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I feel like this is the bias of a very smart, highly educated, highly capable person. If you are already an excellent writer and coder, can take vast fields of

I feel like this is the bias of a very smart, highly educated, highly capable person. If you are already an excellent writer and coder, can take vast fields of knowledge and blossoming ideas and spit them out onto paper in skilled form with minimal anxiety, GPT probably does very little for you. Maybe you could see if you were missing something very obvious and average. I read for probably 8-12 hours a day. I write every day. I think every day. I’ve been doing this for decades. GPT has been like a talking dog. It’s an insane achievement, but he’s not the worlds best conversationalist. But to be 17 again and struggling all night to write a three page paper filled with unoriginal ideas, it would have been a game changer back then.

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
May I ask - what job do you do that you read 8-12 hours a day?
- dougmwne 3y ago
  I’m an enterprise architect. I’ve got a pretty wide set of projects I need to keep up to date on, a lot of industry developments and just following general tech trends. Lots of my role focuses on documenting our designs and projects.
blagie 3y ago
I would add: And doing the same thing over and over. I find GPT very useful in that I can quickly become mediocre in any domain. Need a legal filing? I can get a good-enough legal filing. Need some code in a framework I've never used? I can get it instantly. Need something written in the language of some esoteric field of science? I can get that instantly from a bullet point list. It doesn't do the hard parts well: What's being written, and how it's structured. That's where I fit back in.
kenjackson 3y ago
I think the thing to remember is that there are far more people like me than you. People who are poor writers or middling thinkers outside of specific domains. I agree that GPT isn’t much of a conversationalist. But it is an exceptionally good tool some of us. It has already proved invaluable for me in helping diagnose a medical issue with a family member — one that escaped several ICU doctors and nurses. And a couple of weeks ago helped me fix an issue with my car. A good analogy might be a calculator. There are some people who can do calculations in their heads near instantly. And some of these people could do arithmetic of numbers too large to be represented by calculators even. But for most of us, calculators were immensely useful.
lifeonlars 3y ago
But the only purpose of writing that paper is for you to practice doing research, thinking and writing. Most people who write deep, thought-provoking work started out doing assignments like that. What could possibly be the point of getting a computer program to do it for you?
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
  That you never have to learn how to do it yourself.
noobermin 3y ago
The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and untalented will only grow.
- donkeyd 3y ago
  I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way. The generation after me is hardly able to reset their iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help. Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in their phones, readily available video editing software and processing power to create content like no generation has ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.
  - loup-vaillant 3y ago
    > They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. I think you meant hoard incredible wealth? There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time. Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…). We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
> I read for probably 8-12 hours a day Jealous. What's your job?
jononomo 3y ago
You read for 8-12 hours per day? I guess you get paid to read? What do you spend 8-12 hours per day reading?
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  Slack, email, Jira, StackOverflow?
- whinenot 3y ago
  hacker news, obviously
greggyb 3y ago
I feel similarly to how you have described. My worry is the innovator's dilemma. Given a few generations (software generations, not human) of continuing exponential improvement in capability of LLMs (or whatever replaces them), I worry that those who have spent much more time learning to co-work with a GPT-alike (or replacement) will move to the fore.
- chui1989 3y ago
  I think these going to the fore will become inevitable. These improvements will make things we do now easier, so why not let them help? Until we as human are totally replaced by AI, we will just coexist with them and then we find something new to work on. Evolution.
Paul-Craft 3y ago
I think you might be right. I can get GPT-4 to produce serviceable text on factual topics, if I prompt and guide it correctly. That's about it. Honestly, I'd very much prefer it if my actual dog could talk to me. I'm not sure about "17 year old me struggling to write a short paper full of unoriginal ideas," but it sure could help me write that paper titled "Bullshit, bullshit, etc., etc., bullshit" that I always wanted an excuse to turn in for some college course or another. ;)

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago

May I ask - what job do you do that you read 8-12 hours a day?

dougmwne 3y ago
I’m an enterprise architect. I’ve got a pretty wide set of projects I need to keep up to date on, a lot of industry developments and just following general tech trends. Lots of my role focuses on documenting our designs and projects.

blagie 3y ago

I would add: And doing the same thing over and over. I find GPT very useful in that I can quickly become mediocre in any domain. Need a legal filing? I can get a good-enough legal filing. Need some code in a framework I've never used? I can get it instantly. Need something written in the language of some esoteric field of science? I can get that instantly from a bullet point list. It doesn't do the hard parts well: What's being written, and how it's structured. That's where I fit back in.

kenjackson 3y ago

I think the thing to remember is that there are far more people like me than you. People who are poor writers or middling thinkers outside of specific domains. I agree that GPT isn’t much of a conversationalist. But it is an exceptionally good tool some of us. It has already proved invaluable for me in helping diagnose a medical issue with a family member — one that escaped several ICU doctors and nurses. And a couple of weeks ago helped me fix an issue with my car. A good analogy might be a calculator. There are some people who can do calculations in their heads near instantly. And some of these people could do arithmetic of numbers too large to be represented by calculators even. But for most of us, calculators were immensely useful.

lifeonlars 3y ago

But the only purpose of writing that paper is for you to practice doing research, thinking and writing. Most people who write deep, thought-provoking work started out doing assignments like that. What could possibly be the point of getting a computer program to do it for you?

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
That you never have to learn how to do it yourself.

noobermin 3y ago

The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and untalented will only grow.

donkeyd 3y ago
I'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way. The generation after me is hardly able to reset their iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help. Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in their phones, readily available video editing software and processing power to create content like no generation has ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  > They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. I think you meant hoard incredible wealth? There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time. Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…). We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.

Jeff_Brown 3y ago

> I read for probably 8-12 hours a day Jealous. What's your job?

jononomo 3y ago

You read for 8-12 hours per day? I guess you get paid to read? What do you spend 8-12 hours per day reading?

Firmwarrior 3y ago
Slack, email, Jira, StackOverflow?
whinenot 3y ago
hacker news, obviously

greggyb 3y ago

I feel similarly to how you have described. My worry is the innovator's dilemma. Given a few generations (software generations, not human) of continuing exponential improvement in capability of LLMs (or whatever replaces them), I worry that those who have spent much more time learning to co-work with a GPT-alike (or replacement) will move to the fore.

chui1989 3y ago
I think these going to the fore will become inevitable. These improvements will make things we do now easier, so why not let them help? Until we as human are totally replaced by AI, we will just coexist with them and then we find something new to work on. Evolution.

Paul-Craft 3y ago

I think you might be right. I can get GPT-4 to produce serviceable text on factual topics, if I prompt and guide it correctly. That's about it. Honestly, I'd very much prefer it if my actual dog could talk to me. I'm not sure about "17 year old me struggling to write a short paper full of unoriginal ideas," but it sure could help me write that paper titled "Bullshit, bullshit, etc., etc., bullshit" that I always wanted an excuse to turn in for some college course or another. ;)