In fact, when I use AI, I don't really use it for the things I actually enjoy doing. For example, I like making UI animations, and I don't use AI for that. I also don't use AI when I'm playing games I enjoy. But when I have to make something tedious like a login screen, I use AI. And after I write the code, I just throw the entire codebase at AI to write the documentation.
The problem is that this only lets me think about things I have a taste for.
Having taste and diving deep into it is good. Immersion is great. But on the flip side, you also need to do things that aren't your taste. That's more cognitively healthy. AI prevents that.
In that sense, I think AI's strength is that it creates an environment where you can dive deeper into the areas you like.
But the real question becomes how you use the cognitive surplus that's left after offloading tasks to AI.
I visit Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and USA sites, and honestly, most people, including myself, only have deep thinking about certain topics. Outside of those, we just follow the prevailing opinion.
So I'm not really sure. I don't think using AI makes me stop thinking. I just think it creates a bias that makes my thinking only focus on the parts I want to focus on.
...huh. It's a "startup", so it's not Meta capturing their employees' inputs. I wonder what it could be.
This happens frequently enough that it creates a real disincentive for me to use AI for anything that I already know how to do - and use it exclusively for things I don’t know how to do.
It’s deeply frustrating to realize you just wasted 20 minutes posting error messages into Claude when you could’ve just locked in and written it yourself.
and work on things that would usually be out of my element.
if you aren't thinking more than ever, you're using ai wrong.
Most people just wanna enjoy life and then die.
Very few actually get to a position of influence and power to actually do anything. Much of economic activity isn’t critical to life and death - it’s just stuff we have to make life more interesting than past generations.
does a bear shit in the woods?
does rust have the worst community of all time?
Annoyed, you go find a popular programming chatbot, and ask the question. The chatbot will give you answer, no matter how poorly worded or nonsensical your question, and it will do it cheerfully and confidently. It may even tell you how great your question or idea is. Granted, the answer will be worthless, both because the question was poorly worded and because the chatbot is simply spewing statistically probable text, but you won't know. You're a beginner, without experience to know correct from bullshit. You try to use the answer the chatbot gave you, and when it doesn't work, you go back to the chatbot. It will continue to cheerfully answer your questions as long as you have tokens to spend. The chatbot will never give up on trying to help you, it will never be rude, it won't complain.
And people wonder why chatbots are so popular.
The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans.
So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users?
I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them?
Interesting times and all that.
How can you push your brain go farther than ever, when you don't use it for the basic task?
Higher Math does not work without understanding "lower" Math, running long runs does not work without starting on shorter runs. Thinking about complicated staff will probly not work, if you can't think about the easy stuff.
One can not learn a language without vocabulary and skipping learning verbs in a foreign language, because dictionaries exists does not bring one closer to being able to speak.
The issue being, gratification is rarely a good guideline. It just means collapsing the gap between doing the thing and the idea of having done the thing. But that gap is where you actually learn things
I find I'm not thinking less per say, just thinking about different things. Maybe you could argue there are CEOs who get too far out of touch with the reality on the ground and should get more directly involved in the work. However, I don't know how well one could argue that the CEO should do all of the work.
I see at least the current iteration LLMs and harnesses as me managing and coordinating them and thinking differently, not less.
these are the people who are now first against the wall when the revolution comes.
why would I want to hire you to work the three hours you feel like working per day (per week?) when I can have AI with a deeper knowledge set available 24x7?
I've noticed it when interviewing interns. A surprising number seem unable to think on their feet or solve problems without immediately reaching for chatgpt. I don't necessarily expect you to be able to solve a problem entirely without tools, but you should be able to give me the outline of how to go about something and why you would go that way.
After all, if you are just going to spit out AI, I will just get AI to do your job...
When you cognitively surrender to AI, or to another person (be it a leader/manager, or a subordinate/report), you are asking for trouble.
But this varies from person to person
Some of us overthink already and offloading to AI just enables us to overthink more in other directions than we would if we didn't have ai
Furthermore, there are some clearly wrong questions where person asks AI to make some kind of numerical evaluation of some data. And evaluation is done entirely through inference - essentially a hallucination, instead of some one-off python script which can actually give deterministic calculated evaluation. Yet they accept the answer AI gives them.
They are just straight up admitting they don't know anything, and advocate fiercely for their agent's recommendation.
No one cares, no one tries to stop this behavior. It's seen as good, apparently. I admitted that I don't know enough to have an opinion at the moment, I certainly don't know how to judge the contradictory opinions of multiple frontier AIs, and I fear that just made me look incompetent.
Some benchmark that would take weeks to plan, code and set up is now hours and days - the time is now spent on the benchmark itself, not on temporary code.
Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life?
No direct democracy, just people deciding for you. You can choose once every four years. Are we surprised of how easily we delegate decisions? May be AI can do it better
Offload your execution, not your thinking.
But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise their children, to manage relationships, to design products. So what's your unique contribution to this world - is it the prompt you once wrote? You're standing in front of a token-generating machine, pulling a lever, sometimes receiving gifts. Is that your edge, your unique experience, your purpose in life?
Many LLM maximalists say they use the tech to learn new things, but to what effect? Are you going to apply that knowledge of physics or computer science yourself, or will you just prompt the LLM again?
In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. I want to support that. And I want to be a human who can write novels, the old-fashioned way. I'm not good at lifting weights or running, so my thinking is the only thing I have.
You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah".
That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of the desired output. The whispering earring is atrophy.
Except calculators have been a problem for decades, it's why they're not allowed in school when you're still learning. Without doing the math yourself and internalizing how it works, you won't develop the number sense to tell if the result makes sense (broken calculator, typo, wrong equation, etc).
I still remember my physics teacher using one of the student's test answers as an example of how he should have known it was wrong and gone back over it (I think it was a pendulum on an elevator, his result had negative gravity (so gravity going upwards)).
Many of the LLM maximalists I know don't have the skills or knowledge to excel in technology and need to use LLMs to do their job. It's seen as a cheat code to get work done.
As an example, A person I went to high school with that could barely figure out how to setup a Drupal site a few years ago, is now a frontier engineer at an AI startup. His Linkedin posts are filled with AI buzz words on a daily basis.
"It's inherently worth more because it's hard-earned and anchored to experiences we share. "
At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI.
So what if its indistinguishable - its not a product of human intellect or effort. I feel there is a large disconnect where people look at artful output such as music or writing as a thing no different than a box of paper clips. To them, "It's just there." They don't care how it got there, they just like the feeling they get from the consumption.
That's fast food thinking; It's engineered to be "tasty" in the sense that they put the right amount of chemicals into the food to tickle the right nerve endings. It's junk food that exists to turn a profit. Whereas even the local diner puts effort into its food and has a damn fine Greek menu and the best mozzarella sticks.
> At some point, it will be impossible to tell the difference. Many people already can't tell if something was generated by AI.
Nit: it won't be impossible, just so hard so most people won't bother or give up if they try, and society will settle into a mediocre, regressed state. Then wait a little while, and the next generation will justify their mediocrity as actually some kind of progress, and the people who knew better will be dead and unable to challenge that.
More technology != more progress. Just look what social media had done. At its best, it's like what came before, just more isolating.
My first thoughts were around trying to understand why these people would do that. What I see a lot around me, is people being afraid to fail, as it's some inherently dumb and bad thing, not realizing that sometimes failing is what makes you learn enough so you don't fail later, or builds resilience in other ways that later will be useful, for others or for yourself. Avoiding the path of harsh failure will put you down the path of mediocrity.
I'd extend on this as well: the process of creating changes you. In a technical sense, where you approach a problem and the way you solve that problem informs you. Both your problem solving skills, creative skills, but also even understanding how a compromise works.
This is why I have minimal compunction about an experienced engineer using AI-assisted coding ("hey claude, define this data class") versus finding AI-art to be repugnant.
The act of creating an artistic work is both an expression, but also the act of ideating and then executing on that changes you. Experience, emotion, and other more intangible concepts.
While I appreciate you laying it out so plainly, I disagree. A novel is a bunch of words and I don't care if they were written by one person, five, an AI, or infinite monkeys on typewriters. What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.
I can maybe understand finding value in a machine-written novel if others also read it and enjoyed it, but having an LLM spit out a novel and reading it in isolation, that would be a complete waste of time to me.
In the same way that I don't need the lumber in my house "hand sawed" for it to achieve my goal of creating a habitable space.
---
But more broadly, I do think there's space to at least question the use and role of AI.
Because while content can (and should) be addressed directly, there's a valid meta-conversation about the intent of producing content, and the results producing that content might have.
What goal does producing this content achieve?
What is the role of this content in society?
Is this content, on this scale, an appropriate thing to be making?
These are MUCH harder questions - often because we've shifted from concrete (content) to abstract (value judgements).
To go back to my housing analogy: We're no longer evaluating the benefits of hand-sawed vs power sawed timber. We're discussing whether our housing is built in the right spots, if we're building enough of it, and are we allocating it in the right ways.
or even a bunch of characters, bunch of pixels and so on.
To me this is the wrong level of abstraction that is not sufficient to encode the meaning of literature.
You would care about that story, until you found out that this story is a lie, an old April’s fools joke that escaped confinement. The words are the same, but your reactions to the exact words have changed with new information about the source.
When we read personal stories it affects our emotions as we empathize with the author, or otherwise share the feelings that the author is trying to convey. When we find out there is no such author, our empathy and our notion of shared feelings vanishes with the new information even though the words stay the same.
I don’t want a mathematical approximation of writing informed by feelings, knowledge, experiences, etc. anymore than I would want to see an “AI band” perform just because the music is supposedly great. There’s no personality, there’s nothing personal period.
It's possible to set that latter value to be nonzero. You can't use free markets to set it because they necessarily cannot see what price to set, so you kinda have to guess, but IMO, it isn't zero, and I'd hazard to say it's positive.
We have of course abolished slavery since then.
Which is a weird way of saying I don't think we necessarily should put a monetary value to people. Instead we need to realize that money isn't everything in life. So much of life is unpriceable, and that's as it should be. Attempting to price the unpriceable necessarily makes a mockery of the unpriceable thing.
On the other side, people pushing the intelligence is for losers narrative are already too stupid to create anything that benefits humanity or the planet, so might as well ignore them.
Let the impl go.
.... What?
You open up with the calculator argument. Great. Then state "on the flip side". Ok.
And then declare it very simple in your mind when there is _only_ the flip side.
The whole issue is the not-simple gray area and where each of us believes the line between empowered human and brainless idiot is drawn.
We had some contractors at the house doing some work. The contractors had been doing this work for a long time. I could tell they were good at what they did because I had some experience with that type of work when I was younger and they were way better than me.
We ran into an unusual situation (old house, old building techniques, overlapping old renovations) that they had never seen before. The contractors pulled up ChatGPT and started chatting with it. Eventually they came up with a solution with some good materials and techniques to make it work without turning it into a bigger tear out and complete rebuild project, and they got quick links to confirm it matched code.
This worked because they had the experience to judge the accuracy of the answers. They still checked the claims against the description of the materials we needed to order. After they did the work they had the experience to do it again, and it didn’t take them any guessing, trial and error, or searching through forums or Facebook groups (which are very popular with contractors) to get advice.
This is the right way to benefit from LLMs in learning something: Get the information then put it into practice so you learn it.
I worry when I see someone claim to learn something from an LLM but then the next turn is having the LLM do the work. It’s like skimming a math textbook but then skipping the exercises and never doing any quizzes. Every student in school learns that you have to practice to really understand something because reading the words is not enough. You have to work through it to internalize it.
LLMs can be very powerful tools in this way. They can also trick people into thinking they’re learning when they’re not. I think everyone has to go through that learning process about how to learn all over again like we all did with calculators in elementary school. There will be a lot of people who get trapped into being LLM promoters, whose output ceiling is limited by what LLMs can do as limited by their ability to recognize what’s right and wrong.
By now, almost everyone can think of someone they know who is happy to turn their brain off and press enter in Claude until it says the task is complete. I worry how this is going to intersect with the Reddit generation who grew up consuming doomer content about how jobs are just “bullshit jobs” and how your goal should be to do as little as possible at work, because there will come a time where those who spent their careers offloading their thinking to LLMs without doing the hard work of learning will not have much compelling reason to be hired over any other intern who can prompt Claude.
On the long term view I can see a lot of the LLM prompters getting replaced by LLMs doing the prompting. On social media like Reddit you can already see a lot of people gloating about how they just copy from Jira into Claude, push a PR, and then have Claude handle code review from their peers while they do nothing. Not hard to see that someone like that isn’t doing much that couldn’t be done by going one level deeper with Claude and letting it automate that person away. You have to put in some work to stay valuable.
"Many book maximalists say they read books to learn new things, but to what effect?"
First we had verbal transmission, then books, then the Internet, now LLMs. And they all kind of do the same thing.
For me, the value of an LLM is it can take my imprecise query, scour its memory AND the Internet, and then return an answer (with citations if you ask) quicker than I can look for it "manually".
And I'm far from an LLM maximalist...
I'm not saying this to be snarky, but maybe it's time to work on lifting weights and running. The worth of a novel is, of course, subjective, but most people would judge it based on the entertainment value it provides and not how much human effort went into it. Hobbies like fitness (which don't have an output that's meant to be consumed) seem like a safer harbor in this new era.
Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively.
I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them and I do the same.
I’m willing to bet deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon.
I find it's so easy to convince oneself they're doing the former when it's increasingly the latter. The thinking part is so often provided by default by the models, or is a single prompt away. The thoughts are so syntactically (though not stylistically) perfect that it's difficult to ignore them and reason greenfield.
What's the solution? Given how keen models are to short-circuit the thinking process it could be the only solution is to silo off tasks/ideas. Choosing which mental tasks to silo off is itself incredibly difficult especially when there's a pressure to deliver rapidly (and in quantity) on those tasks.
IOW - modern AI is simply an extension of the lack of thinking that characterizes the modern life... It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
I want certain answers that the docs and the code are not giving me yet. Nothing is more irritating than working through a tutorial on a new framework and then throwing all that work out because that’s not really how one should use the framework. Nothing is more frustrating than having to get through a treatise on why this framework is The Solution before I can actually see code that uses the solution. And it’s beyond annoying when this End All Be All framework has a glaring omission that’s not obvious until you’ve built large amounts of your project on top of it.
Hand the docs and the example code to the LLM, and now I can get answers. “How can I do X?” Example code. “Then I need Z” Modified code. “How is this going to handle Q?” Explanation. “That doesn’t seem quite right. Give me a reference to the doc or code showing this.” Links.
Great, in 15 min, I have learned what I need to know, I can see that this solves a problem that I have, and I have discovered that I need an implementation of S to complement this solution.
That is usefulness. And it requires experience.
I think in the software trade you will definitely use your brain less. But in other trades, it removes the time sucks and gets you back to work.
I'm seeing some incredibly dumb stuff: researchers spending months on Claude trying to do insane deduplication, unrelated to their research question, using regex; whole research methodologies YOLO'd out of ChatGPT.
The results invariably chaotic, resulting in huge amounts of stress and wasted time.
Non-technical people are treating LLMs like an oracle, making big assumptions and decisions with little regard for their implications, because their clanker told them to.
It's scary out there. The lack of critical thinking I'm seeing in some of these projects is horrific. Not unique to the post-AI era, certainly, but on a whole new level. Bad things are undoubtedly happening everywhere, right now, because someone's just like "let's ask Claude".
The article takes a position that assumes hallucinations do not occur, and then posits from that stance the question as to whether we rely on AI too much. We should be taking a step back before even asking that question and focusing on the part where AI does invent answers whole-cloth.
Whatever creativity/thinking/effort bandwidth that's available will now get shifted to a different place in the problem-solving effort bottleneck.
That's the hallmark of any delegation being effective. Do we see that happening with AI tools? Personally, I do see that working for me. Is it as good as the hype makes it to be or I wish it to be? maybe not, yet, for me. But that's the case with most things in life.
Perhaps the only way forward will be if we figure out how to merge with the AIs so we can keep up. Otherwise, a soma-filled world likely awaits. And unlike Brave New World, I think it might actually be a lot more pleasant, but still one with a different set of tradeoffs.
When I know upfront how to do anything, I just give all the instructions. But the OPs point was If we offload thinking too much, so that's why I was just thinking about this example when I need thinking - that's usually when I need to learn something new.
Especially given the comments I see here and on other tech and programming forums, I hate the direction things are going.
I still have some hope this will all fade, but the damage done will be worse the longer it goes on, I think.
For example I send some doc asking for a feedback and someone without reading it generate a feedback with llm with so much ambiguity that I have to get back and wait couple of more days to get a reply.
One of the most silliest thing I see is a middle manager feeding Microsoft planner to Claude to generate a report and generate future steps and sometimes it makes no sense what he present couple of weeks ago because what he present today is contradicting to the one before.
At this point I feel it’s cheaper to replace them with AI. They are just physical vessels for AI.
It’s just not that maybe they were not good enough. But now they just fully depend on AI.
What is frightening is with something like neuralink that in a future hypothetical time would have very fast capability to keep informed and advised, you could be a zombie decision maker and nobody would really be able to tell. Even when you were pressed to why you made the decision, it's just another AI response, it's like a con artist or imposter dream scenario.
I noticed that atm, before these crazy hypotheticals potentially happen, the people that seem to take the time to understand things deeper are still way more valuable than those that just use tools more than not. Its obvious atm due to the lag in time and the way people respond in meetings, at least for now. :)
There are some common traits about the thighs I use AI for. They are this that I either couldn't possibly do myself (because I'm biased, or unfamiliar, or have no access to the expertise) or that I would spend a lot of time while having little agency (mechanical translation). I am not replacing learning, thinking, or deciding. I think this is the key difference.
The rise of knowledge work made many people far less physically active because moving one's body was no longer a given part of one's job. This led to a lot of people (who assumed sports was exercise on top of one's work, not the only source of exercise) moving very little. This meant we needed to rediscover the importance of exercise as a pillar of health.
I think something similar will happen with knowledge work, where we have to do a lot less cognitive exercise due to AI (as well as the decline of reading and rise of short-form video), which will likely lead to eventual issues and subsequently, a rise in activities designed to replicate the cognitive exercise work used to provide.
Somebody asked an AI how to interpret it.
I think the analogy to hyper-palatable, calorific food works well:
Humans adapted for a world with too little food. Then once there was too much, obesity and overeating became a problem for the first time. Self discipline is the cost we have to pay for this kind of abundance.
We now have a general-purpose way to offload mental effort, and are discovering in real-time the negative consequences of that.
I use AI for coding, but I feel I've moved past the honey-moon period and am now learning how to use it in a way that is not a detriment. If I care about the work I'm doing I don't want the AI to do it for me, even if it could. Deciding what work I want/should be doing myself vs what can be delegated is a new skill I, and I believe we all need to learn.
AI makes me massively more productive as a quant, and more creative in the sense that it can often find calculations I don't know how to start, BUT the flip side of that is that I can also feel my skills atrophy and as such am trying to make sure I do maths exercises and so on. I don't worry about programming skills because programming isn't about code.
For myself, I have found that I am better able to learn new topics than ever before because being able to have a conversation with a moderately competent but sometimes catastrophically wrong AI about any new subject is actually the perfect mix of helpful and unhelpful for learning.
I use a loop along these lines:
* Ask a question * Get an answer * Be skeptical of the answer * Investigate/reason about the answer * Critique the answer * Rinse and repeat
This kind of loop is far more useful to me than any textbook ever has been, because a textbook just drips information into my head. It's more likely to be accurate, but not guaranteed, and it doesn't encourage me to actually engage with the material in the way that a wrong AI answer does.
One of the many reasons I'm determined to remain a luddite wrt AI. I hate the idea of being a manager and have refused promotions to avoid it in the past. I don't want to manage automatons any more than I want to manage people. I want to do stuff, not manage.
It is not like you have to give them fun parts of the job.
While being a team lead for people I actually have to do the opposite. Get interesting parts to hand over to people to keep them happy and pick mundane not interesting boilerplate myself.
How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
Which means as a human your only added value is on the edge of the distribution. Which means you need to be learning and doing more complex, deep topics.
I don't think modernity caused any sort of degradation.
You said it yourself, "thinking is hard work". It's rational to save energy. This might even have incentivized the emergence of mimesis in humans, which is arguably the foundation of our ability to cooperate at large scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis
Maybe a few of us do the hard work of thinking, and, if we figure out something novel and useful, huge numbers of people ape us uncritically. It's not an inspiring picture of humanity, but it's also not a reason to disparage anyone. More of a fact of life to be dealt with strategically.
It’s bad enough for rational reasoned discourse that we anthropomorphise LLMs, let’s please not then feed those words back into human discourse, further diluting their meaning. No one “hallucinates coherence”, hallucinations are by definition a perception which does not match reality.
> AI is simply an extension of
It may be an extension, but not “simply” as it also creates the problem where it didn’t exist. I’ve seen several reports (both on and offline) of people who used to engage in deep thinking (I’m talking scientists, postgrads, PhDs working at the edge of what we know) now worrying they are losing their ability to properly think due to their LLM use.
> It just does it faster and uses a hulluva lot more energy.
I hope we can agree that’s bad and that we should try to stop and even reverse it, not simply shrug our shoulders and go “ah well, we were already going to shit anyway, might as well fuck everything up faster”.
Even on Hacker News, when you see debates like 'X technology is good' or 'X technology is bad,' most of it seems to be about identity. And that identity often originates from the community they belong to.
The first identity usually starts with a community or the person who created it. Once the community forms, people under it often forget the original reasons and just accept it as their identity.
This is especially true for technology related issues, because the market share of a technology is directly tied to one's career, which makes it even more prone to becoming an identity issue.
I also do some 'thinking' in certain areas, but most of the time I don't. As my field gets deeper, it becomes harder to allocate cognitive resources to other areas. So in general, most people follow the crowd's opinion, but only maintain deep, thoughtful thinking, including 'taste,' in a few specific technical domains.
everyone is just thinking about how to recall, remix and repeat.
Unfortunately this adds quite a bit of overhead and would make everything take a lot more time. It might be worth it though.
It works quite well. I do the math lessons during bath-time daily with my 6 yo. He's up to the point were he can add multiply pretty much any number by 2, 3 or 4 as long as the product is under 3 digits.
Going from adding single digits to multiplication of random 2-digit numbers by 4 with lessons only during bath-time (no paper or whiteboard) gives a child a great deal of confidence with numbers.
It's not all artisanal, made with love goodness just because human hands did it.
Control of technology is a key issue. Social media wouldn’t be allowed to exist the way it does if govt’s regulated the internet much earlier. Are you happy with the trade off…?
This is something I have a lot of trouble explaining and generally don't try to because I've never actually studied this or anything. So I can only go from my 45 years experiencing of experiencing art along with others.
Of course if you are just putting on music to work to, this isn't going to matter much if at all, but...
Generally people do really seem to care about the person behind something they are experiencing. The simplest example I can give is one of those extremely well shot photos that very few people have taken from a sitting position of their feet dangling off a massive building. I would have a very hard time believing anyone claiming that such a photo wouldn't give them very different feelings if they knew it was a real person v not. Again, this is the simplest example I can think of but I think it goes much deeper with all sorts of art, ie, most people to some degree are attempting experiencing art through the person who created it whether they "know" it or not. This is evident when presented with something they don't like and say something like, "Who would make this?"
If anything, I think most here outsource too little thinking to AI.
What am I supposed to be afraid of? Losing skills I no longer need to get the job done?
When I bring these things up, it will apologize, tell me I'm right, and adjust. But what if I didn't know enough to question it? Approaching from the other angle, maybe I'm actually wrong and it's a sycophant, as mentioned, trying to please the user?
On the topics where I'm having to correct it, I probably shouldn't bother asking in the first place. On topics where I'm not correcting it, is it because the AI was right, or I just don't know enough to call it out? This kind of thing worries me about AI being leaned on more and more as a teacher.
I've been planning forever to do something similar with length, duration, power, etc.
I'd argue that most folks get plenty of value from the content itself, entirely separate from the intent, context, or even existence of the author.
I don't care about the motivations of the director to enjoy an action movie. I don't care about the life history of the author to enjoy a good fiction.
I think there is (and should be) space for content where people care, but I'd suggest it's the fringes (ex - majority of music is production grade pop, not meaningful songs, majority of books sales are erotic fiction, etc).
But the fiction is a product of the author's lived experiences. If the author had lived a different life, they would have written a different book. Or none at all. Without life experience, where would stories even come from? Why would they matter at all?
...and you don't need to know those things, that's insane. But you very likely are, even (not so) subconsciously, questioning some of these things.
This is the entire issue though. We’ve boiled creation down to “consumable content” like we are all in a boardroom talking market strategy. I am reading a book to enrich my life. Yes I enjoy popcorn entertainment and “low brow“ stuff, not everything needs to be Citizen Kane, but what does it say about us if we’re willing to just sit around “consuming” LLM content which is just facsimiles of actual creation by real people? What is the point when we have more “content to consume” than ever before? It’s just saturating us with impersonal stuff lazily achieved by scraping the real thing and prompting until it outputs something acceptable. Why is the person even making it? The answer unfortunately is almost always “a quick buck,” so I’m not sold.
What is the point of reading a middling fantasy book that a person didn’t even create when there are already likely countless fantasy books in existence/being written right now?