6 ms·
ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving
- drpossum 2y ago"Worth" doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
- ctxc 2y agoTo note - 2022
- drpossum 2y agoNot sure why that is in any way relevant, but thanks.
- pests 2y agoIt was 12 days after 3.5 was released. A lot has changed since then. The point being take anything in with a view of the times, just like if I were to show you quotes from people 60 years ago saying computers are useless and no one will use them.
- thowawatp302 2y agoCool you have more than the one canard from IBM for five computers that became triple the amount?
- baq 2y agoIBM 1979 presentation slide is kinda timeless.
- simonw 2y agoThe original story here was published on December 11th 2022, just 12 days after the launch of ChatGPT (running on GPT-3.5). I feel most of this document (the bit that evaluates examples of ChatGPT output) is more of historic interest than a useful critique of the state of LLMs in 2025.
- jamil7 2y agoI feel very differently about the article. What I took away from it was the authors long-held critique of how high school literature and writing is taught and evaluated. Or how teaching in general has become increasingly outcome focused rather than process driven. ChatGPT is used to illustrate this but I feel like the article could have been written using another example like plagiarism or paying someone to write for you or any current LLM.
- ludicrousdispla 2y agoThis document is not a critique on the state of LLMs.
- simonw 2y agoIt includes some very prominent examples of 2022 ChatGPT output. I am not saying that the rest of the document does not include valuable content, just providing a warning that some of it uses 2+ year old examples.
- JohnKemeny 2y ago> I feel most of this document [...] is more of historic interest than a useful critique of the state of LLMs in 2025. I think you completely misunderstood the article. You should try to look at it from the eyes of an educator rather than a programmer.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- gostsamo 2y ago2022
- knowknow 2y agoIt’s always baffling how people take a technology that wasn’t even thought as feasible a decade ago and try to dismiss it as trivial and stagnant. It’s pretty clear that LLMs have improved rapidly and have successfully become better writers than the majority of people alive. To try and present this as just random pattern matching seems as just a way to assuage fears of being replaced. It’s also amusing that people minimize it by just calling it pattern matching, as if human reasoning isn’t built upon recognizing patterns in past experiences.
- bulatb 2y agoYou can't interrogate your qualia. A lot of people think (or really, feel) that makes them magic. It doesn't. But if you feel they're magic, you'll never believe that a "random" mechanical process, which you think you can interrogate, could ever really have that spark.
- CarRamrod 2y agoDefine 'magic'.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wolvesechoes 2y agoWelcome on hackernews, where thousands years old philosophical problems are solved through plain assertions!
- bryanrasmussen 2y agocan it damage though?
- zedascouves 2y ago> I could tell GPT to add in an anomaly for the 1970s - like the girl looking at Billy’s Instagram - and it would introduce it into the text without a comment about being anomalous Wrong. I tried it. it wrote it as "instagram". Then i asked it to explain this instagram: In Timmy’s mind, it was simple. First, he’d snap a Polaroid of some passing dog or a field of sunflowers. Next, he’d run home, sit at his rickety desk, and carefully slip the Polaroid into a school notebook he called his “feed.” He’d scribble a title at the top—something he swore was called a “caption”—and pretend he was beaming the image across some invisible network into the hands of friends he’d never actually met. Awesome to me
- milesrout 2y agoThe author is a poor writer for someone that is supposed to be an expert on writing. Those who can't do, teach? Prolix, excessive commas, takes too long to get to the point, and talks about himself too much.
- OgsyedIE 2y agoIf this argument is true it implies an unintended but very bleak corollary about what things aren't really worth preserving, if you start to think about what things aren't thriving in the economy with competition from LLMs. Trusted phone communication, visual art, rule of law, academic peer review, the news, search engines, question and answer platforms, etc
- briandear 2y agoAcademic peer review? That system can go away. I care about facts and proof of those facts, I don’t care about some academic’s opinion of another academic’s paper. We have t solved for the alternative yet, but peer review has led us to some ridiculous unscientific dishonesty, a reproducibility crises, and other adventurers because we assume the peers have an incentive for truth.
- XorNot 2y agoHow is ChatGPT or anything else killing visual art? The entire zeitgeist at the moment is dismissive and bored of AI generated material already.
- pona-a 2y ago> Giving 10 month old children permanent crutches may harm the development of walking, but since the crutches make unassisted walking obsolete, maybe it wasn't worth it anyway? LLMs are a language calculator, yes, but don't share much with their analog. Natural language isn't a translation from input to output, it's a manifestation of thought. If deaf children not taught sign language suffer from non-language learning disabilities, it's not a far stretch to say failing to practice quality writing will have a similar effect. But even with direct translation, if a school "translated" Shakespeare to a lower reading level to account for the class's lower literacy, it may still affect their development. If you had ChatGPT do every exercise in CS, you wouldn't have learned much from just the explanations.
- daedlanth 2y ago[dead]
- zadler 2y agoMaybe this is propaganda and you are being told what to think. Of course AI isn’t going to be a good thing for the majority of humans at all. But it’s very important to manage sentiment within tech audiences.
- johnisgood 2y agoWhy not? Similarly to how "Google" and "Wikipedia" will make people more dumb? Or how the video killed the radio star? I think the cultural or intellectual decline does not have to do much with Google (in terms of search) nor Wikipedia. Heck, some people do not even know how to search properly.
- zadler 2y agoA little sugar is fine. Alot of it kills you.
- johnisgood 2y agoYes, the dose makes the poison, water can kill you too, in excess, so could oxygen. Using LLMs "responsibly" is OK, I do it all the time. I am productive and I still learn a lot. LLMs are not a substitute for thinking as many people would like to believe / pretend.
- briandear 2y agoLuddites would have argued that textile machinery isn’t going to be a good thing for the majority of humans at all. And they were wrong.
- thomashop 2y ago"I cannot emphasize this enough: ChatGPT is not generating meaning. It is arranging word patterns. I could tell GPT to add in an anomaly for the 1970s - like the girl looking at Billy’s Instagram - and it would introduce it into the text without a comment about being anomalous." I asked ChatGPT to introduce the girl looking at Billy's instagram. The response: "Instagram didn't exist in the 1970s. Do you want to keep the setting authentic to the '70s or update the story to a contemporary timeframe where Instagram fits naturally?"
- LeoPanthera 2y agoTo be fair, the very first version of ChatGPT, which this post is about when it was written two years ago, probably would not have queried it.
- moffkalast 2y agoNeeds (2022) then.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- JohnKemeny 2y agoI added "She should look at Billy's instagram while listening" and got > Reasoned for 6 seconds > Her room was dim, a quiet refuge. On the shelf, records sat like relics of her inner life. She placed Carole King’s Tapestry on the turntable, letting its soft crackle fill the space. Beside her bed lay a small smartphone—a strange anachronism—and she swiped open Billy’s Instagram feed. There, his easy smile and snapshots from math class met her longing gaze. The music and the digital images merged, each note echoing her uncertainty: did he really notice her?
- fragmede 2y ago(2022)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- trash_cat 2y ago> The reason the appearance of this tech is so shocking is because it forces us to confront what we value, rather than letting the status quo churn along unexamined. I think this is the most valuable part of the article. It's the writing process itself, which isn't valued in schools.