcome is a huge volume of very good, very boring & generic photographs. Smart phones did nothing to advance the art of communicating via pictures. AI writing IS likely to follow a similar path.

haswell 3y ago

Photographers are still doing photography for the same reasons we always were. People who want to take pictures no longer need to be photographers. I think it’s interesting to look at, but I think the parallels break down pretty quickly. The decline of legacy photographic equipment and the reduction of skill needed to take photos is all about a rather technical skillset becoming less and less necessary. The smartphone also made many other legacy things irrelevant for most people. Language and writing are closer to the core of humanity in a rather existential way. It’s less clear that reducing the skillset required to participate in writing is a net benefit, even if it enables the generation of more text by people who might not have done so before. Smartphones make a photographer’s job easier and a non-photographer’s goals possible. I worry that the same can’t be said for language models and the end result is likely to be closer to a new form of illiteracy than it is to the democratization of a process that formerly required greater degrees of technical skill. When painting broad strokes, I see the similarity. Drilling down even a little widens the conceptual gap quite a bit.

marcosdumay 3y ago
I have already had to "intervene" on a developer that was writing bad code biased by the fact that he talked to chatGPT, and chatGPT can make tons and tons of bad code for you effortlessly. (The intervention was basically asking "why did you write that? did that function win you anything?") It's easy to imagine the same thing happening with text. In fact, the speed that lawmakers and judges adopted the idea of generated text is a very big concern to me.
HellDunkel 3y ago
What is completely overlooked is the reader. He will have a hard time navigating the world. I sometimes hear people say „there is so much interesting stuff to watch on youtube/pinterest/whatnot“ and i always wonder how the vastly the meaning of „interesting“ can vary.

mpweiher 3y ago

What did smartphones do to photography? I know what they did to cameras, but photography? You still need the person who takes the picture, and the process of taking a picture hasn't really changed that much.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
patmcc 3y ago
Charitably, smartphones made photography a hobby/art form/vocation accessible to almost everyone. We all carry a "good enough" camera in our pockets. So it's really opened up the hobby to a ton of people. I don't know why LLMs would do that with "writing" though.
- swalling 3y ago
  Yes, it democratized access and made everyone a photographer, which also had the effect of nuking the bottom tiers of paid professional photography / stock photos, and turned them into something people do mainly for intrinsic motivations (i.e. as a hobby or as a social activity). The same might potentially happen with writing, where if anyone can generate a decent original story, poem, advertising copy, product UI writing, etc. in less than five minutes, the lowest and middle tiers of paid writing work will be eliminated. It’s possible that because these writing-specific jobs were already low value / largely eliminated by the Internet at large, that won’t happen. But it could happen to almost any role that basically involves synthesis and summary of words and data, since LLMs are so general purpose.
- deckard1 3y ago
  Smartphones only cheapened photography in an additional manner. Which is why you get Instagram filled with pictures of food. It's the internet combined with the nearly free cost of digital. But digital cameras for the everyday person existed long before the smartphone. And before that, point and shoot film cameras and Polaroid.
  - 3y ago

sixstringtheory 3y ago

I think this is a good analogy. Smartphone cameras are great and easy to use for a very narrow set of conditions. Outside those conditions they perform terribly. The kicker is that you don’t really know unless you already know… the “trained eye” can immediately notice. The same is true for GPT text/code. Even then, yes, it will still result shifts like we saw years ago with newspapers letting go of their photo staff and telling journalists to use their phones.

wintogreen74 3y ago

Smart phones dramatically increased the technical capability of amateurs, and to a lesser extent their mechanics, but the net outcome is a huge volume of very good, very boring & generic photographs. Smart phones did nothing to advance the art of communicating via pictures. AI writing IS likely to follow a similar path.