13 ms·

The suck is why we're here

466 points by herbertl 10mo ago

analogpixel 10mo ago
> I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think. I'm always surprised when people say they use LLMs to do stuff in their Journal/Obsidian/Notion. The whole point of those systems is to make you think better, and then you just offload all of that to a computer.
- Kiro 10mo ago
  > The whole point of those systems is to make you think better I'm not using LLMs for my notes but "think better" has never been a goal for me.
- roughly 10mo ago
  A friend noted that many people seem to be cosplaying their lives, and it’s hard not to see it once it’s pointed out.
  - jackyinger 10mo ago
    Great point, this cosplay phenomenon goes far beyond LLM use.
    - Enginerrrd 9mo ago
      “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” A tale as old as time.
  - alansaber 10mo ago
    Most people do, some just more blatantly
  - yeahforsureman 10mo ago
    Funny, I tend to use larping for similar analogies. Not a huge insight or anything, just crossed my mind... I guess there's also overlap, or at least some kind of similarity with cargo cults, too? :) EDIT: Trying to stay on topic and score some po--, cargo I mean...
    - trashburger 9mo ago
      Call it larping, being performative etc. but it is a concept as old as time. People emulate the interface of successful people without actually having the implementation of successful people.
  - rapidfl 10mo ago
    After reading this comment, I feel leaning into the cosplaying will make me more productive/prolific. Many things I do not push thru on are because they seem superficial or a bit fake. Does not apply to all ppl but maybe there should be phases to cosplay hard. Then reflect and realign.
    - albert_e 10mo ago
      I see your point. I am noticing that I am very quick to get excited about a thing and also very quick to lose motivation to pursue that new thing to a meangful level of understanding and mastery. Yesterday I was excited about something that I wanted to build a proof-of-concept of and blog about proudly. It might take 2-3days of intermittent effort juggling between other things but god was I excited to see it through. I reaped great dopamine learning the first 30% of the stuff by end of day. Today I wake up and am wondering what got me so excited yesterday. Of course I knew the basics of that now, parts of it seem obvious even, would anyone be really interested in me talking about it? If I threw my hat over the fence by cosplaying an active builder and blogger ... maybe I would have seen it through 3 days of commitment?
- akoboldfrying 10mo ago
  IIUC, you believe that (a) using a tool like Notion is a useful brain-multiplying lever vs. struggling to keep everything in your head, but (b) using a tool like an LLM is a harmful brain-rotting exercise vs. struggling to do everything with your head. In your opinion, what is the differentiating factor?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - lukeschlather 10mo ago
    Using a tool like notion is organizing your thoughts into a coherent structure so that you can reexamine them. Running that coherent structure through an LLM replaces your structured thoughts with other thoughts you didn't have. You've gone to all this trouble to record your memories so they don't change, and then you run them through a machine that replaces your memories with randomly generated ones. I think AI is a great tool in certain circumstances, but this sounds like one of the clearest examples where it is brain rot.
- kettlecorn 10mo ago
  Sometimes when working through difficult problems I will write pages of notes exploring a topic from a bunch of different angles until my brain is a bit exhausted. I've found LLMs work reasonably well to just copy-paste that blob of thoughts into to have them summarize the key points back to me in a more coherent form.
  - kaashif 10mo ago
    I find value in going from the unstructured blob of notes into structured and coherent thoughts myself, rather than with an LLM. If I understand something well, I can write something coherent easily. What you describe feels to me along the lines of studying for an exam by photocopying a textbook over and over.
    - ragequittah 10mo ago
      Usually studying a test book is reconceptualizing it in whatever way fits the way you learn. For some people that's notes, for some it's flash cards, for some it's reading the textbook twice and they just get it. To imagine LLMs have no use case here seems dishonest. If I don't understand a particularly hard part of the subject matter and the textbook doesn't expand on it enough you can tell the LLM to break it down further with sources. I know this works because I've been doing it with Google (slowly, very slowly) for decades. Now it's just way more convenient to get to the ideas you want to learn about and expand them as far as you want to go.
      - nunez 10mo ago
        My issue with using LLMs for this use case is that they can be wrong, and when they are, I'm doing the research myself anyway.
        ragequittah 9mo ago
        The times it's wrong has become vanishingly small. At least for the things I use it for (mostly technical). Chatgpt with extended thinking and feeding it the docs url or a pdf or 3 to start you'll very rarely get an error. Especially when compared to google / stack exchange.
- jphorism 10mo ago
  It's possible to do both. I write in a small field journal to think better, then periodically use Wispr Flow to quickly transcribe it to Obsidian (where I can use LLMs on the writing).
- wtetzner 10mo ago
  And what is the point of AI generated posts when everyone has access to LLMs themselves? They can also generate whatever text they want.
Quarrelsome 10mo ago
reminds me of descartes. I was mentioning him the other day to my schizo mother in law, who hears voices, to offer the comfort of "I think, therefore I am". The idea being that during her worst episodes she might latch onto the thought that she is thinking, so while the voices _are_ scary; she still exists, she's still in control, she is thinking, therefore she is. Anyway, I casually mentioned he did a lot of his thinking in an oven and her curiousity was really piqued by that idea. Which is funny because every time I mention it to someone, that's the bit that is most interesting to them. I'm not convinced that an AI would necessarily pick up on that detail being of note as much as a human would.
- egypturnash 10mo ago
  Sadly some searching suggests that this fascinatingly eccentric image of Descartes sticking his head in an oven for a really good think is a mistranslation of "Descartes did a lot of his thinking in a room warmed by an oven". Best of luck to your mother-in-law in finding a way to deal with her voices, though. <3
- bschmidt5545541 9mo ago
  [dead]
zdragnar 10mo ago
> The path behind easy only leads to the lowest common denominator. The real artists, fighters, makers—they stick with a truth as old as time itself: The suck is why we’re here, and only those who overcome it themselves will reap all the rewards of their hard labor. The other day, my wife needed to divide something, and rather than get up and walk to the next room to grab her phone, she did it on pen and paper longhand. At first I was amazed that she bothered instead of grabbing her phone to do it. Then it occurred to me that, while more people than I expect probably remember how to divide by hand correctly, I don't think I've actually seen someone do it in years, perhaps since my school days. I do agree with the author that art is a human endeavor and mastery requires practice... But I'm less optimistic that mass adoption of the easy way will let masters stand out. More likely, they'll just be buried under the deluge of slop the public craves.
yakattak 10mo ago
> Because I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think. I feel like this will get missed by the general public. What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something. I like LLMs to get me to reword something, since I struggle with that. But just like in programming I focus it on a specific sentence or two. Otherwise why am I doing it?
- BurritoAlPastor 10mo ago
  > What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.
  - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - SamoyedFurFluff 10mo ago
    I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…
readthenotes1 10mo ago
"If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. " Surely, an AI generated text would have been pedantically correct and used the subjunctive mood there, "If that were..."
skybrian 10mo ago
> “Having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made.” I don't disagree, but on the other hand, searches are not useless. They're limited because you do need to create a query capturing what it is that you're looking for, in advance. But we do that all the time.
vunderba 10mo ago
From the article: > When you’re stuck and sit there, thinking, trying to come up with what’s next, that’s the valuable part of writing. Not just what’s next, but the question of what to write in the first place. I’ve pointed it out before, but this idea of quiet contemplation is exactly where LLMs completely pratfall. The fewer details or instructions you give them, the less novel the output. I can’t speak for everyone, but when I want to write a new blog post on my site, it’s precisely the opposite. I dim the lights, sit quietly, and let the neurological brownian motion machine do its thing.
- CuriouslyC 10mo ago
  Polar opposite. Too many ideas, insufficient time/motivation to give them the treatment they deserve. I'd lovingly hand craft them, but honestly quality doesn't convert, content is a slot machine, gold will fail one day and shit will strike it big the next. When the people complaining about slop stop upvoting it maybe I'll come around.
nospice 10mo ago
Some folks might enjoy writing for the sake of writing. But I'd wager they don't enjoy, say, plumbing for the sake of plumbing? When their toilet is clogged, they call a pro and don't treat it as a journey of personal growth. I think this works both ways. Your average plumber doesn't enjoy writing. It's something they might need to do from now and then, but if you give them a magic box that solves the problem, they're gonna be overjoyed. One less chore. Plumbing or writing, I don't think you can convince people not to take shortcuts by telling them "but the fact it's hard is what makes it worthwhile for you!"
- hunterloftis 10mo ago
  My takeaway from the read wasn't that it was trying to convince anyone to take any particular action, and even emphasized that the mediocrity of AI output as more people use it will be a benefit to the smaller number of people doing their own thinking.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- tolerance 10mo ago
  My impression is that the author’s intended audience is other ‘Writers™’. But you can still make the case that writers and plumbers alike who enjoy doing their work for its own sake should embrace the reward effected by conquering the tedium of their trade and not take shortcuts.
- jphorism 10mo ago
  The plumbing metaphor is interesting. The most adjacent place I've heard this metaphor is in theology (Mako Fujimura) The goal of plumbing is to fix / repair; certainly it's possible to enjoy fixing and repairing. But is the joy of writing in "repairing ideas"? How is that a separate concept from creating new ones?
- xantronix 10mo ago
  I think the crucial difference here is that literally anybody can write without taking on years of training or a tremendous financial burden.
arkaic 10mo ago
What happens when the AI perfects the art of writing? From one turing test goalpost to the next, fooling the human utterly each time until it's forever. Is there a ceiling to this?
BoredPositron 10mo ago
You can't prompt for taste yet and bad taste shines through every medium.
thundergolfer 10mo ago
> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. It's easier than ever to be a p99.999% oil painter, but compared with p99.999% film directors basically no one cares at all. Because painting is not in high demand, and film still is, for now. If the demand for your certain kind of writing vastly diminishes, it is your detriment. AI's supply effect is changing the demand. George Eliot already wrote a p99.99999% novel, Middlemarch. It is only thanks to massive population growth that the number of readers of her novel has increased or remained steady. As a proportion of the population, Middlemarch has no readership, and is a side show of a side show. It has almost completely lost its once hallowed place in society and culture.
ronbenton 10mo ago
>The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. I had some musings about this with respect to blogging. Especially because search engines are now placing their own summaries above SEO-optimized junk posts. Those posts become disincentivized. Hopefully, it leaves us with more people writing blogs for the sake of writing rather than trying to sell clicks.
- namrog84 10mo ago
  The downside of this is what happens in other places. You won't neccesarily stand out. The entities doing endless reposts are building faster bigger audiences and might or will repost your stand out piece. If you care that you wrote it and that people enjoy it. All is good. But I'd you wanted to stand out with it or build around it. The low effort reposters might take that from you. In a rare occasion I've even seen a reposter shorten or better edit the original piece. Though I am still hopefully optimistic that in the long run for the good
throw7 10mo ago
"...reading actual books in full might now be more valuable than it ever has been..." Call me old fashioned, but when has this been ever not true? Like yeah, does someone read cliffs notes and go, "that was really edifying and I gleaned incredible insights into myself and the world!!!".
- dkdcio 10mo ago
  this is my constant take with “AI”…if you were lazy before, you’re lazy now. if you were producing slop before, you’re producing slop now I think this just widens the gap between people who give a shit and those who don’t the big thing that changes are the economics of laziness and slop
- socalgal2 10mo ago
  depends on the book? I've read lots of books where it turned out the author had effectively one idea, it should have been 1 chapter, but they turned it into a book with 24 chapters of filler.
  - jraby3 10mo ago
    I've thought about this a lot. But my conclusion is that many times the base idea is valuable but the author spends time using examples and different use cases to show you the effectiveness of the idea and a wider range of uses. Of course this isn't always true but it's true quite often. Take one random example - Spark: The Revolutionary Science of Exercise and the Brain. The idea is in the title. You don't need to read more than that to benefit from the idea. But all the different varieties of benefit and pathways and studies the author sites are still valuable.
    - sidrag22 10mo ago
      another example Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World idea is also in the title,and it displays so many different scenarios of people engaging with specialized fields and interacting with them in ways that relate to their past experiences.
  - 9mo ago
jphorism 10mo ago
I wonder if the premium on consistent writing quality is different than the premium we place on consistent novelty. I'd hazard a guess that from the writer's perspective, novelty scales with volume of thought / connections, which is (at present) a fragmented process and not that well-assisted by AI. OTOH, can "writing quality" be better approximated by LLMs?
mzajc 10mo ago
> In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. I really want this to be the case, but what I've observed so far is that slop networks with thousands of domains and millions generated articles simply drown out everything else. It's becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart pages written by humans from those written by conmen, especially if I'm not an expert on the subject matter. As an incredibly egregious example, here's one of the top results (#1/#2 on duckduckgo) for "wireguard mesh": https://www.ltwireworks.com/blog/how-to-configure-wireguard-for-a-mesh-network-938209.html https://www.ltwireworks.com/blog/how-to-configure-wireguard-.... Yes, it's a grill mesh manufacturer.
- lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
  lmao ok I love this just for comedy
jolhoeft 10mo ago
A cautionary warning about AI I'm starting to use is, "make sure you aren't taking a forklift to the gym". Getting heavy objects of the ground is vastly easier with mechanical assistance, but doing so completely misses the point of lifting weights. A work related example I have is using AI to generate project plans. LLMs can probably generate an ok project plan for straightforward projects with plenty of examples to be trained on. But perhaps the most important value of generating a plan is the thinking that goes into it. Considering alternatives, likely failures, unlikely failures, etc. In generating the plan you are starting to practice dealing with problem that would come up while implementing it. The knowledge in your head is more valuable than the document produced. The document is just a summary of all the thinking you have done. Essentially a collection of mnemonics. Many details in your head will never make it into the formal plan, but will be needed during implementation.
- nunez 10mo ago
  A more accurate metaphor comparing the gym to LLMs IMO is using cable machines in place of old-school barbell and dumbbell work. You can --- and people have --- built strength-focused programming around cable machines. "They're safer and work target muscle groups more efficiently" is usually the argument. A Life Fitness Synergy system is also much more practical to own inside of one's house than a power rack and 1000+ lb of plates that will make quick work of most home flooring. This strategy works. It's sure as shit better than doing nothing. But quadriceps, delts and lats don't work in isolation. They rely on secondary and tertiary muscles and entire kinetic chains to help them accomplish tasks. Cables do hit muscle groups directly, but they also lead to diminishing strength and physique returns much more quickly than boring traditional weight training. They also lead to problematic muscle imbalances that, ironically, can cause overuse injuries later in life (super heavy leg extensions with improper knee flexion comes to mind).
  - tpdly 9mo ago
    Just because LLMs are a technological innovation for "going to the gym" does not make cable machines a good metaphor. Maybe cable machines with cables made of highly variable grade hemp are comparable to LLMs-- they'll break randomly, and cause unexpected friction here and there. A cable machine still involves a human doing a thing. A forklift at the gym does the work instead. All this fluff about targeting specific muscles etc is simply not analogous to LLMS. Maybe old-school barbells are paper files and fax machines, and cable machines are Slack, Asana, and Excel?
jewel 10mo ago
"If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading." - https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/
komali2 10mo ago
I strongly recommend "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sonle Ahrens, it gets into how important writing is as a part of the process of thinking and learning.
- snoman 10mo ago
  Maybe you’re the person I’ve been looking for but I’ve yet to find someone that actually maintains a zettelkasten that isn’t a researcher/author and doesn’t come to the conclusion that it’s a huge waste of time and energy.
  - 63stack 9mo ago
    I just had the same thought. I searched for the book mentioned, and as soon as zettelkasten popped up I lost interest. I've read about zettelkasten so many times, but I can't get myself to actually try it, it seems like doing organization for the sake of declaring "I'm very organized", regardless whether it's efficient or not.
    - komali2 9mo ago
      I had this same issue with my original zettelkasten system in org-roam. Also it had become just, a locally indexed wikipedia. This book is probably not the greatest resource for establishing a zettelkasten, but it is very good at demonstrating how a good externalized writing system is critical for getting good learning done and finding unique insights. Also, it addresses the wikipedia issue I had specifically. As another person mentioned in this thread, making the notes more like proper publishable writing (even if just a sentence) made a big difference.
  - tpdly 9mo ago
    I've found it somewhat valuable in two ways and unhelpful/misleading in another: 1. Making small notes is so intuitive and low-pressure. I was already essentially doing before but in the form of various lists of "ideas" or "thoughts on _blank_". You can't reliably decide where you would've put something, it becomes a mess. The fact its a single directory of .md's with a phrasal titles is a great organizing constraint. 2. Being able to find old thoughts/ideas easily and link them together lead to the clarification of a lot of my more unique ideas because of the ad hoc link-language that emerged. The big problems are the rabbit hole of manic articles promising too much, and the fact that after a while you simply have too many half-baked two-year-old notes that the whole thing becomes limiting and your declare note bankruptcy.
nemo1618 10mo ago
This is conflating two things: The stuck, and the suck. As the author says, the time you spend stuck is the time you're actually thinking. The friction is where the work happens. But being stuck doesn't have to suck. It does suck, most of the time, for most people; but most people have also experienced flow, where you are still thinking hard, but in a way that does not suck. Current psychotechnology for reducing or removing the suck is very limited. The best you can do is like... meditate a lot. Or take stimulants, maybe. I am optimistic that within the next few decades we will develop much more sophisticated means of un-suckifying these experiences, so that we can dispense with cope like "it's supposed to be unpleasant" once and for all.
ar_turnbull 10mo ago
The point about recognizing what’s valuable and making sure you don’t outsource that resonates. The other day I was on LinkedIn and a Chief Design Officer at a notable company posted her reflections on leadership for the year. There were some potentially interesting insights, but they never got past a surface level. The AI-ness of the writing was as clear as day (and GPTZero tagged it as 100% likely to be AI). It’s disappointing when you see leaders and so-called stewards of taste farming out that part of their voice.
- fabianholzer 10mo ago
  > It’s disappointing when you see leaders and so-called stewards of taste farming out that part of their voice. The bland platitudes of corporate management were mindbogglingly boring drivel already in the era before LLMs went mainstream. What we get nowadays is just more of it. That stuff should be skipped anyways. What was not worth writing is not worth reading.
cryptica 10mo ago
> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out I totally disagree with this point. It's a combination of wishful thinking and denial. LLMs do a very fine job at writing if you give them the right base of information/insights. I think it will totally obliterate 'writing' as a differentiable skill. What will happen IMO is that people who have interesting ideas and experiences but suck at writing will have the upper hand. The market for content will be flooded by articles from people who would normally not write. They will feed the LLMs bullet points of interesting facts and observations and let the LLM fill in the gaps and actually make the article engaging. What matters is that the core points have to be interesting. The AI cannot come up with brilliant insights but it can convey brilliant insights really well. I think even if, hypothetically, some people could tell apart AI-generated content from manually written content, some AI-generated content may actually be more interesting and valuable to read than the manually written one... At the end of the day, writing by itself doesn't matter; it's just a communication medium. What matters are insights, ideas, concepts, perspectives... It was always about substance, not form. It's a flaw of the human mind that some people used form as a proxy for substance. There are a lot of people who know a lot and have a lot to say but they were so busy experiencing and learning that they never had time to write before... And even if they did, they could not convey their ideas effectively before. Now given that LLMs have mastered the superficial aspects of communication, those aspects are no longer valuable and substance is more valuable. But IMO nobody will care whether articles or books were written by AI in the future. It won't have much effect on quality or value of the book/article. I think what will matter in the future are: - Insights, ideas, perspectives. - Media (the most important still); who intermediates content distribution gets to decide what people consume and can shape their perception of quality to a significant extent. I'm hoping that as more people get involved in writing using LLMs, that it will force more people to confront the second point... People will be forced to pay more attention to substance as it will be the only real differentiator. I'm hoping people will begin to feel disgusted by the low level of substance that current media platforms purvey... It's already kind of happening; people invented the term "AI slop" but really it's not just AI which produces slop. The media has been guilty of spreading slop for quite some time and it kept getting worse. Now AI is just a convenient strawman to bash.
tills13 10mo ago
If someone, without my permission, used my content to create a replacement of me, for me -- however shitty -- I would probably commit a crime against that person. How are people so brazen? Or rude? Or stupid? Or psychopathic?
rballpug 10mo ago
A three-fold normative proposition.
cryptica 10mo ago
> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out I think this may be a form of denial. The reality is likely the opposite: AI will commoditize the act of writing entirely, shifting the value solely to insight. For too long, we’ve confused "good writing" with "good thinking." We assumed that if someone wrote beautifully, they had something smart to say. Conversely, we ignored brilliant people simply because they couldn't articulate their complex ideas effectively. AI fixes this market inefficiency. It allows experts who are too busy actually doing things to finally compete with professional writers. They provide the raw brilliance (the substance), and the AI provides the polish (the form).
- ares623 10mo ago
  I think you’re missing the other half to that conclusion.
- phanimahesh 10mo ago
  Now people can articulate bullshit better with LLMs.
  - cryptica 9mo ago
    Yet my comment which you responded to, which was Gemini-generated, got more responses and engagement than my handwritten one! Yes, I actually did this as an experiment. From my perspective they are both different ways to communicate the same idea (with different effectiveness, different level of detail, to different audiences). I don't regard my Gemini-generated one as being any less 'my own work' as the one I painstakingly wrote by hand. It gets to the core of what writing should be about. It should be about substance, not form. LLMs are equalizers when it comes to form. Time to focus on substance now!
- wtetzner 10mo ago
  > Conversely, we ignored brilliant people simply because they couldn't articulate their complex ideas effectively. I don't see how AI helps here. If you can't articulate your idea, then 1) how clear is that idea in your head anyway 2) how are you going to articulate it to the LLM?
NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
these type of posts really do have "professional painter says photocamera has no use for him" vibe casual painting also "makes you remember how to see" and stuff - that doesn't mean that taking photos stop you. It's just different
- tpdly 9mo ago
  Bad analogy. More like, "Professional painter says he doesn't employ low wage contractors to paint for him" If your rebuttal is "Michelangelo would've only painted the broad strokes and the faces" you're still missing the point that he still /did some painting/.
  - NooneAtAll3 9mo ago
    where in Ai use did you find low wage contractors? both Photography and Ai are literally "click a (shutter) button" - so photo analogy is perfect And Michelangelo is bad example because it's "ye old paintings" (you could've at least tried with Picasso or smth) - while my argument would be "painters got replaced by photographers"
- jstgunderscore 9mo ago
  When the camera was invented, no one was claiming a photo was a painting. The camera replaced painters for the "I want to capture a static image" market but not the "I want art as expressed by a painter" market. While tragic for a lot of painters at the time, it does seem like the cost of progress. In writing, there is no "objective capture" like with cameras; there's no tech that can take a picture of your conscious thoughts and translate that to words on a page in a way that's reproducible. So there is only a single arena of "written expression" that LLMs and traditional writers are competing in. And while there is a strong desired market for "art as expressed by the [human] writer," the product itself is much more difficult to distinguish from the new tech (LLM writing) than a photo from a painting. And the low effort of entry into this desired market with LLM writing is driving its dilution. The analogy would work if instead they invented a magical camera that could turn any scene into a painting in any art style reliably, and hide the painting's origins.
maxfromua 10mo ago
I feel like part of this post is a bit of hypocrisy. > This is why reading actual books in full might now be more valuable than it ever has been: Only if you’ve seen every word will you discover insights and links an AI would never include in its average-driven summary. Is summarizing by a human much different? Let's check if the author has a consistent stance on reading every word. https://nik.art/books/ https://nik.art/books/ > The 4 Minute Millionaire: 44 Lessons to Rethink Money, Invest Wisely, and Grow Wealthy in 4 Minutes a Day > This book compiles 44 lessons from some 20 of history’s best books about money, finance, and investing. Each lesson can be read in about 4 minutes and comes with a short action item. Hmmmm
- benrutter 10mo ago
  Not sure that's fair- claiming you prefer reading texts in full to summaries doesn't seem the same as saying you don't ever want to read a summary in any context? Aside from that, it seems more valuable to think about the odeas in the blog on their own merit, rather than attacking the writer for not having been true to those ideas in every past action.
- b3kart 9mo ago
  Not necessarily: assuming I've been following Nik for a while, I have reasons to trust his summary more than an LLMs summary. I would understand Nik's biases, and understand why he would focus on one thing over another. Nik would have a reputational incentive to do a good job and not completely misrepresent the book. I would also value Nik's personal, subjective view on the material, having an understanding of his background, and, again, his biases. On the other hand, I would have no idea what an LLM would focus on when summarizing, I would have no reason to trust it (LLMs fail in unpredictable ways), and an LLMs "opinion" is some average over the internet's + annotator's opinions.
- _bypa 9mo ago
  > Is summarizing by a human much different? One thing I have noticed and drives me up the wall with AI-generated summaries is that they don't provide decent summaries most of the time. They are summaries of an actual summary. For instance: "This document describes a six-step plan to deploy microservices to any cloud using the same user code, leading to various new trade-offs." OK, so what are these six steps and what are the trade-offs? That would be the real summary I want, not the blurb. The point of a summary is to tell me what the most important ideas are, not make me read the damn document. This also happens with AI summaries of meetings: "The team had a discussion on the benefits of adopting a new technology." OK, so what, if any, were the conclusions? Unfortunately, LLMs have learned to summarize from bad examples, but a human can and ought to be able to provide a better one.
phplovesong 10mo ago
The webs downfall started with AI. Soon everything will be AI generated, from text posts, code that is shared with "look what i made, its cOoL", videos, podcasts etc. The himan touch will be gone, and new models are then trained on AI generated content, making the feedback loop worse and worse. It is time for a new web. A new standard, a new everything. A new start without the AI bloat. Either something like this will emerge, or we will loose the web we have.
- sanderjd 9mo ago
  I've been reading about the web's downfall for way longer than generative AI has existed.
  - phplovesong 9mo ago
    Indeed. But AI is something we have not seen before. It does not gatekeep, it devours and destroys.
    - sanderjd 9mo ago
      Yeah, I tend to agree, just trying to check my assumptions. There was always some newfangled thing killing the web every other time too. I would also say that those pronouncements of doom were not necessarily wrong, but that it's been more of a long decline than a fall. I think my expectation is for that to continue.
ciconia 10mo ago
> but I quickly concluded the writing suffered from the same uncanny valley effect as many AI-generated images: It all looks fine enough at first glance, but pay attention just a little longer, and something feels off. My thoughts exactly. In all my interactions with gen AI it was always the same: on the surface it looks pretty convincing, but once you look more deeply it's obviously non-sense. AI is great at superficial imitation of human-created work. It fails miserably at doing anything deeper. I think the biggest problem with AI is that most people just don't take the time or effort anymore to really look at an image, really read a text, or really listen to a piece of music, or a podcast. We've become so habituated to mindlessly consuming content that we can't even tell anymore if it's just a bunch of stochastic nonsense.
- eamag 10mo ago
  https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test You can try to do a turning test. I've met several people claiming they can always find AI art, all of them can't do it (and AI art became even better now!)
- stavros 10mo ago
  This is comparing LLMs to the best humans, and concludes that LLM output is "nonsense". Well, LLM output is better than the average human's output, and there are a many of humans at and below the average. For four billion people, using an LLM to create things is a marked improvement.
- stavros 10mo ago
  This is comparing LLMs to the best humans, and concludes that LLM output is "nonsense". Well, LLM output is better than the average human's output, and there are a many of humans at and below the average. For four billion people, using an LLM to create things is a marked improvement. I'm not sure how you'd explain the phenomenally widespread use of LLMs otherwise. By the way: Can you tell whether my comment (this one) was written by an LLM or not?
  - zacharyvoase 10mo ago
jeffrallen 10mo ago
I work in IT ops for a cloud provider. When the going gets tough, I remind my colleagues that the harder it is to operate these servers with no customer visible downtime, the happier they are to pay us for it. The suck is why we're here. Your suck is my profit margin.
djaouen 9mo ago
> The suck is why we’re here, and only those who overcome it themselves will reap all the rewards of their hard labor. Thinking/writing isn't "the suck". > because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. The creators of The Enhanced Games/Olympics would disagree with you. Which brings me to my point: Are we satisfied being "Top Slave" or do we want to be Free? Or do you believe that Freedom is an illusion?
bschmidt25004 9mo ago
[dead]
aucisson_masque 9mo ago
> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger I’m afraid people will just start getting used to ai written book and go on with it. Just like what happen on YouTube. It’s only going to decrease writer possibilities because their earning will decrease.
- sc68cal 9mo ago
  "AI might be destroying knowledge, causing harm to society, and making people intellectually lazy but it benefits me for a small period of time!"
wafflehouse 9mo ago
i hate everything
wafflehouse 9mo ago
i hate everything !!

466 points by herbertl 10mo ago

> I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think. I'm always surprised when people say they use LLMs to do stuff in their Journal/Obsidian/Notion. The whole point of those systems is to make you think better, and then you just offload all of that to a computer.

Kiro 10mo ago
> The whole point of those systems is to make you think better I'm not using LLMs for my notes but "think better" has never been a goal for me.
roughly 10mo ago
A friend noted that many people seem to be cosplaying their lives, and it’s hard not to see it once it’s pointed out.
- jackyinger 10mo ago
  Great point, this cosplay phenomenon goes far beyond LLM use.
  - Enginerrrd 9mo ago
    “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” A tale as old as time.
- alansaber 10mo ago
  Most people do, some just more blatantly
- yeahforsureman 10mo ago
  Funny, I tend to use larping for similar analogies. Not a huge insight or anything, just crossed my mind... I guess there's also overlap, or at least some kind of similarity with cargo cults, too? :) EDIT: Trying to stay on topic and score some po--, cargo I mean...
  - trashburger 9mo ago
    Call it larping, being performative etc. but it is a concept as old as time. People emulate the interface of successful people without actually having the implementation of successful people.
- rapidfl 10mo ago
  After reading this comment, I feel leaning into the cosplaying will make me more productive/prolific. Many things I do not push thru on are because they seem superficial or a bit fake. Does not apply to all ppl but maybe there should be phases to cosplay hard. Then reflect and realign.
  - albert_e 10mo ago
    I see your point. I am noticing that I am very quick to get excited about a thing and also very quick to lose motivation to pursue that new thing to a meangful level of understanding and mastery. Yesterday I was excited about something that I wanted to build a proof-of-concept of and blog about proudly. It might take 2-3days of intermittent effort juggling between other things but god was I excited to see it through. I reaped great dopamine learning the first 30% of the stuff by end of day. Today I wake up and am wondering what got me so excited yesterday. Of course I knew the basics of that now, parts of it seem obvious even, would anyone be really interested in me talking about it? If I threw my hat over the fence by cosplaying an active builder and blogger ... maybe I would have seen it through 3 days of commitment?
akoboldfrying 10mo ago
IIUC, you believe that (a) using a tool like Notion is a useful brain-multiplying lever vs. struggling to keep everything in your head, but (b) using a tool like an LLM is a harmful brain-rotting exercise vs. struggling to do everything with your head. In your opinion, what is the differentiating factor?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- lukeschlather 10mo ago
  Using a tool like notion is organizing your thoughts into a coherent structure so that you can reexamine them. Running that coherent structure through an LLM replaces your structured thoughts with other thoughts you didn't have. You've gone to all this trouble to record your memories so they don't change, and then you run them through a machine that replaces your memories with randomly generated ones. I think AI is a great tool in certain circumstances, but this sounds like one of the clearest examples where it is brain rot.
kettlecorn 10mo ago
Sometimes when working through difficult problems I will write pages of notes exploring a topic from a bunch of different angles until my brain is a bit exhausted. I've found LLMs work reasonably well to just copy-paste that blob of thoughts into to have them summarize the key points back to me in a more coherent form.
- kaashif 10mo ago
  I find value in going from the unstructured blob of notes into structured and coherent thoughts myself, rather than with an LLM. If I understand something well, I can write something coherent easily. What you describe feels to me along the lines of studying for an exam by photocopying a textbook over and over.
  - ragequittah 10mo ago
    Usually studying a test book is reconceptualizing it in whatever way fits the way you learn. For some people that's notes, for some it's flash cards, for some it's reading the textbook twice and they just get it. To imagine LLMs have no use case here seems dishonest. If I don't understand a particularly hard part of the subject matter and the textbook doesn't expand on it enough you can tell the LLM to break it down further with sources. I know this works because I've been doing it with Google (slowly, very slowly) for decades. Now it's just way more convenient to get to the ideas you want to learn about and expand them as far as you want to go.
    - nunez 10mo ago
      My issue with using LLMs for this use case is that they can be wrong, and when they are, I'm doing the research myself anyway.
      - ragequittah 9mo ago
        The times it's wrong has become vanishingly small. At least for the things I use it for (mostly technical). Chatgpt with extended thinking and feeding it the docs url or a pdf or 3 to start you'll very rarely get an error. Especially when compared to google / stack exchange.
jphorism 10mo ago
It's possible to do both. I write in a small field journal to think better, then periodically use Wispr Flow to quickly transcribe it to Obsidian (where I can use LLMs on the writing).
wtetzner 10mo ago
And what is the point of AI generated posts when everyone has access to LLMs themselves? They can also generate whatever text they want.

Quarrelsome 10mo ago

reminds me of descartes. I was mentioning him the other day to my schizo mother in law, who hears voices, to offer the comfort of "I think, therefore I am". The idea being that during her worst episodes she might latch onto the thought that she is thinking, so while the voices _are_ scary; she still exists, she's still in control, she is thinking, therefore she is. Anyway, I casually mentioned he did a lot of his thinking in an oven and her curiousity was really piqued by that idea. Which is funny because every time I mention it to someone, that's the bit that is most interesting to them. I'm not convinced that an AI would necessarily pick up on that detail being of note as much as a human would.

egypturnash 10mo ago
Sadly some searching suggests that this fascinatingly eccentric image of Descartes sticking his head in an oven for a really good think is a mistranslation of "Descartes did a lot of his thinking in a room warmed by an oven". Best of luck to your mother-in-law in finding a way to deal with her voices, though. <3
bschmidt5545541 9mo ago
[dead]

zdragnar 10mo ago

> The path behind easy only leads to the lowest common denominator. The real artists, fighters, makers—they stick with a truth as old as time itself: The suck is why we’re here, and only those who overcome it themselves will reap all the rewards of their hard labor. The other day, my wife needed to divide something, and rather than get up and walk to the next room to grab her phone, she did it on pen and paper longhand. At first I was amazed that she bothered instead of grabbing her phone to do it. Then it occurred to me that, while more people than I expect probably remember how to divide by hand correctly, I don't think I've actually seen someone do it in years, perhaps since my school days. I do agree with the author that art is a human endeavor and mastery requires practice... But I'm less optimistic that mass adoption of the easy way will let masters stand out. More likely, they'll just be buried under the deluge of slop the public craves.

yakattak 10mo ago

> Because I don’t write a daily blog to crank out a post every day. If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. I write a daily blog to make sure I remember how to think. I feel like this will get missed by the general public. What’s the point in generating writing or generating art if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? I could generate some weird 70s sci fi art, make an Instagram profile around that, barrage the algorithm with my posts and rack up likes. The likes will give that instant dopamine but it will never fill that need of accomplishing something. I like LLMs to get me to reword something, since I struggle with that. But just like in programming I focus it on a specific sentence or two. Otherwise why am I doing it?

BurritoAlPastor 10mo ago
> What’s the point in generating writing … if it gives next to zero feelings of accomplishment? Getting promoted, getting a better job, generating sales leads, things of that nature. A depressing number of blogs or LinkedIn posts exist only because the author is under some vague belief that it’s part of what they’re supposed to be doing to get ahead in their career.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- SamoyedFurFluff 10mo ago
  I think somewhere along the way something has gone terribly wrong in the way we allocate capital to incentivize behavior. Somehow as a society we incentivize (aka distribute capital to) the people who educate our next generation and the people who care for our elders less than the people who smoke weed on podcasts and talk for hours into a camera or a microphone…

readthenotes1 10mo ago

"If that was the point, I’d have switched to AI long ago already. " Surely, an AI generated text would have been pedantically correct and used the subjunctive mood there, "If that were..."

skybrian 10mo ago

> “Having AI summarize a book or a paper for me is a disaster. It has no idea what I really wanted to know. It would not have made the connections I would have made.” I don't disagree, but on the other hand, searches are not useless. They're limited because you do need to create a query capturing what it is that you're looking for, in advance. But we do that all the time.

vunderba 10mo ago

From the article: > When you’re stuck and sit there, thinking, trying to come up with what’s next, that’s the valuable part of writing. Not just what’s next, but the question of what to write in the first place. I’ve pointed it out before, but this idea of quiet contemplation is exactly where LLMs completely pratfall. The fewer details or instructions you give them, the less novel the output. I can’t speak for everyone, but when I want to write a new blog post on my site, it’s precisely the opposite. I dim the lights, sit quietly, and let the neurological brownian motion machine do its thing.

CuriouslyC 10mo ago
Polar opposite. Too many ideas, insufficient time/motivation to give them the treatment they deserve. I'd lovingly hand craft them, but honestly quality doesn't convert, content is a slot machine, gold will fail one day and shit will strike it big the next. When the people complaining about slop stop upvoting it maybe I'll come around.

nospice 10mo ago

Some folks might enjoy writing for the sake of writing. But I'd wager they don't enjoy, say, plumbing for the sake of plumbing? When their toilet is clogged, they call a pro and don't treat it as a journey of personal growth. I think this works both ways. Your average plumber doesn't enjoy writing. It's something they might need to do from now and then, but if you give them a magic box that solves the problem, they're gonna be overjoyed. One less chore. Plumbing or writing, I don't think you can convince people not to take shortcuts by telling them "but the fact it's hard is what makes it worthwhile for you!"

hunterloftis 10mo ago
My takeaway from the read wasn't that it was trying to convince anyone to take any particular action, and even emphasized that the mediocrity of AI output as more people use it will be a benefit to the smaller number of people doing their own thinking.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
tolerance 10mo ago
My impression is that the author’s intended audience is other ‘Writers™’. But you can still make the case that writers and plumbers alike who enjoy doing their work for its own sake should embrace the reward effected by conquering the tedium of their trade and not take shortcuts.
jphorism 10mo ago
The plumbing metaphor is interesting. The most adjacent place I've heard this metaphor is in theology (Mako Fujimura) The goal of plumbing is to fix / repair; certainly it's possible to enjoy fixing and repairing. But is the joy of writing in "repairing ideas"? How is that a separate concept from creating new ones?
xantronix 10mo ago
I think the crucial difference here is that literally anybody can write without taking on years of training or a tremendous financial burden.

arkaic 10mo ago

What happens when the AI perfects the art of writing? From one turing test goalpost to the next, fooling the human utterly each time until it's forever. Is there a ceiling to this?

BoredPositron 10mo ago

You can't prompt for taste yet and bad taste shines through every medium.

thundergolfer 10mo ago

> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. It's easier than ever to be a p99.999% oil painter, but compared with p99.999% film directors basically no one cares at all. Because painting is not in high demand, and film still is, for now. If the demand for your certain kind of writing vastly diminishes, it is your detriment. AI's supply effect is changing the demand. George Eliot already wrote a p99.99999% novel, Middlemarch. It is only thanks to massive population growth that the number of readers of her novel has increased or remained steady. As a proportion of the population, Middlemarch has no readership, and is a side show of a side show. It has almost completely lost its once hallowed place in society and culture.

ronbenton 10mo ago

namrog84 10mo ago
The downside of this is what happens in other places. You won't neccesarily stand out. The entities doing endless reposts are building faster bigger audiences and might or will repost your stand out piece. If you care that you wrote it and that people enjoy it. All is good. But I'd you wanted to stand out with it or build around it. The low effort reposters might take that from you. In a rare occasion I've even seen a reposter shorten or better edit the original piece. Though I am still hopefully optimistic that in the long run for the good

throw7 10mo ago

"...reading actual books in full might now be more valuable than it ever has been..." Call me old fashioned, but when has this been ever not true? Like yeah, does someone read cliffs notes and go, "that was really edifying and I gleaned incredible insights into myself and the world!!!".

dkdcio 10mo ago
this is my constant take with “AI”…if you were lazy before, you’re lazy now. if you were producing slop before, you’re producing slop now I think this just widens the gap between people who give a shit and those who don’t the big thing that changes are the economics of laziness and slop
socalgal2 10mo ago
depends on the book? I've read lots of books where it turned out the author had effectively one idea, it should have been 1 chapter, but they turned it into a book with 24 chapters of filler.
- jraby3 10mo ago
  I've thought about this a lot. But my conclusion is that many times the base idea is valuable but the author spends time using examples and different use cases to show you the effectiveness of the idea and a wider range of uses. Of course this isn't always true but it's true quite often. Take one random example - Spark: The Revolutionary Science of Exercise and the Brain. The idea is in the title. You don't need to read more than that to benefit from the idea. But all the different varieties of benefit and pathways and studies the author sites are still valuable.
  - sidrag22 10mo ago
    another example Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World idea is also in the title,and it displays so many different scenarios of people engaging with specialized fields and interacting with them in ways that relate to their past experiences.
- 9mo ago

jphorism 10mo ago

I wonder if the premium on consistent writing quality is different than the premium we place on consistent novelty. I'd hazard a guess that from the writer's perspective, novelty scales with volume of thought / connections, which is (at present) a fragmented process and not that well-assisted by AI. OTOH, can "writing quality" be better approximated by LLMs?

mzajc 10mo ago

> In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out—because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. I really want this to be the case, but what I've observed so far is that slop networks with thousands of domains and millions generated articles simply drown out everything else. It's becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart pages written by humans from those written by conmen, especially if I'm not an expert on the subject matter. As an incredibly egregious example, here's one of the top results (#1/#2 on duckduckgo) for "wireguard mesh": https://www.ltwireworks.com/blog/how-to-configure-wireguard-for-a-mesh-network-938209.html https://www.ltwireworks.com/blog/how-to-configure-wireguard-.... Yes, it's a grill mesh manufacturer.

lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
lmao ok I love this just for comedy

jolhoeft 10mo ago

A cautionary warning about AI I'm starting to use is, "make sure you aren't taking a forklift to the gym". Getting heavy objects of the ground is vastly easier with mechanical assistance, but doing so completely misses the point of lifting weights. A work related example I have is using AI to generate project plans. LLMs can probably generate an ok project plan for straightforward projects with plenty of examples to be trained on. But perhaps the most important value of generating a plan is the thinking that goes into it. Considering alternatives, likely failures, unlikely failures, etc. In generating the plan you are starting to practice dealing with problem that would come up while implementing it. The knowledge in your head is more valuable than the document produced. The document is just a summary of all the thinking you have done. Essentially a collection of mnemonics. Many details in your head will never make it into the formal plan, but will be needed during implementation.

nunez 10mo ago
A more accurate metaphor comparing the gym to LLMs IMO is using cable machines in place of old-school barbell and dumbbell work. You can --- and people have --- built strength-focused programming around cable machines. "They're safer and work target muscle groups more efficiently" is usually the argument. A Life Fitness Synergy system is also much more practical to own inside of one's house than a power rack and 1000+ lb of plates that will make quick work of most home flooring. This strategy works. It's sure as shit better than doing nothing. But quadriceps, delts and lats don't work in isolation. They rely on secondary and tertiary muscles and entire kinetic chains to help them accomplish tasks. Cables do hit muscle groups directly, but they also lead to diminishing strength and physique returns much more quickly than boring traditional weight training. They also lead to problematic muscle imbalances that, ironically, can cause overuse injuries later in life (super heavy leg extensions with improper knee flexion comes to mind).
- tpdly 9mo ago
  Just because LLMs are a technological innovation for "going to the gym" does not make cable machines a good metaphor. Maybe cable machines with cables made of highly variable grade hemp are comparable to LLMs-- they'll break randomly, and cause unexpected friction here and there. A cable machine still involves a human doing a thing. A forklift at the gym does the work instead. All this fluff about targeting specific muscles etc is simply not analogous to LLMS. Maybe old-school barbells are paper files and fax machines, and cable machines are Slack, Asana, and Excel?

jewel 10mo ago

"If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading." - https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/

komali2 10mo ago

I strongly recommend "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sonle Ahrens, it gets into how important writing is as a part of the process of thinking and learning.

snoman 10mo ago
Maybe you’re the person I’ve been looking for but I’ve yet to find someone that actually maintains a zettelkasten that isn’t a researcher/author and doesn’t come to the conclusion that it’s a huge waste of time and energy.
- 63stack 9mo ago
  I just had the same thought. I searched for the book mentioned, and as soon as zettelkasten popped up I lost interest. I've read about zettelkasten so many times, but I can't get myself to actually try it, it seems like doing organization for the sake of declaring "I'm very organized", regardless whether it's efficient or not.
  - komali2 9mo ago
    I had this same issue with my original zettelkasten system in org-roam. Also it had become just, a locally indexed wikipedia. This book is probably not the greatest resource for establishing a zettelkasten, but it is very good at demonstrating how a good externalized writing system is critical for getting good learning done and finding unique insights. Also, it addresses the wikipedia issue I had specifically. As another person mentioned in this thread, making the notes more like proper publishable writing (even if just a sentence) made a big difference.
- tpdly 9mo ago
  I've found it somewhat valuable in two ways and unhelpful/misleading in another: 1. Making small notes is so intuitive and low-pressure. I was already essentially doing before but in the form of various lists of "ideas" or "thoughts on _blank_". You can't reliably decide where you would've put something, it becomes a mess. The fact its a single directory of .md's with a phrasal titles is a great organizing constraint. 2. Being able to find old thoughts/ideas easily and link them together lead to the clarification of a lot of my more unique ideas because of the ad hoc link-language that emerged. The big problems are the rabbit hole of manic articles promising too much, and the fact that after a while you simply have too many half-baked two-year-old notes that the whole thing becomes limiting and your declare note bankruptcy.

nemo1618 10mo ago

This is conflating two things: The stuck, and the suck. As the author says, the time you spend stuck is the time you're actually thinking. The friction is where the work happens. But being stuck doesn't have to suck. It does suck, most of the time, for most people; but most people have also experienced flow, where you are still thinking hard, but in a way that does not suck. Current psychotechnology for reducing or removing the suck is very limited. The best you can do is like... meditate a lot. Or take stimulants, maybe. I am optimistic that within the next few decades we will develop much more sophisticated means of un-suckifying these experiences, so that we can dispense with cope like "it's supposed to be unpleasant" once and for all.

ar_turnbull 10mo ago

The point about recognizing what’s valuable and making sure you don’t outsource that resonates. The other day I was on LinkedIn and a Chief Design Officer at a notable company posted her reflections on leadership for the year. There were some potentially interesting insights, but they never got past a surface level. The AI-ness of the writing was as clear as day (and GPTZero tagged it as 100% likely to be AI). It’s disappointing when you see leaders and so-called stewards of taste farming out that part of their voice.

fabianholzer 10mo ago
> It’s disappointing when you see leaders and so-called stewards of taste farming out that part of their voice. The bland platitudes of corporate management were mindbogglingly boring drivel already in the era before LLMs went mainstream. What we get nowadays is just more of it. That stuff should be skipped anyways. What was not worth writing is not worth reading.

cryptica 10mo ago

> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out I totally disagree with this point. It's a combination of wishful thinking and denial. LLMs do a very fine job at writing if you give them the right base of information/insights. I think it will totally obliterate 'writing' as a differentiable skill. What will happen IMO is that people who have interesting ideas and experiences but suck at writing will have the upper hand. The market for content will be flooded by articles from people who would normally not write. They will feed the LLMs bullet points of interesting facts and observations and let the LLM fill in the gaps and actually make the article engaging. What matters is that the core points have to be interesting. The AI cannot come up with brilliant insights but it can convey brilliant insights really well. I think even if, hypothetically, some people could tell apart AI-generated content from manually written content, some AI-generated content may actually be more interesting and valuable to read than the manually written one... At the end of the day, writing by itself doesn't matter; it's just a communication medium. What matters are insights, ideas, concepts, perspectives... It was always about substance, not form. It's a flaw of the human mind that some people used form as a proxy for substance. There are a lot of people who know a lot and have a lot to say but they were so busy experiencing and learning that they never had time to write before... And even if they did, they could not convey their ideas effectively before. Now given that LLMs have mastered the superficial aspects of communication, those aspects are no longer valuable and substance is more valuable. But IMO nobody will care whether articles or books were written by AI in the future. It won't have much effect on quality or value of the book/article. I think what will matter in the future are: - Insights, ideas, perspectives. - Media (the most important still); who intermediates content distribution gets to decide what people consume and can shape their perception of quality to a significant extent. I'm hoping that as more people get involved in writing using LLMs, that it will force more people to confront the second point... People will be forced to pay more attention to substance as it will be the only real differentiator. I'm hoping people will begin to feel disgusted by the low level of substance that current media platforms purvey... It's already kind of happening; people invented the term "AI slop" but really it's not just AI which produces slop. The media has been guilty of spreading slop for quite some time and it kept getting worse. Now AI is just a convenient strawman to bash.

tills13 10mo ago

If someone, without my permission, used my content to create a replacement of me, for me -- however shitty -- I would probably commit a crime against that person. How are people so brazen? Or rude? Or stupid? Or psychopathic?

rballpug 10mo ago

A three-fold normative proposition.

cryptica 10mo ago

> The more I think about it, the happier I am that AI is transforming the world of writing. In a way, I think it’ll make it even easier to stand out I think this may be a form of denial. The reality is likely the opposite: AI will commoditize the act of writing entirely, shifting the value solely to insight. For too long, we’ve confused "good writing" with "good thinking." We assumed that if someone wrote beautifully, they had something smart to say. Conversely, we ignored brilliant people simply because they couldn't articulate their complex ideas effectively. AI fixes this market inefficiency. It allows experts who are too busy actually doing things to finally compete with professional writers. They provide the raw brilliance (the substance), and the AI provides the polish (the form).

ares623 10mo ago
I think you’re missing the other half to that conclusion.
phanimahesh 10mo ago
Now people can articulate bullshit better with LLMs.
- cryptica 9mo ago
  Yet my comment which you responded to, which was Gemini-generated, got more responses and engagement than my handwritten one! Yes, I actually did this as an experiment. From my perspective they are both different ways to communicate the same idea (with different effectiveness, different level of detail, to different audiences). I don't regard my Gemini-generated one as being any less 'my own work' as the one I painstakingly wrote by hand. It gets to the core of what writing should be about. It should be about substance, not form. LLMs are equalizers when it comes to form. Time to focus on substance now!
wtetzner 10mo ago
> Conversely, we ignored brilliant people simply because they couldn't articulate their complex ideas effectively. I don't see how AI helps here. If you can't articulate your idea, then 1) how clear is that idea in your head anyway 2) how are you going to articulate it to the LLM?

NooneAtAll3 10mo ago

these type of posts really do have "professional painter says photocamera has no use for him" vibe casual painting also "makes you remember how to see" and stuff - that doesn't mean that taking photos stop you. It's just different

tpdly 9mo ago
Bad analogy. More like, "Professional painter says he doesn't employ low wage contractors to paint for him" If your rebuttal is "Michelangelo would've only painted the broad strokes and the faces" you're still missing the point that he still /did some painting/.
- NooneAtAll3 9mo ago
  where in Ai use did you find low wage contractors? both Photography and Ai are literally "click a (shutter) button" - so photo analogy is perfect And Michelangelo is bad example because it's "ye old paintings" (you could've at least tried with Picasso or smth) - while my argument would be "painters got replaced by photographers"
jstgunderscore 9mo ago
When the camera was invented, no one was claiming a photo was a painting. The camera replaced painters for the "I want to capture a static image" market but not the "I want art as expressed by a painter" market. While tragic for a lot of painters at the time, it does seem like the cost of progress. In writing, there is no "objective capture" like with cameras; there's no tech that can take a picture of your conscious thoughts and translate that to words on a page in a way that's reproducible. So there is only a single arena of "written expression" that LLMs and traditional writers are competing in. And while there is a strong desired market for "art as expressed by the [human] writer," the product itself is much more difficult to distinguish from the new tech (LLM writing) than a photo from a painting. And the low effort of entry into this desired market with LLM writing is driving its dilution. The analogy would work if instead they invented a magical camera that could turn any scene into a painting in any art style reliably, and hide the painting's origins.

maxfromua 10mo ago

I feel like part of this post is a bit of hypocrisy. > This is why reading actual books in full might now be more valuable than it ever has been: Only if you’ve seen every word will you discover insights and links an AI would never include in its average-driven summary. Is summarizing by a human much different? Let's check if the author has a consistent stance on reading every word. https://nik.art/books/ https://nik.art/books/ > The 4 Minute Millionaire: 44 Lessons to Rethink Money, Invest Wisely, and Grow Wealthy in 4 Minutes a Day > This book compiles 44 lessons from some 20 of history’s best books about money, finance, and investing. Each lesson can be read in about 4 minutes and comes with a short action item. Hmmmm

benrutter 10mo ago
Not sure that's fair- claiming you prefer reading texts in full to summaries doesn't seem the same as saying you don't ever want to read a summary in any context? Aside from that, it seems more valuable to think about the odeas in the blog on their own merit, rather than attacking the writer for not having been true to those ideas in every past action.
b3kart 9mo ago
Not necessarily: assuming I've been following Nik for a while, I have reasons to trust his summary more than an LLMs summary. I would understand Nik's biases, and understand why he would focus on one thing over another. Nik would have a reputational incentive to do a good job and not completely misrepresent the book. I would also value Nik's personal, subjective view on the material, having an understanding of his background, and, again, his biases. On the other hand, I would have no idea what an LLM would focus on when summarizing, I would have no reason to trust it (LLMs fail in unpredictable ways), and an LLMs "opinion" is some average over the internet's + annotator's opinions.
_bypa 9mo ago
> Is summarizing by a human much different? One thing I have noticed and drives me up the wall with AI-generated summaries is that they don't provide decent summaries most of the time. They are summaries of an actual summary. For instance: "This document describes a six-step plan to deploy microservices to any cloud using the same user code, leading to various new trade-offs." OK, so what are these six steps and what are the trade-offs? That would be the real summary I want, not the blurb. The point of a summary is to tell me what the most important ideas are, not make me read the damn document. This also happens with AI summaries of meetings: "The team had a discussion on the benefits of adopting a new technology." OK, so what, if any, were the conclusions? Unfortunately, LLMs have learned to summarize from bad examples, but a human can and ought to be able to provide a better one.

phplovesong 10mo ago

The webs downfall started with AI. Soon everything will be AI generated, from text posts, code that is shared with "look what i made, its cOoL", videos, podcasts etc. The himan touch will be gone, and new models are then trained on AI generated content, making the feedback loop worse and worse. It is time for a new web. A new standard, a new everything. A new start without the AI bloat. Either something like this will emerge, or we will loose the web we have.

sanderjd 9mo ago
I've been reading about the web's downfall for way longer than generative AI has existed.
- phplovesong 9mo ago
  Indeed. But AI is something we have not seen before. It does not gatekeep, it devours and destroys.
  - sanderjd 9mo ago
    Yeah, I tend to agree, just trying to check my assumptions. There was always some newfangled thing killing the web every other time too. I would also say that those pronouncements of doom were not necessarily wrong, but that it's been more of a long decline than a fall. I think my expectation is for that to continue.

ciconia 10mo ago

> but I quickly concluded the writing suffered from the same uncanny valley effect as many AI-generated images: It all looks fine enough at first glance, but pay attention just a little longer, and something feels off. My thoughts exactly. In all my interactions with gen AI it was always the same: on the surface it looks pretty convincing, but once you look more deeply it's obviously non-sense. AI is great at superficial imitation of human-created work. It fails miserably at doing anything deeper. I think the biggest problem with AI is that most people just don't take the time or effort anymore to really look at an image, really read a text, or really listen to a piece of music, or a podcast. We've become so habituated to mindlessly consuming content that we can't even tell anymore if it's just a bunch of stochastic nonsense.

eamag 10mo ago
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-turing-test You can try to do a turning test. I've met several people claiming they can always find AI art, all of them can't do it (and AI art became even better now!)
stavros 10mo ago
This is comparing LLMs to the best humans, and concludes that LLM output is "nonsense". Well, LLM output is better than the average human's output, and there are a many of humans at and below the average. For four billion people, using an LLM to create things is a marked improvement.
stavros 10mo ago
This is comparing LLMs to the best humans, and concludes that LLM output is "nonsense". Well, LLM output is better than the average human's output, and there are a many of humans at and below the average. For four billion people, using an LLM to create things is a marked improvement. I'm not sure how you'd explain the phenomenally widespread use of LLMs otherwise. By the way: Can you tell whether my comment (this one) was written by an LLM or not?
- zacharyvoase 10mo ago

jeffrallen 10mo ago

I work in IT ops for a cloud provider. When the going gets tough, I remind my colleagues that the harder it is to operate these servers with no customer visible downtime, the happier they are to pay us for it. The suck is why we're here. Your suck is my profit margin.

djaouen 9mo ago

> The suck is why we’re here, and only those who overcome it themselves will reap all the rewards of their hard labor. Thinking/writing isn't "the suck". > because the more people take shortcuts, the less quality will remain for readers to flock to, even if the overall quantity of options is much larger. The creators of The Enhanced Games/Olympics would disagree with you. Which brings me to my point: Are we satisfied being "Top Slave" or do we want to be Free? Or do you believe that Freedom is an illusion?

bschmidt25004 9mo ago

[dead]

aucisson_masque 9mo ago

sc68cal 9mo ago
"AI might be destroying knowledge, causing harm to society, and making people intellectually lazy but it benefits me for a small period of time!"

wafflehouse 9mo ago

i hate everything

wafflehouse 9mo ago

i hate everything !!