pull down to refresh
if I see a really long article, instead of reading it, I'm often now inclined to tell the AI to read it and I'll ask it the questions I want.
This exactly what I'm talking about. I want to know how to characterize the difference between reading an article and asking an LLM questions about the article.
It seems like a more straightforward path to getting what I want out of the article.
And a car is a more straightforward path to getting around, yet what is the effect on your mind? Is it similar to the car's effects on our leg muscles?
I think that writing is still needed though. The act of writing itself shapes the thoughts of the writer, and forces them to think more carefully and be precise with their reasoning. Then, putting it on paper (/digital) is what allows anyone (human or otherwise) to access their reasoning, and for the AI, to summarize it for another human.
And a car is a more straightforward path to getting around, yet what is the effect on your mind? Is it similar to the car's effects on our leg muscles?
It's an interesting question. On the one hand, by using AI to summarize someone else's writing for me, I'm gonna miss a lot of the nuance that the author intended. Thus, what I am getting is a filtered representation of what the author truly wanted to communicate.
On the other hand, it enables me to interact with the piece on my terms rather than the authors. I can bring up questions that maybe the author hadn't thought about (or didn't want me to think about), and the AI can guide me in whether that's a reasonable question and where to find an answer to that question.
It's different muscles that you're using, I guess.
As with anything, AI is a tool, and people can use it in ways that improve their muscles (use the car to drive to a gym), or degrades them (use the car but never exercise)
As with anything, AI is a tool, and people can use it in ways that improve their muscles (use the car to drive to a gym), or degrades them (use the car but never exercise)
I mostly agree. But what I want to poke at a little is whether the muscle that gets used when you interact with a piece on your own terms is as useful for what we call wisdom as the muscle that gets used when forcing our minds to understand something on the writer's terms.
The act of writing itself shapes the thoughts of the writer, and forces them to think more carefully and be precise with their reasoning.
I think this can be true of reading as well. There are some writers who are so good that the particular way in which they put things moves us into the right mental context for understanding what they mean -- and perhaps it cannot be gotten any other way.
This is most evident in fiction, where a story may be simply an elaborate attempt to position the reader so that they can hear one sentence and it will change their entire understanding of something. Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day once did something like this for me.
I don't mean that all fiction has to function like this, but that writers put words in the order they do for a reason. And readers are doing something different than what we have understood reading to be when they use AI to interact with a piece of writing.
(These may be the already archaic moanings of a grumpy writer)
I'd agree with that. Much of wisdom is learning to see things from other peoples' perspectives. That means engaging with their thoughts on their terms, in their shoes, and listening carefully to what's being said. We'll lose a lot of that if we use AI.
One thing I'll say is that I wouldn't understand anyone who uses AI to read a book of fiction. I would kinda feel like, what's the point? But then, I also don't understand people who watch others play games on YouTube rather than playing themselves. But there are people who do that.
Interestingly, I think it may replace reading more than writing?
Like, if I see a really long article, instead of reading it, I'm often now inclined to tell the AI to read it and I'll ask it the questions I want. It seems like a more straightforward path to getting what I want out of the article.
If I need to use what I learned from the article in a professional or high stakes context, I would definitely double check what the AI told me though.