[haswell]

Before getting frustrated, it seems like we need to have a serious conversation about what we believe is/is not appropriate to delegate to a computer system. We need to be looking at why people are so willing to give up certain categories of thought processing.

Do you feel the same frustration regarding handheld calculators? Why or why not? The utility of reducing math mistakes and improving accuracy across an entire population seems clear.

And yet the ubiquity of calculators has not removed the need to learn the fundamentals of mathematics. I suspect the same will emerge with AI tools.

The primary difference is that it seems possible to get better at writing by working with an AI while a calculator is just a black box that spits out a pre-determinable answer.

A calculator is arguably an overly simplistic analogy, and nuance abounds once you bring AI into the mix, but I don’t think the tech community has done a good job of distinguishing between AI-specific concerns and garden variety problems that seem common to most modern technology, especially the kind that automates something that historically required a human in the loop.

[kibwen]

It is a risk to outsource critical thinking, because a capacity for critical thinking is essential for freedom of thought, which is essential for free society in general.

Delegating creativity is less likely to lead to outright disaster, but allowing your creativity to atrophy sounds like a recipe for a terminally boring society.

[haswell]

I agree that outsourcing critical thinking is an issue, but I’m not sure that is an automatic outcome of using a tool like this.

The flip side is that some people just struggle with writing. I’ve worked with many of them. Smart/capable people, for whom the process of writing is an impediment to clear thought, with many mental cycles spent on the act of writing itself and remembering the rules of punctuation and spelling to the detriment of the idea they’re trying to convey.

They feel about AI writing tools the way I feel about generative AI image tools: excited that I can get better at visually conveying ideas that I don’t have the artistic ability to draw on my own.

> but allowing your creativity to atrophy sounds like a recipe for a terminally boring society

This is a binary outlook on the impact of these tools and I’d pose these followup questions:

- Is a creative person who is driven to do creative things going to lose that drive, or use AI tools as a force multiplier?

- Is there a reason to believe that the act of writing itself is always a creative endeavor and not just an outward/visual manifestation of thought/and ideas? (Note: I’m not claiming that writing is never creative, or that creativity is never involved in the organization of the words themselves, but this is distinct from the underlying ideas themselves, and not always the most important factor).

- I don’t think anyone would argue that a thesaurus or dictionary, or tools like spell check/autocorrect risk stripping someone of their creativity, but what would it look like to define the line between creative thought and expression of those thoughts?

- Most people don’t “create” today, mostly because it’s hard work. Argument about “boring content that lacks creativity” aside, can we be so sure that lowering the barrier to entry atrophies creativity instead of opening new avenues for it to thrive?