- @Joshua
Insofar, I am not at all comfortable letting ChatGPT think for me when I am fully capable of thinking for myself. I’ve got nothing against those who are harvesting the crops of AI-enabled data to improve their writing. Good for them. Nothing wrong, ethically speaking, in using more effective words but at the same time, we have to be cognizant about the uniqueness of human expression.
At the end of the day, an essay composed by AI is an essay composed by AI.
AI is able to do this for you, within a fraction of seconds, because it has understood something that you have been missing out on. It reads and reads and reads. Without reading, there is no writing. It is fully capable of writing for you today because it has been trained to read billions and billions and billions of prose and poetry. Without reading, there is no writing.
So, yes, artificial intelligence can help you shine by making you appear like an accomplished writer—not necessarily, a quasi-original thinker—but the page-burning question of our era is, can it make you sound like an insightful reader? The answer is no. Or better still, not yet. It can write for you but it can’t read for you. You will have to do the reading yourself.
Good luck with that.
great essay.
ladies and gentlemen, Ava.
We are all of us descended from survivors, which is to say, the most prolific murderers.
Life does not require as much as you think it does.
This life is not your life, but it could be—never deny that. Don’t worry. Be happy.
upon reread, this essay seems to remind me of Kierk Suren from The Revelations by Erik Hoel just before he accepted to do research in New York. he had been struggling to come up with an all encompassing theory of consciousness, dissatisfied with the explanations that his field had to offer for this weird phenomenon. he just decided to leave his research one day, choosing to live a life like the one Gwern has described, living in his car, writing, reading.
this was a really great read. nice one from Gwern.
a nice lovely read.
for anyone who enjoyed this, i will recommend Carl D. Offner's paper--Computing the Digits in π. In the nature of Readup honesty, i will admit that i haven't finished reading it but i recommend it anyways, at least the first section titled "Why do we care?"
i will offer a computer engineering addition to this article which is a quote by Baily referenced in ditto paper:
"In recent years, the computation of the expansion of π has assumed the role as a standard test of computer integrity. If even one error occurs in the computation, then the result will almost certainly be completely in error after an initial correct section. On the other hand, if the result of the computation of π to even 100,000 decimal places is correct, then the computer has performed billions of operations without error. For this reason, programs that compute the decimal expansion of π are frequently used by both manufacturers and purchasers of new computer equipment to certify system reliability."
not a big computer science nerd but i see Alan Turing and i click. :)
ladies and gentlemen, Ava once again. i love this essay. it is so apt for this period of my life. it reminds me of that Simone Weil quote where she says:
attention is all there to living a calm, happy life. i dare say that much. since i've been putting my phone on a focus mode which restricts me from using a lot of the apps for 12 hours everyday, my mental wellbeing has only just gotten better. when i don't do it, it's a disaster upstairs. attention is becoming that one thing that i cherish very much. as David Gasca said in one of his substack posts(forgive me if i don't get the entire thing):
in our world as we know it today, attention is a scarce resource which turns out to be very valuable. we all need it. whether we like it or not. PAY ATTENTION!