34 ms·

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

• swellguy 3y ago
  Then again, maybe you don't have much worth writing or much to contribute - better off letting previous iterations of humanity do it for you.
• nnnnnande 3y ago
  I said the same thing to my SO the first time I tried out ChatGPT. However, I'm not sure if AI is where I'd draw the boundary for myself at least, as I've had the same lingering feeling from only reading HN comments and seldom writing my own, or consuming BreadTube content for instance. More often than not, my opinions and thoughts are constructed for me by someone else as opposed to me doing my own critical thinking. Perhaps I'm one of the below-average thinkers for who ChatGPT will be a godsend.
  • kelseyfrog 3y ago
    Some of my favorite thoughts are those that I wouldn't in a million years have come up with on my own. Being exposed to these is a warp gate for the mind. The strange thing about being human is that we have an inordinate capacity to normalize and then universalize just about anything. On one had this plasticity allows us to deal with almost anything we are apt to encounter. On the other hand, it's an enormous blind spot to what could be. We're much more likely to add to our initial mental model than conceive of an entirely new perspective and it's these entirely new perspectives that I value the most.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    My experience with ChatGPT writing is that, if I have some essentially boilerplate to put down on page and work from, it's "fine" so long as I know enough to cross out the stuff I don't like and expand on the parts I do. Saves some time. But if I ask it to analyze a more complicated/nuanced question, it's far less useful. It certainly doesn't come up with unique insights into complicated topics I have a lot of familiarity with so far as I've experienced.
• carrolldunham 3y ago
  As a possible counterpoint to LLMs atrophying writing, in order to have fun on Character.AI, and tease out nuances with various GPTs, I've had to dust off my ability to write/think. I notice a lot more verbal reasoning going on in my mind after these weeks of back-and-forthing.
• zmmmmm 3y ago
  Interestingly enough, you can reverse this statement: "when you gain the ability to write, you gain the ability to think" - and in part gain some insight into how LLMs seem to suddenly have "emergent" behaviour to perform quite impressive feats of logic.
  • happytiger 3y ago
    That’s quite an interesting idea.
  • hammyhavoc 3y ago
    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.
    • mlboss 3y ago
      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.
      • hammyhavoc 3y ago
        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.
• scientist9113 3y ago
  When discussing writing as a form of thinking, I think it is unlikely that ChatGPT will replace this process. In fact, ChatGPT could potentially enhance it, as thinking through writing primarily involves refining ideas, clarifying concepts, and ensuring they are well-considered and robust. ChatGPT offers well-organized summaries of established facts and information, thereby aiding in the clarification of ideas.
• armchairhacker 3y ago
  How much is ChatGPT replacing human writing? It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal documents, mandatory code documentation, technical specifications, formal communication) but what about "real" writing (articles, papers, slogans, and books)? ChatGPT (including GPT4) has a distinctive writing style (neutral-helpful tone, verbose), and in my own experiments and observations I can still recognize it even when it's prompted to write differently. But this is selection bias: when ChatGPT writes something I can't spot, I just don't notice and assume it's human-written. And I know for a fact I can't recognize ChatGPT's writing in isolated paragraphs (I took the quizzes), so it's clear some writings slip past my radar. This is an important thing to track. Idk how we'd track it in a way that's even remotely accurate; perhaps by taking small samples where you know for sure whether each article was written by GPT or human (if your subjects disclose, or if they have edit history turned on). But we can't say how much ChatGPT is replacing human writing, and how it's affecting human thinking, until we have actual evidence this is happening at a large scale. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/139o1q6/lost_all_my_content_writing_contracts_feeling/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/139o1q6/lost_all_m... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/138clv9/spent_5_years_building_up_my_craft_and_ai_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/138clv9/spent_5_ye... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/it_happened_to_me_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/i...)
  • arkaic 3y ago
    Later on, gpt or other spun off gpts can be trained to write with a specific voice. The future is limitless with this tech, for good or bad
  • jmillikin 3y ago
    ChatGPT can't replace writing intended to convey information, but that's only a small fraction of the writing that's getting created. There's a whole industry where people are given prompts like "five paragraphs about the history of spaghetti" and get paid $0.01 per word, then that text gets put into an Italy-themed travel blog full of ads. You and I wouldn't notice if that entire industry was replaced by ChatGPT because nobody reads that text, it doesn't exist to be read, it exists to tickle some ranking model deep in the bowels of Google. But you can be sure that the people selling coherent text for $0.01/word will notice when ChatGPT can generate the same thing for $0.000001/word.
• esjeon 3y ago
  I don't think most normal people will spam their own SNS/blogs using LLMs. If you hate writing, you won't be writing at all, instead of using LLMs to generate stuffs. If you have a message to send, you'll be taking much of your time creating a piece even with LLMs. Obviously, there can be many exceptions here (e.g. trolls, flamers), but the key point is that using LLMs only can reduce the cost of act of writing, but it hardly lowers the barrier of writing itself, especially when there are implications to consider. So, I think OP(Paul Graham) is basically overestimating people's will to write, probably because he's a such good writer himself.
  • hammyhavoc 3y ago
    He's naively assuming that people don't already just dip their finger in the social media feed, Google's first page of results, or their favourite forum to get an opinion instead of formulating their own. Nothing will change except the medium for figuring out which way the groupthink wind is blowing.
  • bombolo 3y ago
    Think of all the blogspam that is on medium, or all the clickbait done to get impressions. That isn't born out of passion.
• andsoitis 3y ago
  The risk isn’t so much losing the ability to think (I think that is exaggeration), but rather that interacting with it is changing how we think, or, indeed, what we think.
  • Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    * but rather that interacting with it is changing how we think, or, indeed, what we think* That's simply the world moving forward. You might assume that a house is a smoky place before folks invented the chimney. Horses were important before mechanical transportation got off the ground. Belief in humors has dwindled since germ theory proved to be successful. Reading and non-religious texts being easily available introduced ideas folks might not have had on their own. The camera caused folks to reconsider what art is and allowed for impressionism, abstract art, and more. Tech and advancement changes the way we think and what we think, and it shouldn't be surprising.
  • jimmySixDOF 3y ago
    This also plays out over time and assuming future LLMs will be trained ever more on the generative output of todays LLMs we could end up communicating using a Language itself that will become frozen in time as it cycles through the same feedback loop. As John Culkin said: “We shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us.”
• zabzonk 3y ago
  title of this post could have been written by gpt. oh, and twitter - no thanks. can we simply stop posting twitter stuff here? it's just unreadable to anyone that doesn't use that platform. (i.e. most people)
  • hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Aren't most HNers using Nitter? https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
    • zabzonk 3y ago
      i would have thought not - certainly not by me
    • snvzz 3y ago
      I am, as it is the only sane way to handle links to twitter. Unlike twitter, nitter is usable.
• rcme 3y ago
  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.
  • imtringued 3y ago
    Everyone knows that using ChatGPT is about signalling your non Luddite status so that the police won't go after you.
    • dbtc 3y ago
      I noticed that you haven't been talking to your AI very much lately, what's wrong?
      • marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Please drink a verification can of AI marketing kool aid!
  • meerita 3y ago
    Maybe you're not using the right prompts. But yes, ChatGPT needs more creativity input.
  • weinzierl 3y ago
    There is also a huge difference between code generation (be it Copilot or ChatGPT). With Code you still have the compiler that rejects the utter nonsense and then you hopefully have tests to check if what was generated makes sense. With prose it's all your manual work again to check. If your text is mundane it might be trivial but for anything a pg would write I guess an AI is pretty useless in its current state.
    • neodypsis 3y ago
• yawnxyz 3y ago
  paulg equates "writing" with "writing for a public audience for exposure bucks". He probably feels like writing inwardly for the purpose of thinking for yourself, e.g. in your own notes and notebooks, isn't really writing at all. At least, I suspect he's kind of person who treats this kind of writing as nonsense. But writing for yourself, in your own shorthand, I think makes you faster and better at thinking than writing clearly for the public. Of course, using an LLM to write for yourself like this makes no sense. Most writing for others isn't really writing to think. It's to please others and fit in and make sure people aren't mad because your one-word email reply ("no.") would be misinterpreted.
  • criddell 3y ago
    He’s on Twitter a lot. I wonder what he would have to say about time and words spent tweeting?
• weinzierl 3y ago
  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.
  • kqr 3y ago
    I don't know about other people, but it helps my thinking process to write things in stupid Jira tickets, spec documents, etc. also. It forces me to combat edge cases that I didn't think about until I had to spell them out. Not always, of course, but perhaps often enough that it's worth it to know how to. Even formulaic messages and emails can be useful, because when what I want to write doesn't plug in neatly into the formula that sometimes means something. ---- As a very concrete, though small, example: I have found that almost always when I use the word "empower" in any of its shapes I'm making a mistake (either taking a lazy shortcut in writing, or an actual cognitive mistake), yet I only notice it as I'm putting the symbols for it down.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • drc500free 3y ago
      Same deal with those warning words - mine are "enable" and "leverage." Smells that I'm handwaving away something I should be specific about, which means I don't understand it as well as I should.
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    > I think pg underestimates the amount of trivial and mundane copy most people write day in day out. Can attest. I had to write a bunch of definitions and do some preliminary research though nothing very technical. I asked chatGPT, it listed a bunch of stuff, I looked around the net, found some more hints, asked again; then I had the model to collect everything for me into a neat little markdown doc, and shared that. Saved me a couple of hours of searching and writing useless / boring stuff.
• hammyhavoc 3y ago
  > 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 school essay or a competing product description for what's essentially the same product? An LLM will probably suffice. Original and novel? Human beings all the way. LLMs highlight that a lot of "knowledge work" is intrinsically bullshit, i.e., a high school essay doesn't actually assess somebody's understanding of a topic, just their ability to hit specific keywords and points, hence even essay mills can churn out an "original" essay for a kid if they're too xyz to do it themselves. Whilst I don't care for LLMs, I do support a huge shakeup of the existing educational assessment paradigm as it is self-evidently not fit for purpose, IMO.
  • kqr 3y ago
    > 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 found myself tempted to instruct it on how to write well but that sort of defeats the point. And maybe I suck at prompting but the appropriate combination of profanity, brevity, yet seriousness was hard for me to get it to do.
    • tspike 3y ago
      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.
• martin-adams 3y ago
  I just had an interview candidate come up with questions to ask us about the company. It sounded formulaic and when I queried it, they said they used ChatGPT. I’m not disappointed, but I’m now wondering how much thinking was left to AI than being genuinely inquisitive.
  • RugnirViking 3y ago
    baffling. I am a huge fan of AI & chatgpt but that would be a giant red flag for me.
    • quickthrower2 3y ago
      Someone AI'ing part of a human process is basically saying "this is BS and not worth my time". They may or may not be right. I think questions about the company should be genuine (it is a good chance to find out what you need to make the decision). But many people think questions about the company are another hoop, i.e. the interviewer is using their questions as another measure, so they need to ask the correct questions.
      • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        >Someone AI'ing part of a human process is basically saying "this is BS and not worth my time". This encapsulates the backlash artists and many others have. But it's a pipe dream of many in business to automate as much business as possible... what's that tell you about what they think? :)
  • blitzar 3y ago
    It's a bold strategy, Cotton, let's see if it pays off for them.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• shapefrog 3y ago
  When writing goes to 120 characters or you regularly write "thread" / 1/n at the bottom of your tweet, you lose some of your ability to think
• ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  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 invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." [1] [1] Phaedrus 275a-b, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174%3Atext%3DPhaedrus%3Asection%3D275a http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
  • bombolo 3y ago
    Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?
    • andy_ppp 3y ago
      We just use our brains differently now, mostly to find ways that support our default positions, that leave our minds unchallenged and certain.
      • bayindirh 3y ago
        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.
      • RealityVoid 3y ago
        Hah, as if people 2000 years ago were more open to challenging ideas.
• chrismarlow9 3y ago
  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?
• tkgally 3y ago
  Many 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.
  • nottorp 3y ago
    Not so sure being served the text on a platter will lead to any improvement. Which is fine when some experienced person uses the generator to do something that they already know how to do (boilerplate code generation) or is tangential to their main activity (report generation). In the long run though, what happens when we reach a generation that is taught to use the LLMs for their job from the start? Will they be able to handle anything unexpected?
  • rprospero 3y ago
    If my entire message can be condensed into a few bullet points that could be fed into ChatGPT, wouldn't it be an insult to my audience's time to provide them with anything but that very list of bullet points? This is exactly the thought that puts me in your category of "people [who] find writing very difficult"
    • tkgally 3y ago
      Depending on the situation, a set of bullet points might seem insulting to your audience for other reasons. Here’s a real-world example. I live in Japan. While I am fluent in Japanese, it is not my first language and I am not confident about writing formal e-mails, as the grammar, vocabulary, and strategies for making requests are quite different from everyday usage. Now, though, I can feed prompts like the following to GPT-4: “Compose an e-mail in Japanese as follows: Sender: [my name and affiliation in Japanese] Recipient: [name of company in Japanese] Content: Request to visit the company to tell them about [my product name in Japanese], which is our new accounting software that uses AI to streamline work. Tell them that I can visit their headquarters at any time on any weekday. Ask them to reply by e-mail or to call my mobile at [number].” In a few seconds, it produced a much better e-mail than I would have been able to write without a lot of effort or someone else’s help [1]. From my experience, I can say with confidence that GPT-4’s e-mail is much more likely to elicit a response than anything I could compose by myself. (I would change one or two things in its version before sending it, though.) Millions of people around the world are like me: doing much of their work in a second language and often feeling at a disadvantage to native speakers, especially when writing for formal or public-facing purposes. GPT-4 is a great tool for people like us, as well as for people who are not confident about writing in their first language. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-composition.jpg https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/20230511-email-comp...
• Valodim 3y ago
  Brilliant bit in the replies: > Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best. > That's a step up for most people.
• newswasboring 3y ago
  I expected something more than a person's unsourced opinions if the link is on the front page of HN. I know it's PG, but he isn't an authority on any of this. Feels like it's here because it's cool to hate on LLMs. I usually flag such stuff and move on, but I want to make my own doom proclamation. The cynicism for anything which will change the status quo is going to be our down fall as an industry and society. I understand raising concerns, but my god man at least pretend to balance it with some excitement. I've truly lived long enough to see the heralds of new technologies turn into doomsayers.
• jbj 3y ago
  Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling control, and successively suggestive typing. writing a sentence while making it, I feel too much the words are being forced on me. Where as it can be a great tool, I like to exercise my mind, the same reason I calculated all Matrix determinants with pen and paper when I started my engineering degree. Some people may go to the gym and work out, but I am like to just squeese in exercise within my bicyle commute. Sometimes there may be greater projects requiring more heavy tech, but for housekeeping I honestly dont mind harvesting the synergies of planning and doing things by myself.
  • rdparedes 3y ago
    > Especially on my phone I have actively disabeled all spelling control I can see that
    • jbj 3y ago
      no pun intended, actual typo caught in the wild ;)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dw-im-here 3y ago
  Many times when I am asked to write something it's not so that I may think but so that others may not. If this is the case I have no problem serving them some AI generated unthoughts
• neilv 3y ago
  I'd love to see numbers on what percentage of ChatGPT writing is for BS that the prompter doesn't actually care about -- they only have to be able to say they did it. Examples: homework, corporate busywork. I'd also like to see numbers on writing with ChatGPT that the prompter does care about a bit, but that is effectively worthless BS, especially if generated by LLM, and just makes more piles of garbage for someone else. Examples: advertising, relationship management, "content" for selling ads or SEO.
  • klabb3 3y ago
    I don’t know what the numbers are right now, but I will eat my own hat if the categories you mention are not the majority once we see widespread adoption. Everything from email to blogs to podcasts to even discussion forums turned into content mill venues of spam. Any new type of digital medium should absolutely be aware of human incentives, because your intentions don’t matter. People have very limited intuition about game theory type of things, even the smart ones who want to build cool shit.
• nestorD 3y ago
  My experience has been that GPT4 is terrible at thinking but, if I provide it with both the content and the way I want structured, it can give me an output that requires very little tweaking before being ready to go. I do my writing-as-thinking when getting the draft ready.
• lofaszvanitt 3y ago
  Common sense packaged as wise sounding sentences.
• jxramos 3y ago
  “If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde The above quote may be apocryphal (I tried to source it once but only found secondary sources) but I shared it at work slack when chatGPT had a lot of action with our tea, chats. Seemed quite fitting much like a pilot rotting their flying skills leaning on the autopilot too heavily. You get good at what you do or so the saying goes.
  • discreteevent 3y ago
    "The spectator is a dying animal" - Jim Morrison
  • pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
    > “[…] others will do your thinking for you.” ― Oscar Wilde Ironic.
    • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      > "Ironic." Predictable. Unoriginal. Redundant.
• jasiek 3y ago
  Use AI to write anything and you become confined to whatever "moral code" the model has been taught to follow. Once a critical mass is reached, whoever controls these models, will control what is being said.
• graderjs 3y ago
  And I think if you lose the oral tradition, if you don’t speak your thoughts out loud and make them into a speech then you lose something too. It’s also the ability to think. I find my modes of communication in writing, and speech way different to the extent that I’ve taken to Verbally responding to things; recording that; transcribing that; and then putting that into writing, because I find like the process of writing maybe because it’s cross pollinate it too much with my work as a programmer uses a different part of myself and a lot of the time ends up going on like long tangents to explain everything in agonizingly stupid legalistic detail wheras in speech, I would just get straight to the fucking point. Obviously, your mileage may vary my insights here may only apply to myself, and certainly not gonna apply to everyone I think. However, what I’m saying, reminds me of what Haruki Murakami talks about as his process for writing I think in his earliest novels anyway, he even mentioned trying to write it as if he was speaking it but certainly he writes his novels in English first and then translates them back in the Japanese, because he finds that’s how he expresses his authentic voice. Kind of hilarious to have such lauded post modern writer, write in a way where his pre-translated works are then translated back into English else. Reminds me too of fight club / chuck Palahniuk copy of a copy of a copy. Yet in Murakami‘s case it seems to create rather than erode quality. Of course there’s always the issue of the very low quality transcription available in a by default in iPhone and android keyboards. The voice typing sucks and so you always get some weird homonyms inside probably there’s some in his comment to.
• d--b 3y ago
  Oh come on. The guy has been pushing AI startups for years, and now he's worried that some people are going to use it? And his worst fear is that people are going to stop thinking?
• piokoch 3y ago
  This is so not true... For the whole Middle Ages people rarely could write, but still there were lawyers (yes, lawyers who could not write), doctors, scientists, poets, merchants, mighty and clever kings (yes, there were kings who could not write). Middle Ages gave us crucial inventions that built European civilization (mills, windmills, agriculture inventions like three-field system, ships building technology and so on), also we have got well developed philosophy - especially scientific methods of reasoning and logic, that were cornerstone of all later science development. How it was possible without writing? Middle Ages life was simply not writing/visual oriented, it was based on speaking and listening and in no way people lost ability to think because of that. For instance PhD thesis was presented as a lecture followed by discussion. When people wanted to "sign" something they were exchanging or giving some symbolic item (like a ring) and that's all. That's why various saints relics were so popular then, they were symbolizing people's affection, etc. Or people were just signing, as most people could write their names even though they could not write as we understand it today - despite many believes people in Middle Ages were quite educated, including "Third Estate", that is "the Peasantry", more, typically they were going to the same schools as rich people kids, the only difference was that rich people had to pay for the school. I really recommend "Lumière du Moyen Age" ("Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths") by Régine Pernoud, it nicely describes a really rich, open and dynamic culture that didn't really need writing.
  • n4r9 3y ago
    That's interesting but not sure it's relevant to the linked Tweet.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dalbasal 3y ago
    "Middle Age" Europe is poorly named. It's based on an idea that ancient europe is Greece and Rome. Then, dark/middle ages. Then Renaissance and modernity. The problem is geography. France, Britain, Germany and such were never part of the ancient world. Rome had colonies there. But, these were (relatively) short lived outposts of civilisation. Civilisation was never a dominant culture in non-Mediterranean "Europe." In the East, civilisation existed for thousands of years before Rome. They always had roads, kingdoms, bureaucracy, restaurants, banks and such. Even in dark ages, after collapse... these were collapsed civilisations. They didn't revert to tribal, oral societies. The european Renaissance (excl Italy) was never a Renaissance. It's the actual birth of civilisation in europe. It's the first time writing became a major thing.
• pyrale 3y ago
  I would prefer this kind of ideas floated by reputable neuroscientists backed by peer-reviewed papers rather than a dev turned investor with a history of falling for theories that are more intellectually appealing than proven. As it is, this tweet series looks so much like one of the many scares we got earlier: RPGs loosen moral norms, videogames make you violent, television cartoons make children less smart, etc. New edition: using chatGPT lessens your ability yo think!
• metacircu1ar 3y ago
  A couple of good posts on this topic, from Jorge Manrubia of 37signals: https://world.hey.com/jorge/writing-for-yourself-c25a5a13 https://world.hey.com/jorge/writing-for-yourself-c25a5a13 https://world.hey.com/jorge/writing-is-thinking-95dee8cb https://world.hey.com/jorge/writing-is-thinking-95dee8cb
• makeitdouble 3y ago
  I have the feeling this is missing on what people want ChatGPT to do for them. They're still communicating their exact thoughts to the prompt, and will adjust to get exactly something matching their intent. To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent: "I quit". The rest is to them useless decorum that can be handled by a random word generator. I kinda hope that ChatGPT will push people to actually write shorter and more to the point. If a bot can understand their message in 40 words, why send their fellow humans 400 words of useless prose ?
  • notahacker 3y ago
    > To take an example, asking ChatGPT to write a professional sounding resignation letter might look absurd to people who value writing in itself, but the people doing it are still expressing a very specific intent: "I quit". But they're not expressing other very specific intents like going out of their way to assure the team that the new opportunity was unmissable or pointedly thanking some people but not others or being deliberately terse because frankly the whole experience was a bit shit. (and might if they're not careful be expressing particular intents they specifically don't wish to convey) And ChatGPT itself generally gives the most verbose answer possible, because people training it reward verbose and somewhat ambiguous responses more than clear but not quite right answers, so I suspect its impact on prose norms will be the exact opposite...
    • makeitdouble 3y ago
      I think that's really the crux of it. We currently require people to express the full extent of their intentions. Not writing that you feel so sorry for your colleagues your are leaving in the dust is a faux pas. ChatGPT fills that gap of generating random acceptable feelings, where you might either not care, or do not want to express your actual ones. I'd argue adding people to thank or sneaky attacks to the ones you hate wouldn't add much to the prompt when requesting the letter to the bot. The joke of course will be that progressively, I'd expect we'll have people sending the bot a prompt, have it converted into verbiage, and the receiving end tl;dr it in the same bot to get basically the initial prompt.
• nologic01 3y ago
  > Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. This resonates deeply. All that matters for our lived experience and our social interactions is how we train our brains, both individually and at collective scale through agreed symbolic modes of expression. Brains are so plastic that wonderfully different alternatives are possible and we almost certainly have not discovered them all. Ancient bards were learning and reciting day-long epic poems by just hearing them. There are still cultures that train themselves to long recitations of text. I don't even know what that might feel like to have such a long sequence readily available in your brain. But training our brains requires massive energy. Depending on individual and social characteristics people will stop training their brains when the going gets tough. Math is a great example. You could argue that chatGPT has a job because our public information repositories are so littered with low-density information (unstructured textual information) that its impossible to navigate. Some professions would go to great textual length to describe in an ambiguous and limited way something that can be described concisely with an equation. Superficially at least, the impact of digital assistive tech is that we are being collectively dumbed down (just like we are becoming obese through the ready availability of massive amounts of fatty foods). Its a multi-pronged process: Before chatGPT decimated our writing skills, visual dissemination of information (which conveys less meaning but requires no training) has taken over like a raging wildfire. E.g., tiktok versus twitter.
  • dsign 3y ago
    The small silver lining is that there are arguably more people who have access to literature, and who like to read, write, and do math, because generally those things have become more accessible to the wider world. But when the going gets really tough, those people may try to band together and secede[^1]. One thing I have to add though, as somebody who loves to write, is that I couldn't do it without our modern digital tools. Because I'm not a native speaker, I tend to bungle prepositions and semantics, and it's only with great effort and many Google searches and ChatGPTs and grammar checkers that I dare to afflict[^2] the world with my words. [^1]: I found this idea in "Homo Deus," blame Dr. Harari! [^2]: "Afflict": To the point, I used thesaurus.com here to find a suitable synonym of "torment".
    • 3y ago
• AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
  It's not just writing. The big problem with the chat interface is it pretends to be acting and reasoning like a human - but it's more like a person with a half brain chopped off (cf> McGilchrist The Divided Brain), and even then, it has no embodied awareness. And so I wonder how it will affect people and their relationships. If you already have eg. anxiety and often times a little bit of frustration in trying to get answers or simply get help from REAL people... imagine how it will change you when you get used to an AI that seems to always be on point. In other words people who spend lots of time interface with AI via a chat interface ; and who have even minor mental health issues such as depression, OCD, etc ; I suspect will have even less social skills. They will expect REAL people to be on point, be even more disappointed or frustrated, and isolate even more. Put simply I think spending a lot of time with this kind of AI may turn us into Spocks... now for some this is good news. To each their own...
  • AverageDude 3y ago
    Yup. I personally have to spend a lot of energy to concentrate in team meetings because my brain keep telling me that I can ignore some information here and there and get back to it whenever I need it using the replay and rewind. Most of the meetings are not recorded. I actively have to keep check on this reflex of my brain learned from Youtube and Netflix.
• hello_computer 3y ago
  [dead]
• tpoacher 3y ago
  Given premises P1. You use AI to write P2. You lose ability to think The argument seems to be: P1 -> P2 I would like to point out the reverse direction is far more likely as a causal direction: P2 -> P1
• INGELRII 3y ago
  I completely agree with PG. Writing is not just communication with others, or writing down information for later. Writing is not just writing down something that already exists in the mind. Writing is a part of thinking process. You talk to yourself few seconds or minutes later. It's back-and-forth. Marshaling thoughts and ideas, reading them back, reflecting, to be processed then writing them down again. Writing is process of improving thoughts, generating new thoughts and ideas, making thoughts clearer for yourself.
  • discreteevent 3y ago
    He is also right about laziness. The tragedy might be that some people will never be challenged to write and so they will never develop the potential that they might have. I would not have bothered to make the effort to write somewhat clearly if I had not been criticized for sloppy writing. And, like you say, writing is thinking - so it's a lot more important than the words that end up on the page.
• janandonly 3y ago
  When early books began to include this new thing called an "index" scholars decried that people could now simply look-up the fact they were looking for without reading and understanding the context[1]. Whether the context here is the whole book or the whole chapter, I'm not sure off. But again, there is noting new under the sun[2]. [1] https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543 https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324002543 [2] https://www.jw.org/finder?wtlocale=E&pub=Rbi8&srctype=wol&bible=21001009&srcid=share https://www.jw.org/finder?wtlocale=E&pub=Rbi8&srctype=wol&bi...
• amadvance 3y ago
  I say the same thing to software architects who no longer write code. After some time, you start to lose your skills.
• theodric 3y ago
  This strikes me as a very bold claim to just uncritically accept, especially considering it's just Some Guy making it because it Feels Truthy. Any sources to support the assertion? Any evidence at all? Absent that, this is likely just more hand-wringing about why GPT will cause the downfall of Western civilization.
• unyttigfjelltol 3y ago
  PG's premise is not really correct. We worry that AI will become super-powerful, but when you use AI you realize its superpower is the ability to collaborate with people. The combined system of one human plus one AI makes each component more capable and powerful than either acting independently. So, what PG really should worry about is people losing the skill of independently writing, and instead getting really used to having AI work as a muse, or worse, a ghostwriter. My writing always will be better with an outside collaborator, and if youre so busy or important to rely exclusively on a ghostwriter, oh well. In all circumstances, AI will not be as good without strong human interaction, and likewise humans can take their work to a different level by leveraging AI.
• keiferski 3y ago
  I think this can be generalized to, “when you lose the ability to create a certain Form, you also lose some of your ability to imagine new types of that Form, and instead just rely on shuffling existing versions of it around to generate novelty.” A bit wordy, but I have the skill of drawing/sketching in mind. There is a big difference between sketching an idea on a blank sheet of paper, and using some kind of software tool that puts you on predefined rails from the start. That said, I think the notion that ChatGPT replacing “good writing” as an artistic activity is basically nil. It’s more like the next generation of word processing: immensely useful for the right operator, not that useful for people without something interesting to say in the first place.
  • TacticalCoder 3y ago
    > I think this can be generalized to, “when you lose the ability to create a certain Form, you also lose some of your ability to imagine new types of that Form, and instead just rely on shuffling existing versions of it around to generate novelty.” And it has a very serious consequence: "when you lose the ability to write, you lose the ability to create new content on which future LLMs are going to be trained". One guy has been exposed for producing one computer programming book per week, for six months or a year straight, all with 5 stars reviews. How many people like him are gaming, for their own benefits, the system? It's all too obvious on GitHub and StackOverflow already: people gaming the system with automatically generated code that just, to reuse you words, "rely on shuffling existing versions". How can this LLM-generated content possibly be used to created a better LLM? Basically: how do we train future LLMs using content produced by those among the humans whom didn't lose their ability to think?
  • leroy-is-here 3y ago
    I think the generalization is more minute than that. Take mathematics for example, we can write that down and so we have. A lot of people “hate” math because they understand math as the shuffling of symbols. They hear “math” and think “arithmetic”. Math appears a lot like some puzzle-game because when they read textbooks they see these symbols being shuffled around which produce exact answers, like 4.8473. But mathematics is about expressing ideas which can produce answers for specific problems, not specific answers in general. It’s the allegory of the cave all over again, mathematics has become a shadow of itself in many people’s minds. Instead of a tool in which to express ideas, it just became stuffy definitions and arcane symbols which produce hard yes/no answers. Why? Because when those ideas are expressed by writing down the mathematics in textbooks, they are expressed in arcane symbols and stuffy definitions which have exercises that have hard yes/no answers.
• truculent 3y ago
  And yet pg is still here, writing
• steveBK123 3y ago
  He's right though. Working in an industry that uses a lot of NLP, its funny to me that people are also so excited about generative LLM. Soon we won't have to read or write! It will be AI expanding content and producing sentences for other AI to condense back down. Less words good, me like nice computer talk for me
• jason-phillips 3y ago
  The key is that information exchange between a person and AI must be symmetric, not asymmetric. One must actively maintain that balance. Asymmetric information exchange will result in deleterious effects, similar to over-consumption of TV or social media.
• klibertp 3y ago
  Quickly scanning the comments here I didn't find anyone mentioning this, a bit further in the thread: > catalinmpit: Too bad the content written by ChatGPT is average at best. > paulg: That's a step up for most people. That's what my impression is: yes, ChatGPT produces mediocre writing and Copilot produces mediocre code, but it's already more legible than many (not sure if "most") people are capable of. I'm not sure in what way exactly, but I think this alone will change a lot in how we communicate online. The best result would be for people to learn from ChatGPT and eventually reach its level and beyond, but... it doesn't go that way too often, historically speaking...
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Alexa, write hacker news comment about how in the future we'll talk by exchanging GPT prompts instead of the text itself, and how each of us will have a local subscription for decoding the prompts into a long essay.
  • janalsncm 3y ago
    The flip side of that is now ChatGPT is a formidable tool for English second language speakers to express themselves in English.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    Yeah. I agree with that. It might give me a boilerplate starting framework for something. Or it might give me a decent parenthetical explanation of a term (though Wikipedia probably would too). It's mediocre, generally lacks nuance, and is pretty boring for the most part. On the other hand, it's grammatical and, in my experience, mostly not actively wrong. So as paulg says, that's at least no worse than a lot of stuff I skim over from people cranking out thousands of words a day for peanuts.
• vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
  [dead]
• ricardo_nh 3y ago
  I think that this question is also an existential one: how do we want to live our lives? besides the scientific/philosophical discussion about memory and writing, which is fascinating by itself, the question for me is what kind of human beings do we want to be? do we want to let AI's write down everything for us or do we want to leave a mark, leave OUR mark in the world and actually do the things ourselves? also, if we think of every activity as a chore, then we are only looking at its results. but there is also the satisfaction of doing the activity. this view of AI's as a replacement for everything is just the climax of the fantasy of the modern hedonist society addicted to instant gratification.
  • JBiserkov 3y ago
    This reminded me of a recent post of mine: Control is an illusion. But that also means that illusions can be used to gain at least some (sense of] control. See that mismatched bracket? I did that, despite the Universe screaming with a thousand voices that I shouldn't. This text was written by a humane life form. #NoAI
• KaiserPro 3y ago
  he's missing the point Firstly, I don't write to think. Its too fucking slow. having had shit hand writing, I've never used the written word as a medium for working stuff out. I suspect a sizeable minority of people don't write to think. However, When I do write, the words I use are deliberate and compact. This is because writing is laborious and slow. The real risk is the death of nuance. At a gross scale the example is this: "Forgive me father for I have sinned" is logically the same as "Sorry daddy I have been bad". However the nuance is fucking miles apart. Unless you are good at proofreading (spoiler, its a skill and is never taught properly) you are going to have a bad time.
• grugagag 3y ago
  Also true of the shortening attention span
• marttt 3y ago
  "I warn you now, this is going to have unfortunate consequences, just as switching to living in suburbia and driving everywhere did." -- This is a really good comparison by pg. If anything, it will be a sneaky change in human behaviour for most people. Everything seems fine, and then you suddenly realize living without that AI "crutch" is simply too hard.
  • ancount 3y ago
    Would you be willing to explain how that comparison makes any sense at all? How is living in a city "too hard" for people in suburban and rural communities?
    • BrianHenryIE 3y ago
      Here's an earlier tweet of his lamenting what has been taken away from children by the rising dominance of cars in society, a function of suburban living: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1656249684300640259 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1656249684300640259 The growth of suburbs had plenty of drawbacks. Many people will argue they "need a car", aka the price of entry to modern society is thousands of dollars. Transport is ~28% of US GHGs. But there's no quick and easy way to rebuild cities to facilitate most people getting to where they need to go quickly and cheaply by transit and walking/biking. There's lots to say on it, but I'm not a great writer! https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-seniors-driving-idUSKCN0YM2E3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-seniors-driving-id... https://jalopnik.com/what-i-mean-when-i-say-ban-cars-1849122955 https://jalopnik.com/what-i-mean-when-i-say-ban-cars-1849122... https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-American/dp/0865477507 https://www.amazon.com/Suburban-Nation-Sprawl-Decline-Americ... https://twitter.com/bancars4life https://twitter.com/bancars4life https://www.facebook.com/groups/whatwouldjanejacobsdo/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/whatwouldjanejacobsdo/
• usgroup 3y ago
  I've made the point before that I don't even use a spell checker so there is a deep sense in which I agree with this, but it is tempered by the recognition that I'm hardly the sharpest tool in the box and I get great purchase from my doodles, scribbles and other "outsourced" mental facilities. I think that for most of us, the mental outsourcing optimum which makes you most capable is probably not the one which maximally enhances and preserves the capacities you have.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  Observation suggests that people are switching to using calculators to add things for them with almost indecent haste. Most people hate math as much as they hate writing. Way more than admit it. Within a year the median column of numbers could be added up by a calculator.
• nickagliano 3y ago
  It's more complicated than, "using AI more and more will cause us to forget how to write." It's just a tool. I like comparing it to something like quizlet (online flash cards), which can be a great study tool, but which people will also misuse and abuse. Instead of studying and taking the online quizzes, people will often just find the right quizlet which has all of the answers to the online quiz. People who are honest will actually learn the material, and the cheaters suffer. I think people who misuse ChatGPT will become lazier, worse writers. But using the tool in an honest way will improve even an already talented writers work. Just my 2 cents.
  • thundergolfer 3y ago
    You say it’s more complicated than PG’d claim, but your “just a tool” narrative is a classic oversimplification of technology’s relationship with man. A tool is an extension of man, and it is not additive as you suggest, even for “talented writers”. A tool interacts with man’s mind and body, and society’s fabric, “adjusting the sense ratios” of man, to use McLuhan’s phrase. “Just a tool” is lazy thinking that is most effectively used to stifle debate about technology. This has happened with the typewriter, the gun, the computer. For a more sophisticated engagement with technology, see Neil Postman, Ivan Illic, Marshall McLuhan, even Frank Herbert.
    • nickagliano 3y ago
      No, I agree with you! I'm not trying to simplify things by saying it's a tool. As you use the tool, it changes you as well. I think the chatbots are particular technology that will have a lot of that effect. One of my favorite ramblings on this is Wendell Berry's essay on "Why I Am not Going To Buy A Computer". I'm just saying that there's an obviously bad way to let this tool have an impact on you, and there's a way to use it that won't ruin you. It's important to be vigilant, and not to abuse GPT-4 and, i.e., replace all of your own writing with AI.
• DuckFeathers 3y ago
  True. And nothing of value will be lost for most people and they will be less prone to propaganda-driven thinking... freeing them from many mental prisons. True bilinguals are naturally free of this, as I have written here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35684559
• justinzollars 3y ago
  I enjoy writing. I hate writing business tone jargon. I use ChatGPT for that.
• jasoneckert 3y ago
  As an educator, I wholeheartedly agree with the author's points. The act of writing our thoughts allows us to make connections between concepts in our mind that we wouldn't otherwise make, often reorganizing and assimilating existing concepts in the process. Similarly, rewriting written notes (e.g., from a class) is an incredibly effective study technique. Writing blogs, detailed emails, and articles also provides these same benefits. If we rely on others or AI to write them, we lose this learning benefit.
  • TheBigSalad 3y ago
    Writing isn't learning. Learning is learning. Writing a blog post about something is a good way to learn about it, but the learning doesn't come directly from the writing. Needing to write it just inspired you to learn, there are other ways.
• voidhorse 3y ago
  I don't typically agree with pg, but I think he's right here. I was thinking about this topic yesterday. I've already seen people start using using these tools to help them craft messages (email, text) to family members and friends. Do we really inhabit a world in which the average person is that creatively bankrupt and lazy that we'll start mediating our intimate social relationships through these tools? It's pretty pathetic. The outliers who are able to produce truly novel styles that the models can't replicate yet (since they aren't in the dataset yet) are going to increase in value 10000x as soon as model produced language becomes the norm.
  • febeling 3y ago
    The thought in the last paragraph resonates. Not sure which shape it will take, but the extreme inflation of reasonable and orderly text that the models produce will make it lose all its value. It might be an opportunity for the better, in the end. Maybe quirkiness, authenticity, and personality will see a revival. It might be better, because the long-winding and formulaic text from the models is something also only models can read well :)
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    My question is though, how many of these people who are supposedly offloading the mental energy of writing onto ChatGPT are good writers in the first place? And are they really delegating that much substantive thought? I think the pg comment presupposes that most people currently know how to write, and I just don’t think that’s the case, at all. At least not to the extent that doing less writing (or using an AI) will dramatically reshape their modes of thought (much less the trajectory of human thought as a whole). Also, I’m not saying that written communication is the be-all, end-all of human intellect - I think I’m a fairly good writer (used to be better, though) but a fairly poor verbal communicator. I know lots of people who are great verbal communicators but not-great not-terrible writers. Some people are great at both, and some people aren’t good at either. But it’s all part of the mix of original human thought. I guess when we get to the stage that a 21st century Orwell is using AI to write his books, then I’ll worry that we’re stunting human potential, but until then it just doesn’t seem to me like much original thought it getting displaced here. Yet, anyway.
• smugglerFlynn 3y ago
  What is interesting to me is that thought leaders are always optimising for some X - be it productivity, some higher good, low poverty, efficiency etc. But two things humanity, as a whole, consistently optimises for is *short-term survival* and *lesser day-to-day friction*. ChatGPT/AI seems to be just another friction optimisation, and truth is, we don't know if this optimisation leads us to the world that is anywhere close to 'pretty' by modern standards. People from pre-industrial world would be shocked to see modern people enjoying all the air and noise pollution, but there is no way to avoid falling into such local optimum, because we do not optimise for clean air or quality of life, only for lower friction and survival. This seems to put us randomly into some local optimums all the time, until unsolved problems pile up so high that they start endangering our survival - rinse and repeat. What I'd argue is there is no way known to mankind that allows to steer this globally in a different way.
  • auggierose 3y ago
    But there is, you said it yourself. A thought leader turns into a dictator. Of course, this can (and will) go awfully wrong at some point, but as a medium-term solution this might be the way.
    • smugglerFlynn 3y ago
      I'm struggling to come up with examples where one man would consciously steer the mankind into some different direction - closest we have to such "steering committee" is probably UN. So I don't see Paul or any other individual significantly impacting the way AI is adopted (at least not in a way it is portrayed today - as a global game changer / new era enabler).
• mensetmanusman 3y ago
  I can’t wait to read high school essays that have hidden sentences like “As an AI writing assistant, I believe…”
• TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  This assumes there's some kind of collective ability to think. The evidence for that is tenuous at best.
• benreesman 3y ago
  Miss the essays pg, when you lose the ability to blog, you gain the obligation to tweet.
• seabass-labrax 3y ago
  There are multiple ways to interpret this, as evidenced by the diversity of comments here; prejudice was the first thing that came to mind for me. Dyslexia is a condition that makes writing arduous due to such challenges as visual confusion between symbols, lack of memory for unusual spellings and difficulty comprehending abstract concepts from words alone. It's not merely a matter of preference to 'hate' writing. To those who have dyslexia, Large Language Models like ChatGPT could be a huge relief: might this finally be the spell-checker able to intelligently correct those misspellings which are so extreme that even non-dyslexic people might stumble on? "When you lose the ability to speak, you also lose some of your ability to think." "When you lose the ability to dance, you also lose some of your ability to think." "When you lose the ability to see, you also lose some of your ability to think." I hope these variations illustrate that writing unlocks only one way of thinking, and to some it's no great loss to replace it!
  • QuadrupleA 3y ago
    Can definitely confirm. Someone close to me is very smart but dyslexic, and ChatGPT had been a godsend - almost like a prosthetic limb.
• nbzso 3y ago
  So basically "fake it till you make it", "move fast and break things", "build it, and they will come" gave us the ultimate UX achievement: Offloading responsibility to the outside entity to be comfortably dumb. What a dream, what progress for humanity. But hey, the money will be great, the opportunities will be immense. Rome is burning. Really. Burning. Where are AI churches? Someone is not investing in the future of mankind. I love the therm "hallucination", marketing geniuses at their best. Calling algorithmic junk which is a clear error by this "term" creates a positive image and enables more incorrectness from a technology which must serve humans. So buckle up, the world of marketing and speculation will come to the ground with a big economic bang. Like it or not.
• pcblues 3y ago
  Audio books returned to me the mouth to ear telling of stories that we had for tens of thousands of years. Writing/reading has not been around long enough to have any impact of our actual evolution. I wouldn't bemoan its loss too soon :)
• pcblues 3y ago
  If anything, writing froze ideas (see religion), whereas speaking them from generation to generation allowed the dross to slough off good ideas. Does good science require writing? That's a good debate to have. Are written notes essential for scientific progress/discovery? Maybe. If failures are recorded and researchable, then I would argue yes, because it is likely only the successes were transmitted with spoken word.
  • bigwavedave 3y ago
    I would argue that broad collaboration requires the written word. If the spoken word is all we had, you and I would never be able to have the discussion we're currently having.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  > Most people hate to write as much as they hate math. The target audience of openai.
  • alecco 3y ago
    While I enjoy the act of writing, I dislike the amount of time it takes to do it well.
• theGnuMe 3y ago
  PG jumps the shark.
• hgs3 3y ago
  This reminds me of the individual who asked, "Is TikTok making us dumber/hurting our focus?" My harsh response was, "You have access to the internet and its wealth of educational information; if TikTok is what you seek out, then you were already dumb to begin with." I don't think AI makes a person dumb, but rather is a magnet for those BS'ers who'd rather hire a ghost writer or shamelessly plagiarize than expend effort. An intelligent person should want to write, draw, and code regardless of what AI can do. They should understand the joy is in the journey, not the destination. Conversations like this reveal a deeper problem with the culture and its misplaced values.
• fredgrott 3y ago
  Funny story... Some of you only know math a certain way as you used programmable calculators etc... i learned math the way of one of the founders of Chaos theory learned via graphing and manual math operations. And the difference is that I can grasp new math fast as my meta-language of math objects in my head is formed of those manual operations and graphing snapshots. It's the same with human thinking-writing connection as writing helps us refine and enter new meta-language objects into our brains, without it we make our IQ -level die.
• Verdex 3y ago
  I think it's the other way around. With certain thought techniques, you will find yourself writing. I'm sympathetic towards having a mode of thought that allows you to be a prolific writer and then bemoaning the lonely path you're on as new technologies allow people to completely bypass what you are good at. People simply do not understand what they are missing. However, people who don't write weren't going to be writing themselves anyway. It's similar with math. Everyone talks about how important it is for children to learn math in school. And everyone recoils with primal terror if I so much as mention the most minor of mathematical constructs. Be joyous that you are good at something. But I don't think you should look down upon those who find a way to survive by not being good at your thing. Even if things would objectively be better if everyone was a mathematician, scribe, and poet, this is probably not a realistic goal.
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    This is precisely what I came in here to say. People who say writing and thinking ability are hand in hand are typically good writers who were told they’re good thinkers because their writing ability set them apart. Similarly, the ability to do rote math skills once set people apart as geniuses, literal computers in the classic sense of the word. I see these tools, as applied to this task, as an equalizer of sorts that lets people who have great ideas express them in a compelling way. In my own life I was terrible at arithmetic, and I grew up at a time when memorizing the multiplication tables was a key life skill. I couldn’t to save my life. I strongly believed I was bad at math and struggled through on sheer willpower and mediocre grades, until I went back to college after I couldn’t make it through calc 1 and dropped out a decade earlier. This time they allowed calculators, graphing at that. I got top marks in every math class from then on and graduated summa cum laude in a top engineering computer science school. How many people have been marginalized because they couldn’t express their thoughts as clearly and compellingly as a better writer? Maybe a leveling of the fields away from mechanical abilities and towards completeness of thought isn’t a bad thing? Will people lean on it and lose what has been a core skill? Some will no doubt. But will it hurt them? Only as much as it hurts to use a calculator to do your menial math.
  • jzb 3y ago
    “People simply do not understand what they are missing.” I think you can say this about people who haven’t learned to write well. ChatGPT seems like a great thing because they can get it to excrete a content-like substance that reads well, and call it writing. Prompting ChatGPT to produce a text lets you move faster when you have an idea and want to cut to the finish. The problem is that part of writing is starting with an idea, thinking about how to express it, and then realizing that your initial idea might be flawed or need work. Sure - ChatGPT seems fine for spitting out web copy or something where the role of the writer isn’t to examine an idea, but just to go from start to done as quickly as possible. But I think he’s talking about the types of writing that involve wrestling with an idea and, for example, trying to persuade others. ChatGPT will happily spit out copy in that form. But it won’t trip over a paragraph and say “hey, shit, now that I write this out, I think it’s wrong or not well-expressed.” People bemoan co-workers who coast by on people skills and bullshit over people who have expertise and do the work. ChatGPT is likely to be similar - helping people who can’t write (express or work with ideas effectively) sound authoritative and generate more content that they don’t really even understand.
• d_burfoot 3y ago
  I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. Future generations not only won't learn write, they won't learn to read either. Writing is a technology that "freezes" language and inscribes it onto paper. That was important when you couldn't record speech directly, or broadcast it easily. But now you can just record a video or audio stream and put it on the internet, and that obviates the benefit of transcribing it. Of course there are a lot of benefits of writing relative to audio/video. But are those benefits important compared to the enormous amount of effort that is required to learn to read and write? I also don't think it's wise to demean the skill involved in generating good speeches/podcasts/talk shows compared to good writing. Language skills are language skills. The difference in ability of a strong speaker vs a weak one is dramatic and instantaneously obvious. As the talent pool of good writers shrinks, the benefit of learning to read will shrink as well, leading to fewer readers. And then the incentive to become a good writer will diminish, since there are fewer readers who can consume your work. This will lead to a vicious cycle of reduction in literacy.
• https443 3y ago
  Wait, didn't Paul Graham leave twitter? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604556563338887168
  • MacsHeadroom 3y ago
    For about two weeks, then right back to tweeting 5x/day. Just like most who "left twitter" in the past year.
• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Eh, the title here is one possible framing of a series of short tweets expressing his concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT. I homeschooled. My sons had trouble learning to write and one really hated writing. I spent several years having him verbally explain material to me, having him learn grammar and vocabulary and other essentials from entertaining videos and graphic books and such. Thinking and writing don't have to be so closely intertwined as they are in Paul Graham's mind. He's a writer and writing helps him think. Some people think while taking long walks, working out at the gym, drawing their ideas, etc. The kind of thinking Paul Graham does may become less common. I have no reason to believe that's some kind of holy grail and thinking via other means is inherently less valuable. I say this as a blogger who may be even more guilty than Paul Graham of using writing to help me think.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    The key is probably explaining/creating something in a way that doesn't have a lot of latitude for just glossing over the details. I'm not sure long-form writing is especially better than giving a presentation to an audience or working through a problem/creating an artifact of some sort/etc. The key is that you can't just read something and go "Yeah yeah I totally get it." Though I suspect some outputs can be easier to handwave through than others--I know I've done it to some degree on presentations. ("This aspect is complicated and we don't have time to get into it today.")
    • DoreenMichele 3y ago
      You make me think of the anecdote about the professor who had half the class graded for making one amazingly beautiful piece of pottery and the other half graded by total weight of the work they created. In the end, those graded by weight had nicer pieces as it involved more practice with producing something.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        In the case of writing/presenting/many things, there's definitely a case for doing something regularly even if a lot of that output is pretty routine and pedestrian. So there's probably a limit to the degree to which you can automate away the routine stuff and still expect to parachute in and produce something killer on demand every few years when you need to.
• petercooper 3y ago
  Just because I wasted too much time thinking about it: "Within a year the median piece of writing could be by AI." What does/could "median" mean in this context?
  • ulrashida 3y ago
    I believe it implies that looking at the volume of writing produced over a period, more than half of it would be AI-generated. It may also suggest a quality lens: all writing average and below would come from AI directly or through AI support.
• whatever1 3y ago
  Writing is killing creativity. Out of the dozen branches of thought, writing forces you to commit to just one and expand on it. That is nice for that one thought, but now you left unexplored the other 11 ones which will be forgotten. When you are thinking you can jump between multiple trains of thought without friction.
• nextmove 3y ago
  Is he referring to writing code or books/essays? For code I think he's forgetting that the people using ChatGPT to write code for them aren't really good programmers. These are mainly people using frontend frameworks that have horrible documentation and use ChatGPT to help them parse the garbage into something that just works. These people would never learn a functional programming language or any assembly. They simply copy the tech that others are using in order to stay employed. What type of code could these type of people, on their own, without ChatGPT produce that is actually useful for others to read or use?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• hypertexthero 3y ago
  Drawing is thinking, too. https://tumamocsketchbook.com/2011/12/drawing-is-thinking.html https://tumamocsketchbook.com/2011/12/drawing-is-thinking.ht...
• JustBreath 3y ago
  Amusing Ourselves to Death is a great book on this idea that the medium changes you. TL;DR: When a disruptive technology comes along (books, radio, television, the Internet, now AI) there's an intrinsic shift in how we think and how information is communicated. For example with books there is generally the assumption that you have read the chapters in order and thus there is no need to give you a recap with each chapter. However, in television, you can make no such assumption and so at the beginning of every episode they have to remind you what happened before because it's possible either you didn't watch the previous episodes or it's been a long time since then.
• tlogan 3y ago
  This is not correct and I cannot disagree more. Sadly, in our society, smart people were not successful as they could due to the prominence of written communication (I call it obsession with fluffy writing). This is because alternative modes of conveying knowledge and ideas, such as mathematics or visual diagrams like mind maps, may not be comprehended as easily as writing. We need also to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that English written by non native speakers often face unwarranted mistrust. This is where ChatGPT steps in, serving as a great equalizer. Math is the core skill required for critical thinking and problem-solving. Not writing.
• Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  My gut agrees -- and yet my head says that if we offload writing tasks that we don't care about to GPT, we might not lose much of value. By contrast, if we offloaded journaling to GPT, that does seem like a big loss. It also seems impractical, though, since as soon as you've told GPT what to say, you've basically said it. Moreover most people don't journal anyway.
• jgalt212 3y ago
  [dead]
• spopejoy 3y ago
  Oh the irony of issuing stern warnings about imminent loss of human thinking ability ... in a tweetstorm
• Night_Thastus 3y ago
  I'm not really a fan of ChatGPT, I think it's overhyped and oversold, and very fundamentally limited. But I also completely disagree with his take, it's too broad and sweeping. Offloading some cognitive load does not suddenly make people stupider. It just means that their focus can go elsewhere. Nor do tools that abstract away some processes. A good example is driving. Does a manual transmission require more focus and thought? Sure! But that's focus and thought that can instead go into paying attention to surroundings. Same with having a GPS. Not having to think about the layout of the city, or how to use a map, just leaves less distraction and cognitive load. Another is programming. Having high-level languages instead of having to write assembly does not make programmers worse. It just means that instead of having to worry about byte alignment, structure packing and nuanced cache details - they can instead focus on providing more features and functionality to the end user - which is a good thing! ChatGPT at its best will be like those two examples. Something that removes some existing load and lets us handle higher level, more abstract problems.
  • nspattak 3y ago
    a manual transmission car does not require more focus and thought as very soon changing gears becomes a reflex, ie it doesn't require the driver's prefrontal cortex. The same can not be said for repetitive work in programming (eg as in programming in assembly or C) IMO, this opinion deserves some thought even though it is not as bad as it sounds
  • bjornlouser 3y ago
    "But I don't expect to convince anyone (over 25) to go out and [ignore ChatGPT]. The purpose of this article is not to change anyone's mind, but to reassure people already interested in [unassisted writing] -- people who know that [writing in isolation] is powerful, but worry because it isn't widely used. In a competitive situation, that's an advantage." -- slightly modified PG drivel on Lisp http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
    • hosh 3y ago
      The scope is much broader than choice of computing language, since it affects the discourse of our whole civilization, and how we think about and discuss societal issues, and where we want to go as humanity. On the other hand, if you want to be a thought leader, you’ll have less competition.
• Alifatisk 3y ago
  You won’t lose the ability to write when you get a fountain pen
• alfor 3y ago
  For writing yes, the more we offload the lazier we will get. But for reading, I can’t stand most text as it’s way too long and convoluted. I would gladly take a short version most of the time or one that is created just for my level of understanding.
• jononomo 3y ago
  Maybe most people will write more now that they have GPT available.
• chasing 3y ago
  Writing is thinking. You do it as much for yourself as you do your readers and having to put effort into it is how you realize gains. Like strength training. Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for you. It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights up and down — sorta misses the point. (Before I get the usual sorts of replies: I'm not talking about writing boilerplate or marketing copy or canned responses to e-mails or just generating reams of prose so you can slap ads on it and make money or whatever. I'm talking about writing with the purpose of getting your personal thoughts and ideas out into the world.)
  • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I made a up a word to differentiate the boilerplate/canned/whatever activity to the personal-growth oriented one: ---- Righting. verb. 1. writing to change the way the world is oriented > I resolve to continue righting until the wrongs go away. 2. writing to change the way oneself is oriented > I resolve to continue righting until I'm not wrong anymore. ---- Ambiguity in usage being more or less the point.
  • psychlops 3y ago
    > It'd be like buying a robot to go to the gym and move weights up and down — sorta misses the point. As a lazy writer who never skips legs day, I appreciate this comment. It inspires me to write more than snarky snippets online.
  • oh_sigh 3y ago
    But what if AI will write a more compelling paragraph than you ever could, even if you devoted your life to writing? So it might only be people who use AI who get their personal thoughts and ideas out into the world.
    • chasing 3y ago
      I wrote: "Use tools, of course, but don't let them do the hard part for you." I didn't say I was opposed to using the AI tools. I'm opposed to using them to think for you — to do the "hard part." If they help with a turn-of-phrase or vocabulary or structure or whatever then they're just a more advanced version of tools people already use for those things.
• idlewords 3y ago
  Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen Keller offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway show.
  • CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    Helen Keller claimed to be able to enjoy the orchestra because she could feel vibrations in the air from the sounds the instruments made.
  • isanjay 3y ago
    Good or bad?
  • JadeNB 3y ago
    > Paul Graham on the benefits of good writing is like Helen Keller offering her reflections on what makes a great Broadway show. I think you can dunk on someone's writing without ableism. (Observing that a blind and deaf person isn't likely to enjoy a Broadway show isn't necessarily ableist, but gratuitously bringing them into a discussion that doesn't involve blindness, deafness, or Broadway shows is.)
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • dS0rrow 3y ago
    > Really, has there been a backlash against me? I hadn't noticed any change. I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it. http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html
• crocowhile 3y ago
  [reference needed]
• oldsklgdfth 3y ago
  In general, taking the easy route stiffs development. Relying on AI to speak for you is a major crutch. "The Art of the Essay"[0] describes the process of formalizing thoughts and ideas into structured arguments and logically unfolding them as a result of trying to put them in writing. This also dovetails into the notion that communication mediums can support only certain information. "The medium is the message" [1] is the phrase coined for this idea. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
• simonw 3y ago
  I'm a big fan of writing as a crucial skill for thinking. But I wonder if this concern of AI-assisted writing harming this will actually play out the way people think. Until quite recently, if you wanted to write music you had to learn an instrument first: needing to learn piano or guitar or similar to a point where you could compose your own music was a pretty big obstacle to getting started. Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit. I wonder if the act of sweating over word choice and spelling and grammar in order to explore your ideas might turn out to work in a similar way? Maybe we'll find out that people who didn't spend years developing their fundamental writing skills will be able to excel in a new, LLM-assissted world where ability to write well is no longer a pre-requisite to using writing to explore, develop and share their ideas.
  • Tainnor 3y ago
    > Now, thanks to software like GarageBand, you don't need to develop those skills first. You can jump straight to the fun bit. It might just be me, but I find it weird that one would consider the act of actually playing music not to be precisely the fun bit.
    • britzkopf 3y ago
      Some might even say that an analysis of the compositions by those who took up music writing after the advent of Garageband etc. proves the harm of such tools.
  • nickagliano 3y ago
    Yes! Thank you Simon. Takes like this will make this conversation a lot more well-rounded. Of course writing is important. Writing free-hand on paper is beautiful. But so are the ideas, and the organization of the writing, and the style, and the plot and the characters. Of course playing instruments is important, but I'm reminded of the Rick Rubin interview where he talks about how he's not a musician, and he doesn't know how to do any real technical music production.
  • alxhre 3y ago
• web3-is-a-scam 3y ago
  My experience with ChatGPT is using it as an "editor". I write down a rough draft of what I want, give it to GPT - tell it to act as an editor, and give me suggestions using certain tones, contexts, etc... I have difficulty expressing tact so it's helped me in various ways doing things like: writing code review comments about extremely flawed code without being accusatory or confrontational, or communicating poor performance in a written review without sounding like it's a personal attack. Of course I always proof read and even change certain things that it generates and put my own "twist" on it, but I always ensure it conveys what I'm trying to convey in the tone I'm trying to present. All things considered, I'm probably a better writer because of it. ChatGPT has been such a wonderful tool for me, it's improved my life in so many ways - but it's just a tool. People that are going to write poorly using ChatGPT were always going to write poorly. It's like saying that using a chainsaw is going to make people worse at cutting down trees.
• lapama 3y ago
  And when you stop writing on paper, you become less consistent.
• shadowtree 3y ago
  Just for one persona. Good old Peter Drucker formalized the personas in his advice to new employees to figure out how their bosses consumed information: 1 - The lawyer. Needs walls of text. 2 - The architect. Needs diagrams, visuals. 3 - The accountant. Needs numbers, spreadsheets. 4 - The actor. Needs a conversation, verbal. It's a generalization, of course, but I have applied this pattern successfully. The core bit is that using the wrong method with any of the 4 personas flat out does not work. Send a long article to an accountant and they're stumped. But send them a bunch of numbers and they hear the numbers sing. Etc. Tangent on the Amazon way of write ups - Bezos forced his persona on the whole company. I would hste it. I am an architect, a few diagrams is all I need.
  • anigbrowl 3y ago
    pg's observations are equally applicable to all of those domains, all of which are likely to become AI-mediated by default.
  • programmarchy 3y ago
    Which persona is Bezos? Accountant?
    • svnt 3y ago
      Probably the lawyer. At Amazon they’re somewhat known for the their six-page essay.
      • alttab 3y ago
        Yeah but the weekly WBR where the directors ask what a cell means on the DataNet report but the data isnt' sussed out so the L5 Data science guy that reports to the L7 PMT will spend the next week changing SQL to produce that requested view for the next week WBR. Many L6 promos over the years went out to folks who could quickly and accurately build WBR decks that gave L8s the visibility they wanted. So maybe Bezos is the lawyer, and all the directors are accountants.
    • alttab 3y ago
• deegles 3y ago
  I'm thinking about buying a personal voice recorder and keeping it on me 24/7. I could run the audio through Whisper every day and then slowly build up a database of facts that I could query. Like every day if I learn someone's birthday or meet a new person, I could quickly say "I met XYZ at the meeting and we talked about AI bots. Their birthday is May 11th", or "remember to pay the phone bill on the 21st of every month". And then every day the assistant could query that database and tell me who's birthday it is, or which task I need to take care of. If it was realtime then we get closer to a "Her" style AI assistant. The biggest issue I have is with the models being cloud hosted. I want to own and control all of my data especially personal things like voice recordings... any company will promise the moon when talking about their data security, but we should be 100x more worried about the risks in the long term.
• majormajor 3y ago
  Oversimplifying, there's two sorts of writing out there: the sort from people who put a lot of focus on developing writing and language skills; and the sort from people who don't. For the folks who aren't writing with care, does a language model flowering-up a message like "be there tomorrow to paint walls 7am" reduce any thinking effort? There are people who are making their way in the world without a detailed writing-driving thought process; I don't see how this harms them. (If anything, an inquisitive, precision-driven LLM bot could help, by asking questions to clarify when it detected ambiguity in their original message and such - but that would be a specific product with a specific tayloring towards helping like that that I have rarely seen out of ChatGPTs default "write me a..." behavior.) And on the other hand, if you care about the LLM-bot-generated message's clarity, accuracy, etc, you're gonna have to proofread it, you might go back and forth, and you will still be going through that process of asking yourself "does this actually say what I mean? did I fully know what I meant when I started"? I guess the suggestion is that this is going to push people who today struggle through writing because they care about the accuracy of the result into a lower-struggle process where they might unconsciously get worse results... but I'm not sure I agree. If I'm anxious about what the final text I send looks like, I'm anxious regardless of if I used a bot, or asked a friend for help, or whatever.
• anonuser123456 3y ago
  Alternate model: Iterative refinement with an AI will make you think better by shortening the feedback loop. The AI will force you to clarify your points because, if not, you will see it has meandered into the weeds when writing based on your prompt. And since you have not authored the prompt directly, you will have to critically read it to validate fidelity to your view point. This will help you build the skill of critical assessment as well as how to concisely specify your ideas.
• wnolens 3y ago
  I agree in the same sense that by using a calculator you lose the ability to think quantitatively. We build tools and move up the stack. Were not going to lose the ability to think. The types of thinking we do change to better serve our needs. Needs change.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• BogdanPetre 3y ago
  History repeats itself - from oral to written, now to AI. Fear not, it's a shift, not a shutdown. Writing didn't dull minds, it sparked ideas. AI isn't the end of thinking, it's a new chapter.
• WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
  it's the opposite, your ability to think is your ability to write anyone can write, even a machine, but do they think?
• similetimes 3y ago
  [dead]
• pictur 3y ago
  pretty silly comments. historically, people have always made such stupid comments on things they didn't understand, and I think they will continue to do so.
• fuzzfactor 3y ago
  >When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think OTOH when you don't gain the ability read or write, you might just end up thinking with both sides of the brain in ways that generations of academics may not do very much. Especially in cultures like some hillbillies who maintained a larger vocabulary without reading or writing compared to their peers in places like Boston where they had schools the entire time since settlement. Twice is nice.